Professor in the Practice Danny Samuels and the Rice University School of Architecture have secured a Fondren Library Fellows grant to archive materials from the Rice Design Alliance (RDA). The project will ensure that documentation and ephemera relating to the fifty-year history of RDA are properly housed, organized, and made accessible through the Rice University Woodson Research Center.
The Fondren Fellows program funds projects of significance to the Rice University Fondren Library’s collections, archives, and spaces. The initiative allows Rice undergraduate and graduate students to gain hands-on experience and skills while completing projects that will benefit the university community. Faculty propose the initial scope of a project, and they supervise the students who plan and execute it. Under Samuels’s guidance, four students are working part-time through the 2023–24 academic year to carry out the archiving project.
RDA’s rich history is documented in these archival materials, which include taped lectures; documentation of past grants, awards, and programs; gala photographs; and ephemera from both home tours and travel programs. The RDA’s Cite magazine provides a particularly deep and storied history of Houston-area architecture, design, and construction communities. All 104 issues created during the magazine’s forty years of production will be archived and preserved over the course of the project.
Samuels observed, “When we started this archiving project, we were faced with sixty boxes of unsorted RDA material, some redundant, some crucially important. Under the expert guidance of archivist Amanda Focke, four architecture undergraduate students are diligently going through the boxes, developing their curatorial skills. The resulting archive will be a worthy record of RDA’s first fifty years.”
RDA was established in 1972 by Rice University School of Architecture Dean David Crane to develop the public programs and engagement efforts of the school. In 2023, RDA evolved to become more fully integrated into the efforts of Rice Architecture. It is now refocused on its original mission of urban and design advocacy in Houston, with an emphasis on direct community engagement. The Fondren Library Fellows grant awarded to Samuels and the Rice University School of Architecture comes at a particularly opportune time to cement and preserve a legacy that is relevant not only to the academic community here at Rice but to the architecture, engineering, and design community in Houston and beyond.