Skyboxdweller

I think Philip Johnson deserves an award for selling the developer on keeping so much of the space open and inserting the fountain , which appears to be about the size  if not larger than the one he designed for Lincoln Center in NY.  I stopped by yesterday  after visiting Marshalls for a pair of comfy pants to wear during  my drive to Palm Springs next week . It's a  lovely neighborhood amenity that is underutilized.  The ground floor areas need to one remodeled and should include restaurants, event venues ( what as nice place to have a wedding on a weekend when the parking lots are empty), local services and even a satellite campus for a business program of a university that would bring people to the area in the evening  An office park where used five days a week 9-5 is passe given the work from home situation and the level of vacant and unoccupied space in Houston overall. 

Given the size disparities and the price paid, by the time the Hess lease is up there will be limited need for a new building or additional space, especially given the work from home situation.  Hess' value relies in their share of the Guyana oil field in which they are a minority partner with Exxon controlling the show and their operations in North Dakota.  Staff functions will be consolidated - finance, hr, legal , shareholder relations, etc. and I assume the Hess folks have their resumes on the street.  M and A and land acquisition as well, except for the locals in the frozen north.  Still a plus for Houston, but not in terms of office space demand. 

13 hours ago, strickn said:

even if owning 800 Bell would pwn ChevronTexaco’s main domestic E&P rival,

and demonstrate their commitment to quote carbon footprint sensitivity unquote vs killing the planet building new construction, 

and accentuate both the 1400 Smith and 1500 Louisiana towers Chevron owns outright, whose sleek blue and white bands both pay discreet homage to their architectural forebear 800 Bell

On 7/10/2023 at 5:40 PM, clutchcity94 said:

Do we know what Menil has in store for the empty lot along Richmond between Loretto and Yupon?

I know a boutique hotel will be on the northwest corner of this lot, but how about the rest?

At one point in time they talked about a mixed use building that had apartments, retail and an auditorium for the museum, which would complete the campus, since they don't have a place to give lectures and show videos, etc. other than the entry area in the main building. Conceivably they could share facilities at St. Thomas, but in my experience they don't. 

On 1/22/2023 at 12:38 PM, IntheKnowHouston said:

Below are renderings of Rumi's Kitchen. I didn't see these shared here.

Rumi's Kitchen is the Persian restaurant opening soon at Post Oak Place. The address is 1801 Post Oak Blvd, Ste 120.


https://3dus.us/portfolio-items/rumis-kitchen-houston/

 

Menu sounds great and the space is an attractive setting for some Persian food.

It is incorrect to characterize the NYT and NYers in general as anti-development.  Real estate interests are perhaps the most powerful political players in NY State and the City, they build on a scale that dwarfs our  projects. Compare Hudson Yards to one of our town centers in physical size,  the amount of capital committed and the engineering challenges overcome . But it's a different type of development than our format of commerce on the feeder road, two thousand houses on curving streets with retention ponds on a thousand acres, a scaled down outpost of our hospital system every 15 miles.  Houston is fortunate in that it has no natural barriers to development , except south of Galveston.  For better or worse , our model can metastasize all the way to Dallas going north and to San Antonio and Austin on the west and to the Louisiana border on the east.  We truly could be what we have been described as, the "blob that ate East Texas". 

The underlying dynamic is that the extra lanes fill up with cars because the additional capacity makes land on the periphery within commuting distance  for workers heading into the core and  for those in the core who are employed  in warehouses and manufacturing operations that need large facilities on cheap land  built on the edge off the sprawl. . The road system is the necessary framework that supports our particular type of urban development : suburban sprawl , so that Houston now covers 650 plus square miles of relatively low density development.  As the prairies, swamps, farmland and forests get paved over they lose their capacity to retain and detain storm water. The costs of flooding are shifted to areas down gradient. .  Finally, it commits us to a built environment  in which individuals are  dependent for almost every task : work, school, shopping , entertainment , on auto transport, which for the next decade at least is powered by gasoline,. and makes mass transit and densification in the future not feasible. 

If commuting patterns have really been changed by work-at home options, and 25% of our office space remains vacant  in perpetuity, projects like the I 45 expansion may be overkill, as the workers it intends to serve during rush hour may not be driving to downtown offices as anticipated before we got comfortable with Zoom meetings and working remotely. 

It's nice being located next to the Target. You can pick up your head ache medicine before buying an expensive bottle of champagne at le club and getting dizzy breathing in fumes from the hopped up euro-trash sports cars rumbling at a low roar while you wait for the valet attendants to bring your Tesla around. The Rainbow Room on the top of 30 Rock its not. 

I recently visited Columbus, Indiana, a small city of 50,000 that Cummings Engine calls its headquarters. Columbus has been the beneficiary of a program that ran during the last half of the last century to hire world-class architects to design churches ( Eliel Saarinen), the library ( Pei), shopping center ( Pelli), private estates ( Eero Saarinen), a corporate building for the local newspaper ( SOM), schools, a local bank, post office ( Roche) and Cummings Engine's global hq (Roche). The program had mixed results. Columbus felt like a small college town with some interesting architecture during  summer break , thus absent students and the lively culture that I associate with college life.

The program was sponsored by the Miller family, which founded Cummings and owned the local bank and a multitude of other  holdings in Columbus.  It provided sophisticated contemporary design for public and commercial buildings not often seen in small town America , but failed to address bringing more residents downtown by providing housing. This was driven in part by racism, as the city opposed ( and the Millers supported)  Fair Housing ordinances and zoning changes that would have allowed a diverse group of people to reside there. (Slum clearance resulted in a nice riverfront park with a memorial to the neighborhood of run down housing that was home to a diverse group of people).  It seems that Columbus did not get the best work out of these architects and many of the buildings seem dated, and dreary, especially the Roche designed post office. Without a local population the mall was not a success and was demolished. The newspaper closed and its building now houses a school of architecture. The local bank building sits vacant.  The Cummings HQ ( picture attached) is another of Roche's sprawling mega-structures that extends several city blocks and wraps around an historic industrial building that was surreally placed in the middle of a reflecting pond.  To me, it looked like a metastasized structured parking facility, and was dehumanizing from the street level. I can't imagine how diminished an employee might feel driving into one of its tiered parking lots and then parking his or her rear in one of the thousands of  workspaces in one of the office modules. Many of these  low-rise one tenant corporate campuses have become white elephants and hard to reuse once the corporation is sold, merges or otherwise changes its business model. It's nice to see that Midway has found a way to find new  uses and a second life for this one. 

The tone of the statement on the use of the facility is all wrong. It has a dismissive quality and reeks of high self-regard that one might have heard in a statement that came out of the mouth of Leona Helmsely a decade ago.  The theme is :

 We're too busy with  our very important work  to shape  your community's future to actually get to know you and have you interact with our staff on a regular basis.  When we want to hear from you we'll schedule a meeting at a time and place convenient for us.

The Endowment could have gotten the information across in a way that does not make it seem like an insular, elitist institution walled off from the community it purports to serve.  The PR rep or communications officer should be given a lesson in how to "howdy". Unless  I am all wrong and the institution prides itself  as a place where one passes the Gray Poupon. 

On 8/21/2022 at 8:48 PM, classic said:

I don't have an answer to this for the Houston project, but the Toronto touchstone (IE the Aga Khan Park wherein theIsmaili Centre Toronto and Aga Khan Museum reside) is fully accessible all the time.  Quite literally, all the time.

Quite a different attitude towards guns, immigrants, social obligations and inequality in Toronto than in Texas.  We live in a fortress society to some extent to protect us from the chaos that we sometimes mistake for liberty. 

I think that the design is in keeping with the tradition of enclosed gardens in Persia and India and is appropriate for  its intended use. . It's not a place of commerce, or finance or mass entertainment , but rather a place more contemplative and a refuge from all of that;  a sacred space amid the profane. It's certainly more connected to the physical environment and a more meditative environment  than  some of the other  houses of worship in Houston that have a regional or national reputation, e.g.  Lakewood Church, Second Baptist or the Cathedral downtown.  It doesn't shout " Look at Me" or attempt to dominate or intimidate .   Given that we experience most of the built environment in Houston as a drive by, I assume that there will be many who pass by this center on Allen Parkway on a daily basis and will have no clue as to the garden and architectural spaces. But not all.  There are many who avail themselves of the trails along  Buffalo Bayou and I think it will pique their curiosity.  In the way that it doesn't give it all away at the street level , it's quite seductive. If the center develops a program of lectures and concerts and other public events it will be experienced by many Houstonians of all faiths, including non-believers.  Security  has to be a major concern to a large Islamic center of worship in the US , and especially in Texas with its open carry laws. It would be unwise to have people with  guns walking in off the street into this center without having to pass through a security checkpoint.  

One of the out door areas looks like they stole Turrell's oculus from the Rice Skyspace, supersized it and neglected the magical lighting effects that makes it buzz. I used to live in Hedwig Village within walking distance to the mall.  MetroNational has produced average buildings with no architectural distinction and little sense of place .  Memorial City defined by its parking lots, maze of interior walkways and bridges on the hospital side  and location adjacent to a 24 lane freeway. I walked over there, but a pedestrian friendly location it is not . 

My experience with private dining rooms in NY and Florida is that when well run the service is more courteous and deferential than what one gets in a restaurant, even if one is a regular customer ; the food is OK, but nothing special and the members like it that way.  Like Trump and his taco bowl, they tend to order one or two things and will let their guests know that it is the best thing on the menu.  These settings used to work well for business entertaining because the guest can't pick up  the check.  For someone who isn't going to have their business pick up the initiation fees, monthly dues and  the monthly required expenditures for food and beverages, they make no sense. 

Seems like a good match between use and location.  It's not an A plus location that merits a five star hotel or luxury condo building.  I'd rather have the tax revenue flowing from a vacant site than having it sit there empty for decades, as many other parcels in this city do. 

I think it is still too soon to understand the impact of the pandemic on retail/consumer activity and foot traffic at retail locations.  At super high priced luxury malls, smaller boutiques and stores not supported by global giants don't have the resources to stick it out and make mid-course changes.  ROD doesn't draw on the presence of office workers to the extent that downtown locations do in America's cities.  But what we see in places like NY and Chi is that without a steady influx of suburban office workers into downtowns on a five day a week basis , the retail and restaurants in the area aren't going to make their numbers to support their pre-pandemic rents. 

The work to integrate the the new land bridge elements with the existing landscape continues.

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re sugarfactoryexpress:  A menu only a profit-oriented cardiac surgeon could love. 

It's not showing in the aerial photo but the lot where La Peep used to be located is also vacant and should be considered part of this same development.  

I  misspoke.  The government taken as a whole, including the Army Corps of Engineers, our Congressional representatives, our state legislature, county and city government has failed to address the problem. It's a fools errand to point fingers at any one group, because floods control affects allocation of Federal resource  and the Army Corps expertise and operational control , buckets of funding allocated to the state by the Feds and direct state revenue, and the resources  available to the counties , especially their land use planning and building code divisions,  the flood control districts, and the city operations and funding that is available as well.  It wouldn't have taken any extraordinary funding for the county to clearly indicate in the land records that certain property was within the limits of the reservoir and subject to flooding, or for the county board to amend the land use regulations to make such land unsuitable for development. But I could only assume that cash passed in the form of legal political contributions from the land developers to the elected officials to look the other way when the land became ripe for development.  .   This region has been governed by the ethos of uncontrolled development, build em and sell em fast and cheap and move on, and didn't hold free riders accountable for the risks they passed on to others downstream. If you look at recent aerial photos of development in Waller County just past Katy,  the development process continues unabated and thousands of homes and supporting businesses will be built on the prairie in the next ten years, precluding any coordinated effort to allow it to exist as a retention and detention zone for the urban agglomeration to the east. 

Re Katy Freeway tunnel : NYC gets 90% of its water from a reservoir system fed by a watershed of  approx 2000 sq miles that sits on the western side of the Hudson River.  The water travels under the river through tunnels and then proceeds to a series of processing plants and reservoirs into the five boroughs.  The water is not pumped and is totally powered by gravity.  By the time it reaches Manhattan there is still enough head on the flow to let it rise to the level of a six story building without additional pumping.  So yes, a tunnel system from West Houston to an outlet in Galveston Bay could use a siphon to  power the flow and would not need the help of mechanical pumps. The sad thing about Houston's management of this problem is that didn't act to buy additional land to extend the public owned land within these reservoirs to the fill line and allowed private residential development to exist within the basins; didn't start the tunnel project while it was rebuilding the Katy Freeway and use the reconstruction to deal with more than moving cars from Katy to downtown and back; and it still is woefully behind in agreeing upon  and designing  major flood control projects and the risk of flooding will remain for at least a decade or more.,  

The corner site with the pseudo-Mansard would be a great location for an Eatally.  Roof garden bar restaurant. Grab and go on the first floor, stack a couple of parking levels and a few more food display court levels and bring the building out to the sidewalk.