2023
The Houston House Music Museum + AIDS Memorial
Houston, Texas, United States of America
Architecture | Urban Design | Conceptual Studies
about
This museum reimagines infrastructure as a secular sanctuary to the structurally outcast of society. Contending with more than art as a place maker, the building also finds new light to celebrate the people who inspire the art.
The role of infrastructure and its ubiquitous and unyielding relationship with marginalized groups presents an opportunity for a more nurturing relationship. Marginalized groups have often utilized the occupation of infrastructure as a means of protest, awareness, and advocacy. Could a more integrated symbiotic relationship between marginalized groups and the ubiquity of infrastructure yield new mixed used typologies aimed at making visible space for the complex realities of marginalized groups?
Direct Action + Occupying Infrastructure
Neglected communities often hold a tenuous relationship with infrastructural investment. In particular the equity of major infrastructure's implementation and access has yielded increased economic and social marginalization. Interestingly, communities have utilized the broader reliance of these systems as a means of self-directed action and advocacy. The occupation of highway infrastructure and urban transportation infrastructure as advocacy became a point of inspiration for the Houston House Music Museum and AIDS Memorial.
Communities + Highways
Individuals + Public Transit
A Living Memorial is a Living Memory
The project becomes an opportunity to examine the role that racialized socioeconomic inequity, wealth inequality, and political regionality play in increased health disparities for Black Queer populations. In examining the Civil Rights, Queer Liberation, and HIV AIDS Awareness movements the project highlights the role and relationship that infrastructure, architecture, and place making play in justice, equity, and liberation.
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A Place to Dance is a Place for Community
Spaces for dance and music—whether discotecas, garages, underground clubs, or iconic dance bars—have long served as vital hubs for cross-cultural connection, especially for racial minorities and queer communities.
Infrastructure Provides Cross-Cultural Nodes
These environments offer more than just entertainment; they create sanctuary. In a society that often marginalizes difference, dance floors become sites of expression, resistance, and solidarity.
Vibrancy and Visibility
For many Black, Latino, and LGBTQ+ individuals, clubs like New York’s Paradise Garage or Chicago’s Warehouse weren’t just places to move—they were places to belong. Through shared rhythms, bodies in motion, and unspoken empathy, these spaces fostered intercultural exchange and communal healing, cultivating understanding across racial and identity lines and shaping entire music and cultural movements in the process.
A Dynamic Venue
The site transforms to confront the needs of its visitors and the community.
Dynamic Spaces for Diverse Uses
Cultural exchange requires a venue that makes everyone feel at home.
Contending the Neutrality of Public Infrastructure:
Infrastructure has historically been designed without neutrality - continuously privileging the privileged and intentionally spoiling opportunities for increased equity or restitution to historically marginalized groups. In many American cities, such as Houston, the residual effects of racist and classist law and policy have been cemented into the organizational structure of infrastructure, yielding continued socio-economic disparities for residents of these communities. Ultimately, de jure discrimination in policy invites de facto discrimination in practice as power and social capital are less equitably distributed.
Reinforced Racial +
Class Segregation
As is the case with many American cities, the cementing of racial and class lines within Houston can be directly traced to the expansion of the highway system amid segregation.
Circumvention of
Racial + Class Groups
White Flight was aided by infrastructural investments that allowed White communities to live on the outskirts of the city and to bypass and avoid Black communities when traveling.
Disparate Accessibility
to Resources
As racial and class lines were drawn with highways, the investments into these areas also faced visible differences. Red lining maps in conjunction with infrastructural decision making solidified racialized communities within Houston.
Waste Management +
Exposure to Pollution
As neighborhoods zoned for Black and Brown communities are being blighted economically and socially, the most viable economic uses for these locations places marginalized communities next to waste and hazardous pollution.
Noise Frequency +
Impact of Disturbance
Pollution proximity also included that of noise. Often, Black and Brown communities are located in areas where unruly amounts of noise exists as a byproduct of programs like industrial plants, and air travel.
Enforced Community Fracturing
As Black and Brown communities were split by unrelenting highways and their construction, the identity of Black neighborhoods were forever changed.
Community Displacement
Additionally, as communities were suffering from being fractured logistically, many residents were displaced as governing jurisdictions favored the construction of new highway systems.
Quality + Scale
The quality and prevalence of recreational or even necessary items like grocery stores, green spaces, parks and stores dramatically skewed along racial lines. These became solidified as inaccessible with the addition of highways serving as barriers.
Congestion
As highways disproportionately bifurcated black communities, issues with congestion, noise, and spatial experience impacted these communities.
Surveillance
Identity further became something to surveil as race became connected to and reinforced by space and boundary.
Reinforced Racial +
Class Segregation
As is the case with many American cities, the cementing of racial and class lines within Houston can be directly traced to the expansion of the highway system amid segregation.
Circumvention of
Racial + Class Groups
White Flight was aided by infrastructural investments that allowed White communities to live on the outskirts of the city and to bypass and avoid Black communities when traveling.
Disparate Accessibility
to Resources
As racial and class lines were drawn with highways, the investments into these areas also faced visible differences. Red lining maps in conjunction with infrastructural decision making solidified racialized communities within Houston.
Waste Management +
Exposure to Pollution
As neighborhoods zoned for Black and Brown communities are being blighted economically and socially, the most viable economic uses for these locations places marginalized communities next to waste and hazardous pollution.
Noise Frequency +
Impact of Disturbance
Pollution proximity also included that of noise. Often, Black and Brown communities are located in areas where unruly amounts of noise exists as a byproduct of programs like industrial plants, and air travel.
Enforced Community Fracturing
As Black and Brown communities were split by unrelenting highways and their construction, the identity of Black neighborhoods were forever changed.
Community Displacement
Additionally, as communities were suffering from being fractured logistically, many residents were displaced as governing jurisdictions favored the construction of new highway systems.
Quality + Scale
The quality and prevalence of recreational or even necessary items like grocery stores, green spaces, parks and stores dramatically skewed along racial lines. These became solidified as inaccessible with the addition of highways serving as barriers.
Congestion
As highways disproportionately bifurcated black communities, issues with congestion, noise, and spatial experience impacted these communities.
Surveillance
Identity further became something to surveil as race became connected to and reinforced by space and boundary.
The Museum and Gallery Hall
The Main Hall
The Memorial Hall
