What Brays Bayou needs: Ice house-like buildings for hanging out

Houston is a city of the world. All languages and food can be found nestled in our vast suburban fabric. This diversity is often discussed, but it is represented little in the public spaces of the city.

With Bayou Greenways, though, we have an opportunity to physically create space that embraces diversity and brings out the range of cultures in a more public setting.

Among the bayous, Brays stands out as a unique Houston waterway. This bayou might be the most diverse waterway in the world. The span of its 30 short miles begins with its mouth in the East End, near our historic Hispanic neighborhood of Magnolia Park. The newly built greenway continues past UH, westward through the Third Ward.

Next, Brays winds past the international microcosm of the Medical Center through West University and Braeswood. Exiting 610, the bayou touches on Meyerland (our Jewish enclave) and past Hillcroft, near the base of our south and west Asian communities.

Beyond, the bayou crosses Bellaire near the Asiatown shops and into a hodgepodge of nondescript neighborhoods that jumble all the above.

This route makes neighbors of everyone while brushing up against our museums, universities, parks and medical center. Buffalo Bayou is a beautiful downtown jewel that draws the city together, but Brays is how Houston actually lives.

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Bayou Greenways is a great first step. We needed these paths to connect the parks and bike lanes that we have. But they only create lines that people are able to exercise and travel along, not spaces where they can congregate to perform, protest or celebrate.

Outside of downtown, Houston lacks the historic "town squares" that used to meet this need in communities. The square brings people together, out of their houses and into the enclaves that have distinctively developed.

While the square hasn't been a part of our city's fabric, the ice house serves many of the same purposes. Through their small scale and physical openness, these bars developed closely with the neighborhoods that they served ice. Along with a commercial purpose, they act as collective front porches. Importantly, the architecture also provided shade and breezeways in the summer months before air conditioning.

As a speculative project, I've taken the ice house type and tested how it might translate to a public use. The form presented in the renderings above has been abstracted into simple interior/exterior relationships involving roof, curtain, steel and glass.

Within the edges of each material, the body's relationship to the city changes. The roof provides shade and cover from rain, while framing the view.

The curtain creates some privacy and a surface for projection and lighting at night.

At center, steel frames a completely enclosed space for small events while being structure for the building.

At the far corner from entering, a glass box is visually transparent while physically controlled, an opposite of the steel.

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This simple pavilion is designed to be copied at six locations along Brays Bayou. Each would be physically identical but programmed specifically to the site. The idea is to create a new cultural backbone that embraces our many cultures, bringing events, markets and performances farther out into the city where Houston lives.

On an average day, the pavilion might provide coffee to medical students, fresh produce to food deserts or shade to runners and cyclists. At night, movies might be projected onto the curtains or a wedding reception might fill up the glass box. I don't know what all the uses would be, but not every modest event needs to happen at Discovery Green or NRG Stadium.

We have this new infrastructure on the bayou that connects us; we just need a place to go.

David Richmond is an architecture graduate from Rice University and project manager at Metalab Studio in Houston. Since graduating, he has also been working on an ongoing study of ice houses in the Houston area. You can follow him on Instagram @HoustonIcehouse.

Bookmark Gray Matters. The idea is to create a new cultural backbone.