Over the past several decades, print material produced by the Rice University School of Architecture has been collected in a small room on the third floor of Anderson Hall. Posters, pamphlets, limited edition prints, journals, magazines, and books crowd shelving around the room’s perimeter. Many of the publications are one-offs or qualify as short-lived experiments. Columns (1978) and RSA News (1990-1991) function as compact alumni newsletters, featuring a collection of school updates and class notes; Student Project Review (1990-1991), Student Projects (1991-1992), and Working (1999-2008) embrace visual formats, presenting studio curricula alongside student work; and Manifold (2007-2008) is text based, publishing essays, interviews, and reviews. The hardy exceptions are Cite (1982-2023), established by the Rice Design Alliance as a sounding board for Houston’s design community, and PLAT (2009-present), a journal of design theory and practice that publishes two weighty issues a year through the sheer drive and determination of its student editors. Viewed as a local archive, the contents of this third-floor room provide a window into the evolving culture of the school—what design perspectives were deemed representative, provocative, or newsworthy over the past fifty-plus years—and how that culture was packaged to engage a public audience outside the walls of Anderson Hall.
With the launch of Sphere, what it means to add another title to the list of Rice School of Architecture publications has been top of mind. The potential to act as a bellwether for the school and discipline at large offers one ambition, as we craft a document that gathers events of the past year while establishing a discourse that forges ahead into new territory. Gazing forward, the content of Sphere is concerned with design transitions—of new environments, politics, and ways of life—both at home and abroad. It asks what positions we take amid the whirling cycle of contemporary events that destabilize our understanding of the world, at times sending us (and the discipline of architecture) off in unexpected directions. How we recalibrate to meet these changes is critical. And while unsettling, it is precisely this dynamic condition that makes novel positions, adjacencies, and approaches to space-making not only possible but necessary. The contributors in the first issue of Sphere take on our present moment through critical texts, speculative proposals, and build work. They offer a contemporary model of design practice and scholarship. Environment and ecology, preservation and adaptation, and the urban policy mechanisms that condition urban form and the growth of cities all emerge as common themes that bind the issue together, functioning as connecting threads across diverse projects.
As this is the inaugural issue of Sphere, a guide to its structure and design is in order. The publication is organized into five sections. Planetary Practice features projects spanning architecture, landscape, and exhibition design, with an emphasis on visual content and new modes of representation. Design Research covers scholarly articles that engage architecture history and theory. Conversations asks Rice School of Architecture visiting scholars and Cullinan Professors, as well as members of the broader design community in Houston, to elaborate on their current projects via interviews and public forums. The Houston Archive Project publishes contemporary images of the city, produced by a different photographer or visual artist for each issue. Finally, Future Forward highlights student work of exceptional merit. Throughout the development of this publication, the Dutch graphic design studio Experimental Jetset, led by Marieke Stolk, Ervin Brinkers and Danny van den Dugen, has been a trusted collaborator. In a time when design formats have become increasingly standardized (or, to quote Junkspace, “predigitized”), it has been refreshing to engage Experimental Jetset’s wry wit and expertise in search of the most appropriate recycled paper types and offset printing techniques. The large, floppy format of Cite from the 1980’s along with the magazine’s editorial focus on local city issues served as an important reference, and a commitment to Houston as a site of research, debate, and design innovation is a tenet of this publication too.
Whether Sphere proves to be an eccentric one-off or a multi-decade series with legs, the value of a project of this kind lies in its ability to constitute a community. Once can only hope that this community will continue to grow, pick up speed, and acquire a centrifugal force of its own—emanating from the center to the periphery.