The Republic of the Valley

A critical underpinning of Outram's approach to creating communities is the concept of a river valley civilization or the "Republic of the Valley." Many early civilizations formed around a single river valley that ran from a source in the mountains to a delta and harbor in the sea. This pattern occurred in many locales - Ancient Greece, Cypress, Egypt's Nile Valley and Oregon's Willamette Valley. The figure of a river valley occurs as an organizing prinviple in many architectural settings: in Roman villas and Christian churches, in Chinese cities and Indian temples, in the designs of Le Corbusier and James Stirling. The recurring use of the river valley figure through the ages suggests thatit touches something fundamental about the organization of societies and civilizations. This notion is central to Outram's vision of his work and his interpretation of the work of others.

To create a community, Outram designed into his building a river valley with its many diverse elements (mountains, sources, clearings, Caves, bridges, delta and ocean). The valley creates a single social space to bring together the diverse community of computational engineering (applied mathematicians, computer scientists, electrical engineers and statisticians). While his building is the first at Rice to create such a space in the interior, the figure of a river valley is not new to Rice. Outram argues that it is a central metaphor of Ralph Adams Crams ofiginal plan for the campus.

In Outram's view, the critical features of the valley are its source from which water flows, the valley or canyon itself and its delta. At the head of the canyon, streams from multiple sources may merge together. At the foot of the canyon, one finds a bridge like the bridge of appearances found in a Gothic cathedral. The delta is a place for cities, for commerce and for contact with other cultures. These features are clearly present in his various drawings of the "republic of the valley."

The River and Rice

Looking at Cram's plan for Rice, it is easy to see the valley that Outram envisions. It has a source placed in what is now the stadium parking lot and a valley that flows from there to its delta in Founder's Court. The implementation of the plan still follows this model. Alice Pratt Brown Hall lies at the western end, in the mountain glade or "round dance" under the dome of the sky - an appropriate figure for the performance halls of the music school. In Cram's plan, a single, small, central building sits like a boulder in the middle of the river, as realized in Fondren Library. It is a dam that truncates the whole arrangement. The buildings aligned along the axis - Physics, Sewall, Anderson, Rayzor, the Student Center, Herring and now, the Baker Institute - become the canyon walls. The walls break to admit flow from tributary valleys to the north and south. The Sallyport of Lovett Hall forms a gateway underneath its bridge of appearances, leading to the delta that faces eastward, toward the City of Houston.

In this iconographic view of the campus plan, even the oft-recounted limerick about Lovett's office takes on new signaificance. Watkins placed Edgar Odell Lovett's office above the Sallyport, where it dominates the bridge. This placement implicitly underscored both his central imporgance to the institution and his role as guardian and protector in the interactions between the university and the adjacent city.

Appropriately, the current academic rituals of the institution both recognize and reflect this river-valley myth. Matriculation, the formal entry of a student into the University, is held on the lawn of Founder's Court. Thus, students begin their academic journey in the river's delta, pass under the Sallyport's bridge and enter the valley wherein they work and study. At the completion of their studies, they graduate. Graduation is staged just inside the quadrangle, to the west of Lovett Hall. The students receive their degrees and pass back through the Sallyport to the delta and its harbor. They have spent their time in the valley and are sent forth to use their new-found knowledge in the commerce of the outside world.

The River in Duncan Hall

Duncan Hall is a physical manifestation of the river valley plan. It has clearly defined sources in the balconies of the western and southwestern wings. Water gathered in these highland "roof gardens" flows down the open stairs to the floor of the West Hall. The water mixes and meanders a bit on the sandy floor of the West Hall before coalescing into the river that ripples down the central hallway. (Outram refers to this as the "dancing floor" or the "round dance.") The central hallway or "street" forms a vanyon with its precipitous walls rising on either side. On one side, the caves of habitation cling to the canyon wall along the exposed hallway. The canyon ends at the bridge of appearances," giving way to the delta and harbor in the Main Hall. Other tributaries form around the balconies of the northern and eastern wings, running down the central stair to the Delta.

The river organizes the building. The two critical locations are the canyon's head in the West Hall and the delta in the Main Hall. These spaces are given over entirely to the public functions for activities that deal with the community and its interactions with the world beyond the valley.

The Main Hall contains the principal community outrach spaces in the building. Surrounding the hall are the auditorium, tow lecure halls, three classrooms and two conference rooms. Each hour of the day, hundreds of students file through this space en route to classes. The street, connecting the Main Hall to the West Hall, is lined with the administrative offices of Rice's Center for Research on Parallel Computation, the Computer and Information Technology Institute and the academic departments housed in the building. As the administrative center of the building, the West Hall contains the public offices of the various organizations housed in the building, along with a conference room.

The glazed brick patterns on the columns of the main entrance depict this river-valley figure. The rivulets of water, formed in the highlands, begin at the top of the columns. They run downhill to the head of the canyon where they hit the "round dance," shown as the swirl that divides the rivulets from the canyon. The water runs down the canyon to the gateway bridge, represented by the arches of the arcade, with the windows of the central conference room forming a balcony of appearances. Finally, the river flows into the delta depicted on the lower column, across the creasing tiles and into the unending waves of the sea. (Notice the small icon set to the left of the swirl. It represents the "occluded temple."

The Robot Order and Its Hypostyle

Along with the figure of the river valley, Outram uses a regular grid of columns called a "hypostyle" to organize his architecture. While the valley structure focuses the architecture inward, the hypostyle relates the detail of its structure to the surrounding world and integrates them together. The hypostyle is a regular grid of columns, potentially infinite in its extension. Where the valley recalls the structure of the Greek city-state, the hypostyle reminds us of the unifying force of the Roman Empire. It reaches out to shelter everyone under its sspreading canopy. In the campus plan, the hypostyle might be recognized in the regular and ordered planting of trees.

Within the building, the massive columns of the hypostyle both organize the space and provide it with a sense of scale. In Duncan Hall, for example, the columns are six feet in diameter - a human dimension. To create rooms, walls are set between the columns. To create larger rooms like the Main Hall, some columns are removed. To reinforce the column's absence, Outram leaves a scar in the floor where the colun is missing.

It appears that the columns of classic architecture are somehow fundamentally related to human form - the classic, chiched image of Samson chained between two columns that hold up the roof. And, to trees - the columns of an idyllic forest holding up a canopy of leaves. The human scale of the columns is important. In some mystic way, it helps people relate to the scale of the building. Using modern construction techniques, however, Outram's columns are far more massive than structural requirements would dictate. To justify their size and to bring the various building services into a rational relationship with his architecture, Outram moves all f the major services into the columns, creating columns that, quite literally, serve the building. In Outram's buildings, the oversize columns constitute a distributed, localized service core. Each column creates a vertical shaft to contain the support structure, power, water, environmental control and network systems required to operate the building. This leads to a discipline of vertical distribution. To accomodate horizontal distribution, Outram sometimes adds a "robot beam" along the grid lines of the hypostyle. In Duncan Hall the robot beams are rarely realized. In some of Outram's other buildings, the robot beams occur regularly and quite visibly.

In Duncan Hall, the columns are large enough that they can be hollowed out and a hallway run through them. This occurs throughout the building, although it is most noticeable along the south side of the street at the second floor. Where the hall passes through a column, a round light marks its hollow core as if it were simply transmitting the light of the overhead skylight. Walking the hallways, the "robotic" function of the columns is reinforced by the fact that access panels, fire alarm enunciators and electrical distribution panels are all located in the "column zone."

The Occluded Temple

One of the fundamental ideas underlying Outram's building is the notion of an idealized but obscured temple. To see the hidden plan of Duncan Hall, you must climb to the third floor and look down the long clearstory. The clearstory is the key. It reveals the long march of the columns through a grand space that resembles a gothic cathedral. Looking below the clearstory reveals that this grand structure has been infested with a horde of small rooms.

The clearstory reveals the plan of the building. Its form is that of two Greek crosses. The Main Hall forms the center of the larger cross, while the West Hall lies at the cente of the smaller cross. These abstract truths about its shape are hidden by the details of daily life. Outram calls this building the "occluded temple."

This ideal but hidden structure cannot be seen, it can only be visualized and held in the mind. This requires the willful suppression of detail, a deliberate abstracting away of the myriad small rooms that partition the larger space into mundane offices, labs and classrooms. Outram was commissioned to build an office building. By leaving the clearstory open, Outram has created a space that suggests the larger, grander structure to the observant mind.

Just as the nature of the interior is hidden from direct view, so too is the exterior. The building is embedded into a site that is rich with trees. Most views of the building show it peeking through the trees. It is difficult to discern either its size or shape until one is quite close. Again, the temple is obscured. It can best be perceived by mentally elaborating the hints seen through the trees. The same effect can be seen in Rome, where ancient buildings aare hidden in and under more recent structures.

The concept is not new. This kind of abstraction is commonplace. Consider the maps of cities like Paris that are produced for tourists. These maps show the major monumental buildings - the Eiffel Tower, the Arc du Triomphe, the Opera, Place de la Concorde, Place de la Bastille, the Louvre, Montmarte - but omit everything that lies between them. In essence, they call on the user to ignore the fact that this mythic and monumental landscape has been taken over by neighborhoods and office buildings.

This notion appears to have been invented in the fifteenth century by Leon Battista Alberti. His map of Rome demands that the user ignore the details of reality; even in his day the space between the monuments had been filled. Even so, his maps call on the user to picture an idealized reality, a mythic landscape. Outram argues that although we cannot take the old fables seriously and enshrine them in a mythic landscape, we can and should embed the extraordinary facts of our history and our imaginings of the future to create a new, modern mythic landscape. In this view, the occluded nature of m0onuments is just a natural part of the machinery that can liberate us from a mundane and literal world.

Entablature, or the Raft

How did this river valley come to be? Outram explains it by relating it to our common mythic heritage. When early civilization set out to colonize, they sent forth a raft or an ark. The raft carried people, fire and civilization. It would float until it struck new land. At that point, the colonists would use the transported fire of their old home to start the fire of their new home. They had, in effect, moved their civilization, their ideas, their fire to a new land. The raft would decay or break up, but the essential elements - people, ideas and fire or energy - would persist.

The roof structure of a classical building recalls this raft structure. In fact, its supporting members are often called "rafters." A decking on the rafters supports a pyramidal roof or "pyre." In Outram's architecture of ideas, this superstructure, or entablature, represents that mythical raft. Thus, above the column capitals, we find the blue logs of the raft. They are still dripping wet. The swirls remind us of the chaotic waters of the flood. Above the logs, we find a green "saddle" that is the deck or table (entabulature) upon which the ark rides. It is colored green because, in the raft, it is the lifespace, the level where people can actually live. On the table rests the pyramid of the raft, containing civilization, ideas and fire.

The raft of computational engineering rests on a field of columns, impaled on Texas' alluvial plain. In Outram's myth, it cam to rest on a mountain. The act of impalement opened a hole deep in the mountain's core into which the flood receded. As the water rushed out, it eroded the interior into the river valley, revealing in the process the orderly hypostyle of columns. On the exterior, we see the geological striations of the eroded stone - a faint reminder of Outram's myth.

The classic vocabulary of architecture uses the word "entablature" to describe that part of the building above the columns. The word appears to derive from in-tablatum, meaning a table or planked surface. The tablinium was a room where one kept pictures, painted on wooden planks. Thus, we can envision the entablature as a table on which one places ideas, mediated by text or pictures. The ideas are visible on the outside, where openings appear at the high widows and terraces, or where a ceiling coffer protrudes upward into the ark. In the Main Hall, the ceiling reveals some of these ideas, with its iconic representation of the birth of consciousness.