The conversion of a raw warehouse just outside Loop 610 into an internationally-acclaimed artist's studio is a prodigious proposal, but a challenge to which Museum of Fine Arts, Houston building and grounds director Henry Griffin was eager to tackle.

"I was kind of amazed that somebody takes gunpowder and creates art," he tells CultureMap of artist Cai Guo-Qiang's Portal Project, Odyssey. "That's a pretty neat thing."

With his team of 15 department employees, Griffin has masterminded and executed a temporary studio for Cai to produce his epic gunpowder drawings on Oct. 6. When Griffin approached the project, he was confronted with a tabula rasa: a 25,000-square-foot empty warehouse that had yet to be outfitted with power and lighting.

"To convert a warehouse to a museum — that's pretty tough," he says.

The first step in the metamorphosis was acquiring an occupancy permit from the city, which entailed coordinating electrical and lighting installation. Exit signs were illuminated, a fire alarm system instituted and a complete HVAC system was conceived.

For the realization of a truly museum-quality environment in what was originally built as a storehouse, the primary issue was establishing an extraordinary level of air quality. In the reinstalled Chinese art gallery at the MFAH, where Cai's 42 panels will line the walls, the temperature will remain at a steady 70-72 degrees with a 50-55 percent humidity.

That atmosphere is difficult to replicate in a subtropical area, but with the aid of 200 tons of air conditioning and a 1,000 kva generator, Griffin and Aggreko LLC have conquered the Houston climate. The official supplier of temporary power and temperature control solutions for the 2010 Winter Olympics, Houston-based Aggreko provided expertise for the unprecedentedly ambitious project.

Today, a flexible duct snakes from the delivery dock doors throughout the entire warehouse. Because of Cai's flighty medium of choice, gunpowder, the gusts of cool air couldn't be directed immediately downward like a typical air conditioning system, or else the material would become airborne and alter the drawings' compositions.

"We had to use four air handlers, a 500 gpm (gallons per minute) pump and 10,000 cfm dehumidifier," Griffin attests.

Griffin's affiliation with the museum spans 23 years, but he describes Cai's warehouse studio as his most monumental task to date. He began his career in 1975, working on what was then called the Summit before its Compaq Center days (which has since been reincarnated as Lakewood Church).

Despite Griffin's veteran status among building managers, the warehouse project was not always a breeze.

"It became a bigger job than what we thought," he says, elaborating on the unexpectedly noisy air conditioning system. Once installed, the racket caused by the system was deemed too cacophonous to allow Cai to easily instruct his crew.

"We didn't know that the velocity of the air returning back to the unit would create so much extra sound," Griffin says. "Since there's nothing in the warehouse that would baffle the noise, it just bounces around."

As part of the warehouse's finishing touches before Cai's Saturday arrival, Griffin has enlisted a specialized sound engineer to design sound attenuators. Made of plywood with fiberglass coating, the apparatus will be complemented by acoustical sound blankets hung around the exterior air conditioning units.

Once Cai ignites his gunpowder drawings and the panels are trucked to the MFAH, the warehouse will be gutted once again. Not a trace shall be left of Cai's explosion and Griffin's expert handling, and the ephemeral ad-hoc studio will persist only as the subject of Houston art world lore.