Future Houston: Parks on highrises? A downtown built to flood?

When world-renowned architect Thom Mayne visits Houston, he doesn't think first about the diverse population, the delicious restaurant scene or the beautiful new parks.

"It's one of the most dispersed, horizontal, unplanned cities in the U.S., if not the world," he said recently.

Mayne wasn't thrilled that he spent an hour getting from Bush airport to Houston's center recently. The city sprawls farther even than L.A., his hometown. And it has no subway system like New York, his other hometown.

"I had no idea how horizontal it was," Mayne said. "It's going to share some of the problems L.A. has. As you're developing the horizontal city, you're limiting some of the options for transportation."

But the city he finds most like Houston?

"It's closer to Bangkok than any other city I could name, at every level," he said. "It barely functions as a city, in terms of a lot of people's ideas."

He was thinking about flooding and the lack of zoning.

"The ad-hocness of the way it grows is like Bangkok. You could put two high-rises together a meter apart and do anything you wanted to," Mayne said. "And when it floods, they just roll up their pants and walk into a brand-new building like it's normal.... This place floods all the time, and you tolerate it. When does it become untolerable?"

Mayne was in town to collaborate with University of Houston architecture professors Peter Zweig, Matt Johnson and Jason Logan on a "Vertical Studio" -- a deep-dive, conceptual project that dovetails with the work of the Now Institute at Mayne's firm, Morphosis, in Los Angeles and elsewhere.

Zweig said the professors wanted to investigate crises that Houston may face or is already facing: How might the built environment support or mitigate flooding? How will people live in the city? How will people get around? What will happen to the Ship Channel if industries go into decline or disappear?

Each professor chose a subject he feels has been overlooked in planning discussions — the port, the lack of zoning and the vacancies that come with boom-bust cycles — then asked students to explore the issues and suggest ways Houston's downtown could adapt.

Conceivably, some of the ideas could be realized one day, but that's not the point.

"They're provocations that force us to look at a situation in a certain way," Mayne said. "And the solution might take more than 30 students. It might take a really concerted, multi-disciplinary effort."

It's important that cities not "wait to break," Johnson said. "In Houston, we're going to reach a crisis quickly.... We need to up-armor the city to deal with those issues. But part of that is to identify what those issues are.

"Students come into school and think, 'I'm going to design buildings.' But in fact a lot of what they're doing is trying to come up with strategies for how to approach a problem. Sometimes the solution isn't architectural at all. Sometimes it's policy, or ecological. Or sometimes there's no solution or it isn't necessary."

To get a handle on this mode of thinking, fast-forward 60 years, when Houston could be a post-industrial city: The world will rely more on what we currently call alternative forms of energy, so petrochemical production won't be so important. That means the Port of Houston won't be as busy as it is today, and office building vacancies could be more permanent. The one thing pretty much guaranteed to flow, however, is flood water, with four or five major storm events each year.

For Mayne's visit, the students filled a gallery with slickly-produced posters — impressive graphics that could make your head swim, based on months of research into aspects of the region's infrastructure, land-use patterns, population, ecology, economy and policies.

Teaching assistant Munjer Hashim, a native of Bangladesh, produced cool renderings that imagine a downtown where floods might no longer be a negative, and where empty spaces in office buildings are filled with people-pleasing amenities.

He wanted to examine how downtown could become a better destination for people to live, play and work.

In spite of the city's efforts to add residential towers downtown, the area is still overwhelmingly a work environment. The nine-to-five population of 150,000 drops to 4,500 people after five — "and about 1,000 of them are in prison," Hashim said.

His Jetsons-esque drawings propose a network of skywalks that connect the"vacant" areas of skyscrapers, which could be re-purposed as indoor park spaces or hydroponic farms.

Take the CenterPoint Energy building, for example. "Right now, it's 80 percent occupied," Hashim said. "But with energy shifts, that could evolve. What if it becomes more vacant and becomes not just an office building, and it's more connected to other buildings?"

Hashim also imagines the downtown tunnel system moving water instead of people when it floods. Different architecture would accept floods as "more of a normalcy," he said, perhaps even forming some sort of cistern that could also be used for leisure.

Hashim said his work is just a small example of what the studio has produced, with  "23 bright individuals and three amazing professors who have helped us look at Houston globally."

The Vertical Studio ends in June with an exhibition at the architecture gallery Aedas in Berlin, where Mayne, Wolf Prix, Gerald Hines and other global practitioners will participate in a symposium.

Bookmark Gray Matters. The ad-hocness of the way it grows is like Bangkok.