Polishing the 'Golden Triangle'

Mike Greenberg
Express-News Senior Critic

Editor's note: The UTSA College of Architecture is emerging with a distinctive approach to architectural education. To learn about it, Senior Critic Mike Greenberg is following the class that entered the program in the fall of 2004. This is his fifth report.

For some third-year students in the UTSA College of Architecture, spring semester was an opportunity to see exotic places far away.

Some studied at the school's outpost in a hill town near Florence, Italy.

Some studied at the Barcelona Architecture Center in Spain.

And some got to see Cotulla.

For Shantha Gunawardena's 16 students, the 90-mile drive down Interstate 35 may have been a bigger step toward the practice of architecture than other students' trans-Atlantic flights.

Up to this point, student design projects had been mainly hypothetical. The sites were real, but the programs — the uses and space requirements — were invented by their teachers.

The culminating project in Gunawardena's spring studio didn't originate in the teacher's mind, but in the political realm and the real needs of Cotulla, a town of about 3,600 people and the seat of LaSalle County.

The city and county hope to build a civic complex on an I-35 site now occupied by a small convention center and the Cotulla Chamber of Commerce.

That project is to include a small museum, the Chamber of Commerce office and visitors center, classrooms for law-enforcement training and a convention center that can also serve as a refuge for hurricane evacuees. A locker room is needed to serve evacuees and a planned softball field.

But County Judge Joel Rodriguez also envisions this complex as a kind of advertisement for Cotulla. He hopes the architecture will be prominent and striking enough to draw travelers off of I-35, and that the museum and visitors center will entice some to explore downtown Cotulla, about a mile away.

Rodriguez would visit the studio at UTSA's Downtown Campus to review the students' intermediate progress, and the students would present their individual final designs to the residents of Cotulla in the courtroom of the LaSalle County Courthouse.

The project was not just a design challenge but a dry run at wooing a potential client with persuasive drawings and oral presentations.

"You've got to work on the story line — a little bit of salesmanship. Tell them why they should pick your design," Gunawardena tells his students.

Concepts

The early phase of the project is largely occupied with the search for concepts that might relate the civic complex to the culture and history of the place and give rise to an iconic image.

"I started thinking about ranching, and then water troughs. That's what attract animals. Campfires, too," Edward Picha tells Gunawardena when he comes by to check progress. "So I started messing with circular motion ..."

Gunawardena interrupts: "You don't mess. You design."

Brendan Vos looked into Cotulla's history and discovered onions. The area was a major producer of sweet onions for several decades after the first Bermuda seeds in the United States were planted near Cotulla in 1898.

Vos imagines a cluster of buildings, each set inside an onion-shaped sculptural framework.

Gunawardena is enthusiastic about the idea.

"That will attract. That's a history they are very proud of," he tells Vos. "The danger is, when you pick something like that, you can go overboard very easily."

But another danger is that Vos might not be able to make the step from concept to design.

"You have to develop it more. If you let this sit you might lose the flow. You've got a good project."

Julia Charo thought of old ranchland fences leaning at odd angles. In a sketch, the "falling fences" concept is translated into layers of metal sunscreens that project from the building roofs and twist down toward the ground to define areas for gathering.

"That's a nice sketch, a very nice sketch," Gunawardena tells her. "As an architect and teacher, I love it. But as a client, I'm lost. I need a site plan. I need to know how to get to the toilets."

Thinking of how to sell her concept to a client, he tells her: "I would spend a little more time on the study model because it's such an interesting idea, you don't want people to shut it down."

Noting that Cotulla is on the annual migration route of monarch butterflies, Crystal Hernandez wanted to draw inspiration from the wings of butterflies.

She has made a small cardboard study model showing rectangular buildings with vault canopies projecting from them. She's begun to work on the plan, but she's not happy with the simple rectangles she's drawn.

"I don't like it," she tells Gunawardena.

"Why not?"

"It's not interesting."

"Make it interesting."

"I don't know how, though."

He advises her to sketch to help her break through the mental block and see the flow of spaces.

"Don't say you don't know what to do. Sketch it."

The value of sketching is an important theme in Gunawardena's teaching.

Even at this early stage, Hadley Dullnig designs on her laptop using professional drafting and 3D rendering software she'd learned to use at Austin Community College.

Gunawardena tells her sketching is faster. She should design in sketches, using paper she can throw away.

"When I sketch, I start to see things I never thought about," he tells her.

"In real life, you don't want to go to the computer till the last minute."

One problem with computer drawings is that their clean, finished look can fix an image in a client's mind too early, before the design work is fully developed. Sketches are more fluid and open-ended, allowing more room for maneuver.

"(In a sketch) the client has an opportunity to see how I'm thinking and where I'm going," Gunawardena says.

A rocky review

Most of the students' work has advanced only slightly beyond concept and general space planning when Rodriguez drives up from Cotulla in early April.

Because of a misunderstanding about the requirements, several of the preliminary designs put the large bathrooms for evacuees in a building separate from the convention center.

"The design has to have shower access from the convention center" where evacuees would stay, Rodriguez says to the students. "If a storm hits really hard, we don't want to make elderly people go outside."

Rodriguez asks several students if their roof or wall designs would be able to handle high winds. He notes approvingly that one site plan includes trailer parking.

Rodriguez is an advocate of alternative energy sources and appreciates the designs that include solar panels or geothermal systems. Gunawardena, who has been working with Rodriguez on the restoration of the LaSalle County Courthouse, had apprised the students of that interest.

But Rodriguez also is sensitive to aesthetics and bold concepts.

He is especially intrigued by Vos' field of onions, even though he represents them with garlic bulbs on a study model.

"I couldn't find any onions small enough," he explains.

"It's crazy," Rodriguez says of Vos' concept. "A lot of people in our county would probably like something like this."

Then, turning to Gunawardena, Rodriguez adds: "His thought pattern is a little different from everyone else's."

After Rodriguez leaves, Gunawardena quietly but firmly chastises his students. Most of their presentations were unacceptable. Only two or three were ready for the client. Some students hadn't been putting enough time into design; others "have great designs, but not presentations."

Practical matters

One week later, the students face another review, this time by a faculty tag team that includes Craig Blount and Sue Ann Pemberton-Haugh.

Blount is intrigued by Charo's "falling fences" model.

"This model says a lot that the drawings don't. It looks like it was made by insects or small birds," he says.

"I bet the people you present it to can't stand it, but I think it's great."

Both he and Pemberton-Haugh, however, say Charo's sculptural fence-like forms need to be integral to the design of the buildings rather than, as Blount puts it, "just tacked on to a corner of a box."

Only four weeks remain before the final presentation in Cotulla, and one of those weeks will be occupied by final exams in the students' other courses.

As design work proceeds, the students have to deal more and more with practical issues.

Stopping by Tory Wood's board, Gunawardena glances at the plan for the locker room.

"No gang showers," Gunawardena says. "They're not allowed any more."

Wood, who served two years in the military before entering UTSA, protests: "We had 'em in the Army. We got over it."

Several students are clearly in time trouble. Others advance with seeming ease, their designs strong and well-developed, their presentations clear and compelling.

One of those in the second group is the studio's elder statesman, Ignacio Alarcon, a former Marine and Vietnam War combat vet who worked as a construction supervisor in El Paso for many years before deciding to pursue an architecture degree.

Alarcon designs and draws the traditional way, without aid of a computer. Working next to each other across the studio are Paul Whiteman, Vance Heinrich and Edward Picha. They do much of their work on the computer and are amazingly adept at a 3D rendering program called SketchUp. Alarcon calls them "The Three Musketeers."

Whiteman has refined his design from an initial congeries of unrelated forms to a set of consistent variations on a theme — modernist, generously glazed structures partially sliced by structural limestone walls.

In one iteration of the design, Gunawardena sees that the stone walls, rising above sloping roofs, would interfere with drainage in some places.

Whiteman says, half joking, that the engineers can deal with that problem.

"It's not engineering. It's architecture," Gunawardena counters.

He suggests lowering the stone walls to below the roof line. But Whiteman wants the walls to rise above the roofs for aesthetic reasons. Over the next week he revises his design to meet both the practical and the aesthetic criteria.

The most notable feature of Picha's project is an open-air "market square." The space is shaded by tensile structures stretched on a grid of tall steel columns, each of which is enclosed in a sort of organ pipe that Picha thinks will help circulate air by means of the chimney effect.

Gunawardena says that won't do much good in the outdoor setting. He suggests turning the air scoops atop the columns to face the southeast, so they can draw in the prevailing winds.

Heinrich's design is unusually lyrical — a wavelike ensemble of vaults, like Quonset huts with wide skirts, linked by a heavy timber truss structure.

Rotating a 3D rendering on his laptop, Heinrich shows Gunawardena how the building would look from the highway.

"That's a super shot," Gunawardena says. "Oh, definitely, I want to go see that building."

The final pitch

For the final presentation in Cotulla, the jurors are Rodriguez, San Antonio architect Killis Almond and a project manager from Almond's office, Mehmet V. Aldikacti. Gunawardena, too, is an architect in Almond's firm, which is in charge of the courthouse restoration.

The Three Musketeers are the first to show their projects. All are supported with beautiful, communicative visuals and excellent models — Picha's and Heinrich's models are equipped with internal lights to show how the buildings might look at night.

Though Whiteman's project doesn't have the "Wow! factor," as Aldikacti puts it, all three win praise for professional-level design and presentation.

Aldikacti said of Picha's project, "I got goose bumps. I wish I was in class with you to learn from you."

The projects that followed were variously successful, and the oral presentations variously trenchant. "Bathrooms are a necessity for quite a few people," one student said.

Alarcon was the last to present. He is a resourceful and intelligent designer, if not a notably bold one.

His freehand drawings are handsome, clear and persuasive. His presentation stresses practicalities.

The concrete building walls, to be poured in layers to suggest the look of adobe, are energy-efficient and can be built inexpensively by local labor. The roofs, inspired by the wings of the hawks that fly the area, are sloped at the proper angle for photovoltaic panels. He has drawn "maintenance-free landscaping" of native plant materials.

"It could have a botanical desert garden trail, something tourists could see," Alarcon says.

Gunawardena recalls that Alarcon had worried the Three Musketeers' computer renderings would outshine his drawing.

"You didn't have to (worry). This freehand work is excellent," Gunawardena says to Alarcon.

Aldikacti is impressed by the time Alarcon evidently put into refining his design and presentation. His work exemplified what professional architects do.

"Any architecture office you go to," Aldikacti said, "they sketch, they improve, they improve, they improve."

mgreenberg@express-news.net

Express-News publish date June 24, 2007