Nestled in the heart of downtown Houston is the site of the most prestigious high rise in all of east Texas as well as home to one of the up and coming fashion designer, Bernard, lies Bernard’s Tower. This was a group project done by myself and two other graduate students for my Studio IX class in 2023. The project was to take an existing parking garage and build upon it. We all had different strata to work on with me being floors 1 through 8 with the other two taking the latter portions. We had to take parts of the city that our floors would allow us to see and make parti models to convey these actions.

We then had to combine our parti models into a tower. We all made our own and picked the one we felt was best. I don’t think it was any contest when we picked Bernard’s model to be the one to go with at it seemed the most interesting to further develop.

Following this we then moved on to designing our portions of the buildings. I worked on the programs for spaces over the next couple of weeks but they were to maintain the following:

• The existing parking garage was to remain
• Visitor Center
  • Exhibition Spaces
  • Cafe
  • Gift Shop
  • Offices
  • Multipurpose Room
• Administration Area
• Dining and Retail
• Residential
• Be accessible for all the Floors

Upon having to design the building, we also had to design the structure as we were taking Structures III during this semester so this project worked to be our finals for those two classes.

All three of us were simultaneously working on our portions of the building making sure they tied in correctly. In order to do this, I had to create the column spacing of the building as my floors were on the ground. In order to do this I used a combination of steel columns and beams, concrete decks, concrete columns and slabs for the garage, transfer beams for the areas where the building changes shape, and shear walls for the building core and exterior walls where the fire stairs are located. I had never done a full structure for a high rise before so learning about radial structures, transfer beams, limitations of shear walls, and double helix parking garages was all new to me.

In the end, the columns, shear walls, transfer beams, and building shape changes all worked throughout all the floor plans to give ample spaces for each of their programs.

With the building done, it was up to another one of our group members to complete the renderings. Not only did she deliver but she completely knocked it out of the park with what she was trying to convey. Also, as if you cant tell from the pictures above, she really loved pink so we made everything have a reference to it.

There really are a ton of renderings she did but I can only post so much. In the end, this was probably the best project I’ve ever worked on for school or otherwise. The group was amazing and I wish them nothing but the best.

Project Information:

School Project

Fall 2023