Along Houston’s Buffalo Bayou, a low-slung 1930 Spanish Revival building was when home to an inscription factory. In 1985, it became the Stages Repertory Theatre. In 1992, it became the Kid’s Museum of Houston. Today, it is the U.S. headquarters of the Mexican drink company, Electrolit. To develop a Texas home for the Guadalajara-based company, Electrolit assembled a fitting team: Schaum Architects, based in Houston; local architect Jesús Vassallo; and Luis Aldrete, a designer based in Guadalajara. The style effort finds warm Mexican design components within a Texan context.
The style team completed a total gut renovation for the new headquarters, stripping the frame to its original concrete bones and making repair work to the worn out building. “The challenge of this project was to make an architecture inside an existing architecture,” said Aldrete. “This was conceptually various from interior design or adaptive reuse, as the goal was not to change the original architecture, or even more its program, however to develop a new architecture inside of the old one, and then tune this circumstance to the point where a clear reciprocal relationship between both became evident.”
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