OPEN-GROUND is a proposal for an architecture of outdoor public leisure for hot, humid, toxic, and flood-prone climates. Modeled on the shaded sports courts typical of Houston, the project deploys a thick roof, hollow ground, and thermal chimneys to shade and cool this difficult environment while making a space for community gathering. The space frame roof is loosely filled with recycled insulation material, functioning as a thermal barrier to slow heat gain in the courts beneath. Belowground, an array of tubular chambers functions as a stormwater detention, toxicity filter, and water harvesting system. Connecting the roof and reservoirs below, a series of cylindrical ventilation structures provides conduits for buoyant air. These thermal stacks create a microclimatic engine, using temperature, humidity, and pressure differentials to ventilate and cool the open-air space. Not only does this cooling center build up the capacity for on-site water detention, but it also proposes how climate infrastructures can function beyond bare shelter. OPEN-GROUND offers the political position that the role of architecture in the Anthropocene is to hybridize the relationship between public life and terrestrial systems. The project’s underbelly of pipes and conduits, crisscrossing beams, and soil substrates imagines architecture as part of a planetary stack, mediating a site’s geologies, hydrologies, and atmospheres to offer a new space to gather under the sun.

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OPEN-GROUND is the recipient of the 2024 AIA Upjohn Research Initiative grant. This project was also supported by a 2025 residency at the Headlands Center for the Arts. 

 

Featured in The Sixth Sphere exhibition at the Aedes Architecture Forum in Berlin and the Rice School of Architecture in Houston. 

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Project Leads: Daniel Jacobs, Brittany Utting

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Design Team: Nathan Ehrlich

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Photographs: Sean Fleming / smfleming.com​