ING ARCHITECTUREAND ART BUILDat Prairie View A&M in Texas

At first,we were afraid to ask the brick what it wanted to be,” says
Michael Rotondi, FAIA, of his design for the Architecture and
Art Building at Texas’s Prairie View A&M University.“What if it
still wanted to be an arch? But then the answer came: It wanted
to dance.” So, Rotondi; his partner, Clark Stevens, AIA; and their firm, Roto,
experimented with the material, creating a sheathing, with great rhythmic
pleats and gaping flaps, that billows like a huge, windblown garment.
Brick was a given, mandated by the campus planning guidelines.
But Rotondi, a seasoned educator,who had headed the Southern California
Institute of Architecture (SCI-Arc) for a decade, saw this requirement—and
the entire project—as an opportunity to challenge the conventions of materials
and spark the imaginations of architecture students.
In interviewing for the commission, Rotondi told Ikhlas Sabouni,
Prairie View’s dean of architecture, that he was ready to “download 30 years
of experience as an architect and educator.”He proposed not only to review
the curriculum, but also teach the students, as part of the design process.
With the search committee’s approval, Sabouni soon signed on, dedicated,
as she puts it, to finding “an architect of national renown, who’d create a
laboratory for design, a beautiful structure that students could learn from.”
Just as Rotondi had been eager to embrace Native American culture
when he built at Sinte Gleska University, on South Dakota’s Rosebud
Reservation [record, November 1999, page 84], he hoped to gain an
understanding of Prairie View’s culture. Historically, this 130-year-old
branch of Texas A&M University, sited 45 miles northwest of Houston, has
had a predominantly African-American student body. In 2000, the school
won a $190 million Office for Civil Rights settlement to compensate for
long-term denial of adequate financial resources. The university allocated
the funds for four new structures for the following disciplines: architecture
(which shared a building with engineering), nursing, juvenile justice, and
electrical engineering. In addition to the architecture school, with its 225
undergraduate and graduate students, Roto’s $20 million, 108,000-squarefoot
building would house construction-science and community-development
programs, as well as the Community Urban Rural Enhancement
Service and the Texas Institute for the Preservation of History and Culture,
with its focus on African-American contributions to the state.
Rotondi began interacting with the students through nonarchitectural,
almost meditative exercises aimed, he says, at “heightening
awareness, concentration, and focus,”while opening windows to their subcultures.
After getting his pupils to savor and describe the textures and
unfolding flavors of “a fresh food item that a grandmother would prepare,”
he asked them to bring in a favorite piece of music. They diagrammed what
they heard on 6-foot-long pages, tracing melodic lines and rhythmic structures,
and relating the drawings back to the body’s movement through space.
“From gospel and rhythm and blues to bluegrass, all the music had roots in
East or West Africa,” the architect says.“So, right there, in those incremental
rhythms and long melody lines, we found our building’s ordering system.”
Though Rotondi considered various partis, he settled on a long
configuration with a central space and linear arrangement of studios—a
diagram that had proved successful in SCI-Arc’s latest incarnation. Prairie
View initially offered him a site buried at the back of the campus, but
Rotondi convinced the university president (a man committed to architecture
as an educational tool) to place the building as a gateway to the school.
As realized (in conjunction with HKS), the three-story, 450-footlong,
concrete-framed structure presents its most eclectic face on its south,
or entry, side.Here, a curving shell of brick wraps the cultural center, at the
building’s west end, while a brise-soleil of painted, perforated steel veils