School of Architecture, Prairie View A&M.

Teaching by example, RoTo raises brickwork to imaginative new levels with the Architecture and Art Building at Prairie View A&M in Texas

At first, we were afraid to ask the brick what it wanted to be,” says Michael Rotondi, FAIA, of his design for the Architecture and Art Building at Texas’s Prairie View A&M University. “What if it still wanted to be an arch? But then the answer came: It wanted to dance.” So, Rotondi; his partner, Clark Stevens, AIA; and their firm, Roto, experimented with the material, creating a sheathing, with great rhythmic pleats and gaping flaps, that billows like a huge, windblown garment.

Though Rotondi considered various partis, he settled on a long configuration with a central space and linear arrangement of studios—a diagram that had proved successful in SCI-Arc’s latest incarnation. Prairie View initially offered him a site buried at the back of the campus, but Rotondi convinced the university president to place the building as a gateway to the school.

As realized (in conjunction with HKS), the three-story, 450-foot-long, concrete-framed structure presents its most eclectic face on its south, or entry, side. Here, a curving shell of brick wraps the cultural center, at the building’s west end, while a brise-soleil of painted, perforated steel veils glazed architecture studios to the east. Though this elevation offers the project’s most collaged and even disjointed composition, the contrasting materials and forms effectively distinguish among the functions within. And the sunscreen, dipping toward the ground, mediates between the prairie grasses in front of the building and the campus behind it, while alluding to a shady Southern front porch.

As if entering a truly lived-in home, students typically access the building not from its formal street approach, but from the back, or campus, side to the north, where an ancient oak tree commands an entry courtyard. Here, on the north face, the brickwork becomes extraordinary. Using old-fashioned, wire-cut clay bricks, instead of the more artificial-looking versions that clad the surrounding buildings, Roto inventively explored corbeling, displaying a jubilant range of possibilities in full view of the students. The skin, with mortar matching the deep orange bricks, wraps the cylindrical auditorium like taut fabric, flaring out toward the base. Like a monumental flap swaying in the breeze, a wall of brick opens from the drum, creating an interstitial space, where stairs spill out from the theater.