Transart

A new sculptural art space in Houston strikes a nuanced balance between precision and imperfection.

What was the genesis of the Transart building?
Troy Schaum, principal: We used to have an office in the photography studio that’s at the back of the property. Our client Surpik Angelini was our landlord. For a long time, she had been supporting and curating projects through shows around town that looked at the intersection between art making and ethnographic practices in art making—combining her interests in art and anthropology—and supporting emerging Latin American women artists and lots of others. She knew our work and wanted the project to be a statement about what our work could be, and she wanted it to be something that could support her curatorial interest.

So, it sounds like you had a pretty free rein in terms of how you wanted to approach it aesthetically?
Schaum: Surpik knows very specifically what she wants out of the project, but she has worked with enough creative people to know that you have to give anybody that’s making something the room to develop ideas in their own methodology. She likes to say that she almost fired us halfway through the project because she thought what we were doing was too monumental and too pure Modernism—she wanted something that was a reflection of the work we did that was a little bit softer and less assertive. And she was able to, through some combination of carrot and stick, tease that out of us. She is trained as an architect, so we could sit down and she would make drawings and we would make drawings. The idiosyncratic quality of the building, the funny little details and nooks, came from these very intense sessions. A kind of aesthetic negotiation was happening, and there was a real conversation at the level of detail. It is a different kind of prodding than we get from most of our clients.

Tell me about the evolution of how you approached the project. How did you arrive at the final design?
Schaum: Surpik is from Venezuela, and in her youth in Caracas, she had this experience with a certain type of space between a gallery and a salon and a space for small events. They were often in people’s houses and they would host artists’ talks and show artists’ work. She wanted to replicate a space that she could do those things in, and she also had a large library that she wanted to make available to people. The design really comes down to a very densely packed core, which you can see in the section pretty clearly. It has space for the bookshelves, circulation, bathrooms, seminar spaces, and her office by the roof deck. And then there are these two very large volumes—almost tubes—that can support various kinds of art making, exhibitions, and conversations.

Rosalyne Shieh, AIA, principal: I think that the project is like a house in a way. It’s a bigger gesture in terms of inviting people in, but it’s also a very intimate space, and that’s one of the things we were playing with.

How did you develop the materials palette?
Schaum: Some of our earlier projects dealt with a kind of panelized logic—the multiplicity of working in panels can actually soften something that has stronger monumental forms. This project evolved to something that we actually ended up constructing out of heavy engineered timber and stucco, which gives it even more of this kind of domestic familiarity. But we wanted to keep that idea of the softening of the building that emerges out of the panels. The windows were part of that discussion around how to produce something that has kind of a discipline, but then breaks at certain moments. A lot of the detailing you see in the windows was produced by sheet metal artisans—they were made by projecting our drawings on the wall and the steel fabricator tracing it and building the steel to match. It has much more of a kind of handmade quality.

Shieh: There’s a free quality to the materials which we worked very, very hard to get to be precise, but at the same time, have imperfection. Stucco and wood have inherent imperfections, which I think is very contextual. And the project is very well-crafted, but it’s a prosaic palette in many ways—you can see the handmade-ness.

How does Transart fit within the work that you’re doing, particularly as a young studio?
Schaum: I think it’s squarely in the center of our development. We worked on it for almost five years, and while we were working on it we did a lot of other work. But we always had this project as an ongoing conversation, in its multiple iterations. I think it was an important project for us to think through a lot of things that we were developing conceptually and to actually build ideas. Now it’s becoming a reference point for us as we think about bigger projects as well.

Shieh: I think it’s a question of: “Where is the architecture?” Is it in the building, the process, or the relationship of the two? And I think architecture is all of those things. There was also this other learning process—the developing of a process and a way of working—and Transart came at a really critical moment for us. Not only in the formal, spatial way, but also in terms of our career development as people who are trying to practice in this world with other people.

Project Credits
Project: Transart, Houston
Client: Surpik Angelini
Architect: Schaum/Shieh Architects, Houston and New York . Troy Schaum, Rosalyne Shieh, AIA (principals); Giorgio Angelini, Tucker Douglas, AIA, Ane Gonzalez, Nathan Keibler, Kevin Lin, Anika Schwarzwald, Ian Searcy, Anastasia Yee, Yixin Zhou (project team)
Structural Engineer: Zia Engineering and Environmental Consultants
Contractor: Welch Construction
A/V: RC Automations
Lighting Designer: Lighting Associates
Custom Nook Fabrication: Jeff Jennings, Steve Croatt
Custom Steel Windows: Cedar Mill Co.
Pneumatic Elevator: Home Elevator of Houston
Size: 4,000 square feet
Cost: Withheld