There are six large garage doors at Big John's Icehouse. There are six large garage doors at Big John's Icehouse.

Seven months ago I started a yearlong project photographing an icehouse in Houston every week. Each location is studied both formally on its own and as documentary survey points across Houston. It’s a pretty simple process. I arrive, have two Shiners, take photographs, and leave.

With all the discussion today about walkability and public space in Houston, it seems like icehouses are an important local example that new public and communal spaces might learn from. This project was also a way for me to spread out across the region, whereas most of my classes at Rice had focused within the Loop. These buildings stood out to me largely because they counter most understandings of Houston. In this city known for massive forms, these are intimate. In a city home to the world’s widest freeways dividing neighborhoods, icehouses create slow spaces that connect neighbors. In a city of conditioned malls and underground tunnels, they invert their interiors outward, and in doing so pull the city in. The icehouse reinforces the basic notion that form affects both the users of a building and the city around it.

Now that I have photographed about 20 icehouses, I can say that the most radical architectural detail continues to be the garage door. The simple move of permanent openness inverts the last 50 years of Houston living — hot days are hot, ugly streets are visible, bad smells can linger, and humidity can ruin your day. The garage door becomes a way of existing in your location for what it is that day at that moment. The city is no longer an image through a window but a physical space. Of the stops I’ve made so far, a subset has emerged that’s even more radical: the public space that exists where it really shouldn’t. Where West Alabama or Jimmy’s open to active, walkable neighborhoods, this group of icehouses exist in the residual space between Houston’s infrastructures, subdivisions, and industries.

View from Big John's Icehouse. View from Big John's Icehouse.

My first experience in this type of space would be Bubba’s Burger Shack, an old icehouse that now sits underneath U.S. 59. Having a burger and beer here gives visitors an appreciation for the physical presence of Houston’s insane overpasses. This is a space that was in no way made for you to slowly sip a beer; it’s surreal. The freeway runs overhead, Uptown towers peak over the green behind you, and a huge electronic store is the only “architecture” in walking distance across six lanes of traffic. Yet in this tiny pocket that even confuses Google Maps, burgers are served outside, often with live music. So much of this city is built purely as infrastructure that there is a subversive beauty in these icehouses that appropriate car spaces for the pedestrian.

South of the Energy Corridor, Big John’s Icehouse occupies the end of a strip mall. Within this strip mall is an Indian restaurant, a liquor store, a church, a florist, and a judo studio. These all exist side by side, because each acts as a single interior, separate from each other and the city, with visitors choosing one and ignoring the others. The icehouse caps the western end, creating communal space within a sea of suburban sprawl. In this residual space outside the subdivisions, Big John’s six garage doors and long covered deck face directly into a fence. This region of the city was designed in huge chunks as subdivisions with grassy traffic medians the only shared space. In breaking up the end of this strip mall, an icehouse becomes the space to sit and be in the city as it is.

View from Red River Icehouse. View from Red River Icehouse.

 

Red River Icehouse stands off South Main past the Astrodome. The site is an awkward triangle, facing directly into Main where it becomes a short freeway. The building embraces this context though, taking the triangular shape and tucks itself into a far corner. From that corner, it opens into a great bar space that itself opens directly into the street. Just outside there’s a large patio of chairs and umbrellas that edges right up to a frontage road. All this faces directly into the on-ramp. The city is obscured, except glimpses down the frontage road. The wall of infrastructure creates a new exterior/interior space, with the hum of traffic and open sky adding to the calm.

A few blocks from the Westpark Tollway, Mike’s Icehouse stands among warehouses. The form is a simple standalone, with one completely closed half and the other made completely transparent by three pairs of garage doors. The day I visited, all six doors were open. From within, you are directly facing the end of a 1600-foot-long warehouse wall — it’s architecture at the scale of infrastructure. Once again, this seems like the last place to make public space, but instead of becoming an internal condition, this bar gives in completely to its site. There’s a beauty in embracing the city and letting it in.

View from Mike's. View from Mike's.

 

Of the spots I’ve visited so far, many icehouses are in nice residential areas. They have traditionally attractive streetscapes and energize active neighborhoods. They fill a lot of my Instagram page and usually get the most reactions. I love visiting them and will go back. My goal in this project, though, was not only to capture a local architecture type, but also to document an honest survey of Houston. This city produced itself so rapidly and haphazardly that a book of beautiful pictures would be both a lie and a nightmare to edit and crop. The icehouse is an intensely local way of framing and understanding the city; in viewing both the beautiful and the strange, old and new, you begin to decipher Houston’s language.

Follow Richmond on Twitter and Instagram as he continues his research this spring.

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