The studio, “Buildings on Buildings,” asks two main questions: 1) How can we repurpose a former Coca-Cola bottling plant in Houston, Texas, for an art incubator program? 2) How do we negotiate the 13.6-acre site for a program that only requires 1/6th of the site’s square footage?

Our project Art Incubator + Housing in Houston responds to these questions, firstly, by breaking down the building into a field of columns where art incubator programs can be plugged into, and secondly, by utilizing the additional space on-siteFf for 280 housing units to address the rising housing demands in Houston.

Building on the site’s history as a rapidly growing manufacturing plant, our adaptive reuse strategy is to preserve and expand on the existing columns and roof structures, bringing about a continuous ground floor condition where programs can be inserted without limit. We adapt the non-hierarchical ideologies of precedents, such as Archizoom’s No-Stop City, by dispersing our core functions, design workshops, throughout the site so that production and design are present at every corner. Materially, a mass timber structure is introduced to contrast the existing steel and concrete columns of the bottling plant.