A Cavernous Space The Size Of 1.5 Football Fields Featuring 221, 25-Foot Tall, Slender Concrete Columns
Underneath one of Texas’s busiest cities stands the Cistern, a cavernous space the size of 1.5 football fields featuring 221, 25-foot tall, slender concrete columns. Reminiscent of the ancient Roman cisterns under Istanbul, it was once a reservoir, although it had been shut down since the 1970s when it sprang a leak. There are still a few inches of water at the bottom reflecting the columns, making them appear infinite. Houston’s Buffalo Bayou Park, a huge cavern, built in 1926 which used a 15 million gallon water reservoir until the early 2000s, has been reimagined and reopened as a place for public art.
Larry Page , the principal architect of the redesign, was charged with planning a ground-level entry structure to help transition visitors from the outside world to the Cistern and making improvements to the shelf on the perimeter of the space to create a 6-foot wide accessible walkway with guardrails.
“Descending into the Cistern the first time was like discovering some ancient ruin,” he said. “It was so strange and exotic in the setting and clearly lost to people’s consciousness.”
Back in the summer of 2010, nobody thought much about an odd artificial hill where, every year, the city of Houston launched Fourth of July fireworks. Next to a skate park, the hill lay inside a strip of land that Buffalo Bayou Partnership was preparing to transform into a park.
Since hills are rare in Houston, the partnership's consultants thought they might be able to put this one to good use. They contemplated using the site to build a concert hall, which would then have a stunning, up-close view of downtown.
They also considered that the park could also find a use for the enormous underground space that they knew must exist beneath the hill. They had heard about the dilapidated water system and the city considered taking bids to demolish the site, remove its concrete and fill it with dirt.
City officials sent a workforce down to open the hatches on top of the hill. Then, armed with flashlights, the consultants climbed down a skinny metal ladder, into the humid dark. That’s when the light from the overhead hatches pierced the blackness in dramatic shafts. As the consultants' eyes adjusted, they saw hundreds of slender concrete columns, 25 feet tall, stretching in rows to the far edges of the darkness. Reflected in the six or so inches of water that remained in the reservoir, the columns looked even taller, even more magical.
That’s when the plans changed significantly.
Realizing the historical and architectural significance of the highly unusual space, the organization along with the city, worked to take over management of the site. With research, 3-D modeling of the interior by SmartGeoMetrics, and community input, Buffalo Bayou Partnership developed a plan to repurpose the Cistern not just into a magnificent public space but one to house temporary, environmental art installations.
The space, which was only very minimally renovated to make it safe for the public to access, is like a work of art in itself. The Cistern produces a 17-second echo from any clap or exclamation that is inevitably let out inside the reverberant space. It’s dark and beautiful, reminiscent of the Middle Ages, said Larry Page, which added a sloping entryway and softly lit walkways ringing the perimeter.
"It's all about reflection. Something here feels ancient, like an Egyptian hypostyle hall,” said Page Senior Principal Larry Speck. "We discussed lots of possibilities. We dismissed the idea of parking, the columns are too close together for that anyway, but there was the thought that we could put in a restaurant that looked into the cistern. That would have ruined it. We decided to stick to something like the Hippocratic Oath: First, do no harm."
Visitors now step onto a six-foot-wide catwalk halfway between the Cistern's floor and ceiling. Originally, just a naked concrete ledge intended for maintenance workers, the catwalk is now protected by a spare guardrail to prevent visitors from tumbling a dozen feet down into the shallow water below.
As visitors make their way through the busy sights and sounds of Houston, a side trip to the dark beauty of the Cisterns is worth every quiet and beautiful moment.
Candice Reed
A graduate of Kelsey-Jenny College in Communications as well as a certified grant writer, Candice has written for The Los Angeles Times & The New York Times. She loves entertaining and all things French.
Make Sure To Stay At:
Woodland Lakes RV Park, just two miles from restaurants, shopping, I-45, St. Luke’s Woodlands and more. Yet campers wake to the sound of chirping birds, Black-bellied Whistling Ducks, fishing ponds and just an extraordinarily quiet park.