By Allyn West | TUESDAY, SEPTEMBER 3, 2013

DUDE! Got a snazzy idea for that 1927 underground water reservoir near Sabine St. on Buffalo Bayou, but you just can’t picture what’s down there? Well, grab the potato chips and crank up Pink Floyd, because now you can. The Buffalo Bayou Partnership is reaching out in the hope that entrepreneurs, artists, and visionaries the city over will use the above video, created by SmartGeometrics, for inspiration. (And more 3D images are forthcoming on the partnership’s website.)

Last week, the BBP’s Guy Hagstette unveiled this woozy sequence and some additional renderings of the so-called Sky Lawn at the Water Works, just north of the skatepark. This would become a kind of entry point for the park, with a snack bar, restrooms, and a greenspace fronting a pavilion and stage. Underneath that greenspace the cistern would sit. (It was abandoned by the city when a leak, never found, sprung.) And doesn’t it seem a shame not to — you know — do something with it? Right now, says Hagstette, there’s just no money in the budget for the 87,500-sq.-ft. “accidental cathedral.” And so the BBP’s hoping that this fly-through, donated by SmartGeometrics, will spur some Houstonian to plug it into her design software and come up with something grand. (And, yes, they’ve already talked to James Turrell.)

The Water Works Underground “Cistern”: A Historic Houston Space With Enormous Potential [Buffalo Bayou Park]
Previously on Swamplot: Using Pictures To Picture Uses for Buffalo Bayou’s Basement, Poking Around in Buffalo Bayou’s Abandoned Basement
Video: YouTube user alexaporter88