Houston Endowment
A new hybrid building and landscape takes advantage of—and contributes to—its setting in Spotts Park and the greater Buffalo Bayou network. The building is welcoming to park users, visitors and Houston Endowment staff. A large portal opens the building to the park and allows people to pass through the building; shaded overhangs create layered indoor/outdoor experiences leading to a landscaped amphitheater and other outdoor engagement spaces.
The building’s highly articulated facades and rich materiality add to its strong sense of place. Inside, engagement spaces create flexible environments for community partners to work with the Endowment. Throughout the building, spaces connect visually and physically to the landscape. A variety of workspaces—meeting rooms, focus areas, open and enclosed offices, informal social spaces—accommodate different types of work.
Role: Project Architect
Architect: Ten Berke
Location: Houston, TX
Date: 2019
SF: 42,000
The building is sited on a ridge at the top of the park, and the plan of the building helps give shape to a landscape amphitheater. Taking advantage of the site’s topography, the amphitheater placement along the ridgeline also helps anchor the park and makes the building visible in the distance—a beacon within the larger system of the Buffalo Bayou.
Shaded outdoor spaces with native plantings are provided on all levels of the building, creating opportunities for the building’s occupants to experience the landscape—and the skyline—throughout the day.
1. Gateway: Signaling Openness and Equity
2. Indoor/Outdoor: Melding of Park and Building
3. Pinwheel: Spaces Organized for Exchange of Ideas
Public vs Private Circulation
Whether you are a visitor or someone that comes to work, one arrives at the lobby and mezzanine overlooking the park and then connects up and through the building in its social center. Active design was prioritized to encourage occupants to undertake regular physical activity by walking between nodes and taking stairs.
The indoor and outdoor programs reinforce one another: a flexible meeting room and a covered outdoor harvest table, or an indoor/outdoor gallery for arts engagement or displaying Houston Endowment’s ongoing initiatives in the region.
The building accommodates all kinds of working—collaborative, focused, social, active, contemplative, informal. By sprinkling spaces for working together and socializing across the building, they become destinations for people to search out, mix, and focus on “solving big problems.”
Environmental Control and Performance
The envelope design goals are to optimize passive design strategies through modulating the proportion of glazed to solid facade areas, and providing deep overhangs for external shading.
Material Palette: Rich, weighty materials that evolve over time.
Main Lobby and Multi-Function Space
Main Lobby and Multi-Function Space
Boardroom Terrace
Boardroom
Central Stair and Collaborative Breakout Spaces
Breakout Space
Breakout Space