How fitting: The former St. Catherine’s Montessori School across from a Reliant Stadium parking lot is gone, but its spirit will live on. The school itself now has a new location on the other side of the South Loop, but the concrete bones of the “castle-like” building it left behind at 2510 Westridge will be . . . reused!
That’s right, organ-donation organization LifeGift will be spending $7 million to graft new space onto the existing structure, which will be renovated and kept alive presumably with an infusion of stucco. The completed building will be the organization’s 26,000-square-foot headquarters. A new blue-glass prosthesis will connect it to a parking lot along Lantern Point Dr. and serve as the front entrance. Among the features inside: LifeGift offices, an organ-donation education center, and operating rooms for onsite tissue extraction and organ recovery.
Let’s hope the transplant is successful. But really, this is nothing new for the patient: Before it became a school, the building was a firearms museum.
After the jump, more views of the bionic building from m Architects and Burwell Architects.
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A touching story, isn’t it? And to think how many buildings die each day without realizing that their still-functioning tissue could give the gift of life to new construction. Sign up your building to be an organ donor today!
- LifeGift Expands Organ Recovery [KUHF]
- Central location to house organ, tissue donation agency [Houston Chronicle]
- Future home of LifeGift Corporate Headquarters and Southeast Region offices (video) [LifeGift]
- Construction date draws near for new building (PDF) [LifeGift News]
Renderings: m Architects.
