Newsletter of the College of Architecture at Texas A&M University
Students in a fall 2009 first-year graduate studio at Texas A&M explored alternative designs for a new art museum in downtown Houston.
The Anza Falco Museum of Art and Design will begin operations in a transitional structure scheduled to begin construction later this year.
"The students' projects addressed how materials are not just about construction choices," said Gabriel Esquivel, assistant professor of architecture, "but also a means of creating diverse sensations in a space, focusing on the effects produced by the materials’ textures and surfaces."
The designs, he said, avoid a neo-utilitarian tone in favor of aesthetic and psychological investigations.
A museum board member said the facility will have an alternative view of the design arts.
"It does not fit within the conventional definition of a museum of design," said Jorge Capetillo-Ponce, "for the reason that its focus goes beyond the simple presentation of international trends and designers and into the exploration of the complex relationship between the emergence of design as an artistic, technological, economic and social force in the past one hundred years and the international artistic trends and diverse ideologies that filled the nineteenth, twenty and twenty-first centuries and that had a constituting influence on its development and expansion".
To see images of the students' designs, visit http://theoremas-gabe00fab.blogspot.com/
For more about the museum, visit http://thetransitionalmuseum.blogspot.com
- Posted: Jan. 21, 2010 -
