Firm name: UltraBarrio
Firm leadership: Marcus Martinez, Assoc. AIA; Amna Ansari, AIA
Location: Houston and Austin, Texas
Year founded: 2018
Firm size: Five
Education: Both Martinez and Ansari: Masters of Science in Architecture Studies for architecture and urbanism, MIT; B.Arch., University of Houston
Experience: Ansari: SWA Group. Martinez: Enrique Miralles Benedetta Tagliabue (EMBT), Elkus Manfredi, Page.
How founders met: In undergraduate architecture studios.
Firm mission: To design field-merging projects that create thriving environments. When the complexity of the urban fabric is rooted in cultural expression, public cause, mobility, aging infrastructure, and overtaxed nature, it’s clear that durable responses rely heavily on disciplinary allyship.
First commission: The Transit Environment Programming Catalog for the Metropolitan Transit Authority of Harris County in Texas orients the community toward more robust and resilient placemaking. Our team workshopped ambitions of sustainability, accessibility, and connectivity into a vibrant publication. Through layout and narrative, the catalog emphasizes shared topics and opportunities for sites that blend ecology, safety, and equality with placemaking for Houston’s natural environment, neighborhood demands, and invaluable blend of cultures to connect with transit.
Defining project: In 2021, the Gulfton placemaking project “Roaming Cart-Ographies” was an opportunity for Amna to reconnect with the Houston neighborhood she grew up in. Gulfton is an epicenter of immigrant culture and density where newcomers have brought more than 50 languages from more than 40 countries to the informality of approximately 90 apartment complexes since the 1980s. Informed by a partnership with My Connect Community, a local nonprofit, and a task force made up of property owners and residents, we created a mobile workshop that delivers opportunities for community events supporting the ever-present microeconomy of local artisans, home cooks, teachers, and vendors. These
events disrupt the fabric of multiple continuous parking lots with vibrant carts and chairs that support community story days, movie nights, and informal trade skill-sharing—from mending clothes to selling tamales.
Personality of your practice: We would be best described as navigators, editors, and experimenters.
What inspired you to start the firm? We’ve long been motivated to disentangle design decisions that are knotted-up with cultural dialogue. For us, design is fundamentally a combination of trajectory-seeking, risk, and testing across contexts. We identified an urgency to build a practice around those characteristics, and we leveraged our ability to pivot with the flow of connected ideas as they surface.
How did you come up with your firm name? We wanted a name that acknowledges how we organize, express, and share ideas that are informed by a locale. Barrio, the Spanish word for “neighborhood,” carries its own complexity and meaning that are distinct by each context—functional, structural, or informal. The barrio is a place of deep identity where people find what they need or discover what they didn’t know they needed.
What inspired you to start the firm? We’ve long been motivated to disentangle design decisions that are genuinely knotted-up with cultural dialogue. For us, design is fundamentally a combination of trajectory seeking, risk, and testing across contexts. We identified an urgency to build a practice around those characteristics and it was crucial that we leverage our ability to pivot with the flow of connected ideas as they surface.
Another defining project: The Southwest Civic Core project is the result of a circumstantial center in which public and non-profit partners service a community in need, where each entity’s struggle for space limits access or messaging for services. The intensity of visitors is exhibited by the Non-Profit Health Clinic, receiving over 700 monthly prenatal patients. The community-led design includes 5 acres of park, programmed pavilions, welcome café, and a civic garage within the most diverse and dense part of Houston. The focus is on programmed edges where dignity in seeking health and educational services happens alongside Eid family gatherings, senior events, or the occasional quinceañera. The project seeks to maximize how the existing organizations thrive to support the community that can result in a framework for a stronger, equitable, and resilient future.
Biggest challenge in running a successful practice: “Beware of inertia” is a key piece of advice. For us, it means a mindfulness toward the influence of our growth. We have learned that consistency and adaptability can be overvalued and produce a practice that is a result of project circumstances. Instead, we seek to support, reframe, and maintain the complexities of a project. We find the external factors of a project need to be met with both established and evolving internal concerns and design processes.
Most urgent policy question: How can we enable cities—especially smaller communities—with the administrative support needed to shoulder the transition to and enforcement of sustainable policy changes, specifically for disaster resilience and for diversity in housing opportunities?
What’s one thing everyone should know about your studio? We resist fixed approaches in favor of nimble and tactical collaborations to accelerate hybrid ideas.
Ambitions for the firm in the coming five years: Our goal is that our process continues to help people see promise in their own community, to provoke politicians for engagement, to compel civic minded investment, and generate more productive policies.
The most important piece of criticism you ever received: At an open forum with MIT leadership for architecture graduate students, a fellow student asked “How is our time here preparing us for jobs when we graduate?”
Nader Tehrani, who was department head at the time, replied: “You’re not here to be employable, you’re here to be relevant.” Although we didn’t receive this criticism directly, the message reverberates in our practice as an obsessive mantra.
This article appeared in ARCHITECT's September 2023 issue.
Read more about emerging firms: Shin Shin Architecture aims to address "issues of transparency and value in the profession and strive[s] to nurture equitable client, employee, and peer relationships underlined by integrity and discipline." | Studio BANAA is "serious about weaving curiosity, diversity, and pleasure into the narrative of cities through hospitality, cultural gathering, and mission-driven public spaces."
