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strickn

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Everything posted by strickn

  1. strickn
    Disconnect. Sure there's a layer in which the design must connect the neighborhood, but on this equally lasting level, they've disconnected.
  2. strickn
    A university (not this one) uncle of mine said that the Southern way to do things is smaller and more personal than Northern institutions are comfortable with. Compare the Menil, Phillips, Witte and Kimbell to, say, the Frick, Morgan, Albright-Knox and the Stewart Gardner fossil (just because by law nothing can be moved around doesn't make it less impersonal). The Menil is even a nice landlord. But these designs' refinement is too hamfisted. The designers think the point is to be modern and sedate. But neither of their buildings have any human tactile qualities, even the 'green' mesh grid. The culture is wrong.
  3. strickn
    Right, because in-town is authentic, like the river in River Oaks, the foothills in the Heights for the mountain in the Montrose, the completely pretentious practice of naming streets for bits of English literature and Ivy League colleges so the price tag can be larger, etc. An old method of theming, and to exactly the same purpose.
  4. strickn
    Are there any new measures, do you know, for keeping what's going down there dry in the next Allison?
  5. strickn
    Both Anderson and UTMB got to be made part of the Permanent University Fund, which lately has declined as steeply as any other chunk of equity. The promises being made to bring UTMB back from the dead would probably be better spent on keeping other units' budgets out of predicaments as far as possible. The one use I have yet to hear suggested for the Astrodome is to become a giant field of medical administrator cubicles. It really begs for illustration and publicity, but let's leave it at imagination.
  6. strickn
    In Context,
  7. strickn
    Anyone's happy to leave the proving job to the fact (that tamtagon picks up on) that this is an institution backed into a corner.
  8. strickn
    Yes. If you compare nacubo's FY 2004 report, when the BCM endowment was $ .972 billion, to the 30/09/2007 one you link, when it was $ .954 billion, and then add in the statement in the back of their Winter 2008 print magazine that they have received just over $ .7 billion in philanthropic donations since 2003, they have eaten through a lot. http://www.nacubo.org/documents/research/F...etsforPress.pdf
  9. strickn
    It would take a heck of a lot of modification; so much that it wouldn't really be able to be called that house anymore. It would lose whatever purity the architect aimed to introduce. Fortunately this particular kind of purity is lost on that neighborly neighborhood.
  10. strickn
    Contrast, yes, but whether it's really of interest is troublesome since it's not even subtly different than what Legorreta might have proposed for anywhere. This design's strongest color is the red flag that it basically passes on specific interaction with the surroundings. Ricardo drew a blank this time. Thanks for the relevant link.
  11. strickn
    BCM got ahead of itself, sadly. Med schools have such vicious internal politics that that can happen more easily than you would think for such large behemoths (they will also have a doubly hard time integrating outside influence). Endowments are going to keep taking hits for the foreseeable future, so it's a question of the extent to which Rice sees that writing on the wall and decides the higher profile name placement is worth the very serious risks. If they risk it, Rice will get top billing because reputation promotion is half the game. Rice University will remain Rice University; BCM will much more likely become the Rice University Baylor College of Medicine - indicating that it's one of the subsidiary faculties (a bit more like MIT Sloan, although there was no merger there, than a merged name like Case Western) - than simply Rice Baylor College of Medicine.
  12. strickn
    Speaking of which, look how the tower cranes are inside the glass cladding (in the picture above).
  13. strickn
    I very much suspect your zeal is misplaced, kylejack. Piano is not on the project for two reasons. First, this is a campus plan. Chipperfield, AFAIR - thinking I read that any of the previous finalists could be hired to work on the actual gallery expansions - will not be designing blobs of physical structure but of rationale. Second, Piano already has a reputation about the Menil. He's lately been hired to expand Fort Worth's Kimbell, and since Kahn is worshiped, being judged to have done a Kimbell expansion artfully would offer him a bigger chance to move on up in the architectural pantheon of how timeless you are. I guess he will be spreading himself thick on that commission.
  14. strickn
    1836 is a rather significant date to be able to look back to. It's like a whole other 1800s. About the only other homestead I know of still like that is Punto-Pina, the estate for which Piney Point Village is named. Thanks for the link.
  15. strickn
    http://www.luxuryportfolio.com/browse~mc/t...ill_village.cfm has one listed for now.
  16. strickn
    ...a permanent loss, I would sooner have said. I saw two Katy houses; any pictures of his first one in Brookshire?
  17. strickn
    It's true that he did a good deal to make Houston what it is for us. But having come to this point in Houston history, it's sad that no one among us can work in his mold for the following generations. Where Vale blessed the streetscape, the economics now call for garage door, garage door, garage door... and that's not a knock on automobility: find new residential blocks that face the street all the way to the ground and the designs hold, if anything, even *less* hope of ever providing surfaces to tinker with and interact with. If it came to change, a garage door is much more easily changed out for something detailed than the blank materials that are becoming the norm. Speaking of which, I'm sorry that he found the courthouse to be his most important commission, because passing by there, it really is a dog compared to the rest of downtown Bay City. The only good thing one can say about its treatment of the surroundings is that it allows large windows by shading them with climatically appropriate louvers. Otherwise, it's a permanent shame that he didn't find a way to give us a public building that showed how to be civically proud while remaining contemporary country. http://www.rootsweb.ancestry.com/~txmatago/bc_pics1.htm
  18. strickn
    Some are saying that Dillards will be leaving Brazoria County's other and only indoor mall. I went and sat out by the side of the road in the middle of the county on Sunday afternoon listening to A Prairie Home Companion and saw about 500 cars headed north in the first hour. Quite something for a Southern Brazoria County area of 75,000 people total.
  19. strickn
    I guess Allen Center is their (Devon's, not just Hess') E&P base or something, but all other things are not remaining equal with its overall leasing needs and operations growth - Devon is building a 2,000,000 ft^2 building in Oklahoma City.
  20. strickn
    You make a good point. Bryant Park offers the Public Library; Millennium Park hosts the Art Institute of Chicago. Central Park fronts the American Natural History, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Neue Galerie and other stuff. Hermann Park has MFAH, the Natural Science Museum, and more. Forest Park gives you I can't remember what-all other than the arboretum, but I think Grant Park has Science and Industry and the Shedd Aquarium. Once Disco Green's surrounding blocks have finished filling with national-label hospitality brands, as you assume the economy will let them do, then what we are looking at is fairly straightforward. I don't doubt for a minute that it's possible to keep the Green programmed enough with local color to charm out-of-towners and the execs staying in One Park Place or the 4 Seasons Residences, and there are upsides to that (I don't remember what prior posts I have ever made about DG, but I have always been quite in agreement with ya about its capacity to be a real estate development magnet; only reserved about its capacity to be very much more in a few years, once the place is ringed by glass lobby walls not so different from the ones that sterilize Smith, Louisiana and Milam). Yet so does the programmed green at Pearland Town Center: and, once that kind of schedule starts to strike consumers as inauthentic, like the indoor mall and its public liveliness began to look to people after awhile... then I can't foresee how the GRB neighborhood gets any closer to having the built-in resources - built in like the destinations that help keep Bryant Park and all the rest very relevant and so made you think of them - for DG to appear greater than just downtown's piece of flair. To appear as much greater than that as it still could [with some wise noncommercial use of the double block on the north], anyway. Once its economic energetic job is done, you want to see it keep enchanting the community. You know the Duchamp doodle off at the edge, by the parking garage entry? For downtown, the current infill program is distressingly apt to leave Discovery Green to function like that hood ornament writ large.
  21. strickn
    gosh, this thing would be a business-class cul-de-sac. Unless you're coming to the park from a baseball game, any Houston resident is going to be leaving the park the same way they came in, instead of having a visual reason to pass through or a physical possibility of strolling across in the course of local living. This matters. TXVines, I'm not sure what feeling that emoticon meant to put on your sentence, but if posts of more than a paragraph or comments without indents are a problem, maybe we should display them two or three inches wide, like newspaper columns; no one is chapped by those. When my tone is unhelpful and my writing bad communication, I'm sorry, but I still ask you to go ahead and cherry-pick things one by one that help you in thinking about Texas and metropolitan life. As long as you do that, they are more important than a sequence of points or any winning remarks.
  22. strickn
    Thanks very much, photolitherland. To others - Instead of worrying about this project a person might do better to worry about the national convention business itself drying up. The dollars we use only have provisional value, and none of the national policymakers D or R is publicly 'fessing up to the central fact: Just as surely as the new easy jackpots all dried up when we stopped being able to spend tomorrow's money today, so will discretionary spending vanish when these new stimulus dollars start adjusting to reflect the value by which they're less and less hypothetically backed. And with discretionary spending goes most of the cultural lagniappe that we think of as regular civilization. Returning to the smaller subject, people who care about Houston urbanism shouldn't be dismayed, because conventioneers don't make for good neighborhood fabric any more than convention megastructures do. The available space downtown was what it was, but for educational purposes let's imagine how much livelier and more worthwhile the Discovery Green area would be with even a short block and a half or so of neighborhood variety in between the edge of the park and the convention center wall. Bigbiz districts pressure against exactly that sort of flow. Efficiency does not produce good places, dig? Speaking of which, less than half of Big D is north of the Trinity - who said anything was hiding? While it's in straits in some places, most of what I've seen is livable for precisely the reason that it aint streamlined into efficiency in the usual ways that fail to leave good places for people. Maybe Oak Cliff is undersold compared to Houston like Houston is undersold compared to that wannabe-northeastern-coast city. In the cracks of each of the places' publicity, Texans get to flourish. If the Sixth Ward flowed all the way to Westcott, with perfect Allen Parkway skyline-bayou views, it would unquestionably be more beloved to Houstonians than the Heights, Rice Village or Montrose get to be. That's basically what I experience in a huge triangle all the way from the Zoo to the Sylvan Viaduct. If you mean that South Dallas is tucked out of the way, remember that there is not a city in America where business and residential growth have expanded farther toward downstream than up. Let him whose out-of-town visitors spend much time east of Highway 288 cast the first stone. I wouldn't count on us having much more to discuss about this development proposal for many moons.
  23. strickn
    Just want to reiterate this beautiful post. This is quite a bit like the role of Houston itself. I just don't want people to get in a rush to revamp Houston, UH-like, into a 'mature' city a la the classic major cities of the country. Because when our city becomes as frozen for the working man as the East and West Coast costlies are, then the fluidity is just gone for good.
  24. strickn
    Well, post-Panamax ships are going to begin coming through the new canal in 2014, so if Bayport will take until 2015 to build out, and Pelican Island would be even bigger, then Pelican will come onto the scene far too late to capture demand response at the outset. Port Freeport is wanting (not very publically - though they have a 1300 acre multimodal site with two 1200 foot container ship berths listed in one place on their web site, they are none too forthright with the community about truck and rail traffic skyrocketing) to draw a lot of container traffic, despite having rail service only on a single 20 mile spur from Angleton's UP yard. Pelican Island's rail service would be even more circuitous, not to mention requiring a new water crossing that wouldn't interfere with navigational traffic.
  25. strickn
    As far as meaningful or meaningless names go - frankly - unless it is accredited to grant doctoral degrees, this college shouldn't in the first place be diluting the term university.
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