Houston built its cistern in 1926 to serve as the city’s underground water reservoir. By 2007, the year that the city decommissioned it, Houston was already sourcing its drinking water from lakes and rivers. The cistern had sprung a leak over the past decade that rendered it unusable. So the city locked it up and promptly forgot all about it. ... Today, the Houston Cistern is much more than an afterthought. With a $1.7 million grant from the Brown Foundation, the Buffalo Bayou Partnership decided to restore the cavernous 87,500-square-foot structure as a temple devoted to art. The Houston Arts Alliance has stepped up with programming for the space, with the first in a series of sound- and light-art installations planned for January 2017, with new artworks installed every six months.

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The first art project to be hosted at the Houston Cistern, Donald Lipinski’s Down Periscope, opens up the space to viewers beyond Houston. Viewers can request control of the digital periscope and peer around the structure’s concrete columns, which number more than 220 and measure 25 feet in height.

As an arts venue, the Houston Cistern boasts its flaws as features. It’s far too dark to host most kinds of artwork. Limited egress means that viewers can’t stray from the guided path. But contemporary artists who use light in their work could use the space to dazzle. It also features incredible echoes—echoes that last for 17 seconds or longer—meaning that sound artists could put the space to work, too. Work that shows up in Houston Cistern will inevitably specific to the site.