Join us as we celebrate Danny Samuels and his retirement from teaching at the Rice University School of Architecture.
Danny would love to see any of his former students who would like to join us in honoring him and his career as part of this special community.
In 1965, when Danny Samuels arrived at Rice University from Arkansas as a first-year student, he had no idea how his life would unfold. He found a new home at the School of Architecture, with inspiring teachers, provocative classmates, and memorable experiences. Early on, three classmates—John J. Casbarian, Liliana Milani, and Robert Timme—joined Samuels as “Architects Incahoots.” They worked on school projects together, continuing after graduation, first as a kind of club and later morphing into something of an office, Taft Architects. Their philosophy was collaborative practice. This collective effort by the partners and their associates has resulted in fifty years of work that has been widely recognized, exhibited, and published.
Samuels has taught at Rice since 1977, including the freshman studio from 1991 to 2012. In 1996, Dean Lars Lerup charged Samuels to start the Rice Building Workshop to get students out of the studio and engaged in the larger community, where their design ideas could be challenged in real situations. Samuels' work over twenty-six years through the Rice Building Workshop with Associate Director Nonya Grenader has resulted in a stream of realized projects: nearly eight hundred students have designed and built projects at various scales in the Houston community, from furniture to affordable houses. For the long-term collaborative work with Project Row Houses, the Workshop received the 2004 NCARB Prize for the "Integration of Practice and Education" from the National Council of Registration Boards, in 2005, the "Collaborative Practice Award" from the Association of Collegiate Schools of Architecture, and in 2015–16 it was the subject of exhibitions at Harvard University Graduate School of Design, the American Institute of Architects, New York, and the Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum.