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strickn

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Everything posted by strickn

  1. strickn
    Description and rendering look like the project will be fine for downtown *except* for the dead first floor. If they could do formal or informal micro- ground leases to let anyone activate that unused room along the street, that would be groundbreaking.
  2. strickn
    That building was a good citizen. And not insignificantly, it had wonderful deep awnings well above the sidewalk.
  3. strickn
    Plus the permanent gantry crane atop the facade's outer bays would look appropriately cool and industrial for Houston.
  4. strickn
    Since nobody has figured it out, what MDACC needs to start doing is building arcologies. Just have a jenga grid of 20' deep trusses, and lab, office or clinic modules can be rotated in and out of the infrastructure as various TMC institutions need flex space faster than they can design shell expansions.
  5. strickn
    A thing about certain appearances. A pastor told me a couple of years ago that if a person comes into an auditorium and the seats are 70% occupied, they feel like there are no seats left for them. It's a cute little factoid until you realize that your socially practical capacity is barely two thirds of what your serious estimates thought you were putting in. The TMC is pretty crowded at its core (at least in the sense that all the land is institutionally spoken for and sat on; there's still a lot of vertical expansion that could take place), but when you skim around you are struck by nothing so much as its peripheral seas of surface parking more prevalent than anything downtown in the 1970s. Once you start to map it out, Baylor's destruction of the Parkwood live oak grove was more for deed convenience than anything. There is one king-hell of a lot of room to expand, and if anybody needed 60Msf instead of the current 30 it'd comfortably double along OST alone without crossing Murworth or Almeda. And probably will. It's just that deed consolidation makes the westward neighborhoods psychologically seem more impermeable than they've really got to be, so that after Hermann Park standing to the north, people just get that seventy percent feeling right out their ears.
  6. strickn
    Well, the latest news on deyaar.ae is the unveiling of their new development direction: "...What makes this new [28 Aug] corporate identity truly special is that it reflects the strategic shift in our focus from single-tower projects to master-planned communities..."
  7. strickn
    William Daigneau, their veep for operations and facilities, gratingly told KHOU that "the mural, which depicts African-Americans hauling hay, 'does not reflect the values of M.D. Anderson. There's the issue of who's running the farm, and who's working on it.' Polled faculty and employees, he said, were opposed to installing the mural in a new building. 'There is a lot of science to art in a healing environment,' Daigneau said, noting that the cancer center employs a consultant to help choose soothing artwork for patient areas." And judging by their recent healing environments, the bulldozer district (of a part of town not particularly interested in the modern experience of black Houstonians) of put-you-to-sleep urbanism is just about par. But they do like their, "issues", always.
  8. strickn
    http://www.flickr.com/photos/kuhfhpr_news/...57604893064617/ with more info if you do a text search for hurd mural houston
  9. strickn
    Well, that's exactly the point. It's an embarrassment at best, but it's absolutely *all* the designers had to offer the tangent neighborhoods, so harp on it enough and maybe you can keep hoping one day to make a sore thumb a "signature." Cos you're sure not going to do anything else with it.
  10. strickn
    See post no. 5.
  11. strickn
    I agree with you, although one can't blame them for enjoying suburban comfort in the middle of the city in a way very few cities offer. In Midtown Manhattan right now neighbors are fighting mad about a proposed 75-storey building which is, of course, "totally out of character" with the surrounding neighborhood of 45-storey towers. It wasn't until the latest round of developers' attention to Houston that density began to reach a point where many folks felt like maybe their piece of the pie is in danger of shrinking - that's why all of the hostility and hedging all of a sudden - but it's why density is its own poison in democracy (I've noticed that Houston is actually more intensively developed relative to its infrastructure than Brooklyn is, and the Manhattan example tells you why: the more people there are, the harder they make it to add any more). And maybe that's not a bad thing - once there are too many toes that can get stepped on that have to be protected from one another by an oversight process, which will exist to guarantee "legitimacy" of local actions on anything from street furniture to you-name-it, neighborhoods lose all of their real trial-and-error responsiveness in the name of proper public management, and it becomes impractical for individuals to actually have agency in shaping their environments.* No amount of community participatory visioning sessions will ever change that, but planners overlook the fact, perhaps because they are disciplined to view themselves as being the factor of-which-still-more-is-still-needed in shaping environments, the thing that's still not gotten its due for being as indispensable as it is. Going that route will make the same mistake here that the East and West Coasts have made, not to mention it'll erase/calcify the central Houston character that led us to fall in love with the place. *Imagine trying to adaptively craft a sculpture one weekend, when every suggestion from your brain to your hand and every signal from hand to mind has to be vetted in a four-month political procedure: you simply can't make anything suited more and more responsively to its living surroundings - so the pinnacle still available to strive for becomes a misbegotten perfectionism. "Okay, we've hashed this out, as few people as possible are alienated, it's DONE. For ever, if possible." If you think an exurban cul-de-sac is deadening, try an ideational one, like that. You'll find them all over the richer coasts, and I'll give them that they're certainly glamorous: "Why can't we have urbanism like that in Texas?!" - since the foregoing paragraphs are reasons why, if we can, we shouldn't.
  12. strickn
    Well, you have just opened onto an opportunity to get to know your home better in many ways. Decades before building the Exxon skyscraper downtown, the Humble Oil Company was based in what's now the multi-Marriott and directed work (and economic development) all over the state. If you drive up 59 to Humble you can see a lot of old buildings, but until the company knew how long many employees would need to live at an exploration site, it had camps to house them. My grandparents lived in Stanton camp (which did not involve tents) in West Texas for a while, and when Houston's urbanization was much more limited, there were some around the area too.
  13. strickn
    CB Richard Ellis webpage still has the building 100% unleased. http://www.loopnet.com/xNet/Looplink/Profi...7&stid=cbre
  14. strickn
    All right, but keep the web scoured for mentions of 3200 Post Oak then.
  15. strickn
    It would take someone with more Microsoft knowledge to tell us whether the deadness was a matter of access security or of the files actually not being on the server. However, there's the matter of each project number beginning with a recent year, or at least consistently able to begin with a recent year (3100 Post Oak's is 08, and recent built projects appear to line up with when they would have been in the engineering stages), and what is so interesting is that you can see, even without the details being available, that the program for the site involves not only a parking garage but LEED core and shell and the possibility of a retail element significant enough to be broken out of the plans for the main high-rise calculations.
  16. strickn
    http://www.dbrinc.com/ProjectInformation/P...mberSubmit=Find Anything else
  17. strickn
    Bob Hope* might favor the view across Hermann Park even still. *who, asked late in his life to name the most beautiful vista he had ever seen, named the view from the top of the Warwick Hotel That foreground is just, just wonderful.
  18. strickn
    Eh, tell it to Maxwell House in the East End or Anheuser-Busch on whatever freeway they occupy. Imagine what people would do if coffee and beer were even single-digit dollars a gallon. They'd think they'd died and gone to heaven; and about the closest those chemicals come to having to be leased, found, captured, dragged around half the equator and subjected to arcane processes is the point when the fancy bars whip out a scale to measure the pressure on the coffee grounds. Look at it this way instead: Because the skyscraper is not just an American but a Northern invention, not only were the early skyscrapers in New York and Chicago, but all of the subsequent generation of skyscrapers were either happening in Buffalo, Cincinnatti, Cleveland, Detroit, St. Louis, Kansas City, Philadelphia and Pittsburgh, Seattle and San Francisco, or were mimics of theirs. By mimics I mean that even when high-rise construction did creep beyond those cities in the course of the early century, Dallas in particular, but also Houston to a strong degree, took their architectural design cues from the classicism of New York or the blockiness of Chicago style. As far as cues go, not only were Southern skylines content to model their local pride directly upon Northern gigantism - a difference from the usual Southern way, which has been to do things more personally, to do things small and well - they also were not bothering, as they borrowed, to significantly improve the building type from what had been set in much dimmer and colder surroundings. Fastforward across the world war transformations in production now. By the turn of the 1960s, when Exxon set up its building plans, there were only two major - even 500' - buildings in use in the entire subtropical and tropical zones of the globe. Mexico City's Torre Latinoamericana (1956) and Sao Paulo's Pal
  19. strickn
    That's not what capnmcbarnacle was saying - in fact he took pains not to - and I would take pains not to have this sound abrasive, but as far as I can tell, you may as well be happy with whatever sterile prism pops up, because (the value of street-level accommodations notwithstanding) if the existing tower's architectural merit was so reducible, you have to that extent already bought into the postmodern thought that its substance is in its skyline statement. And the present proposal (if you trace the perspective line of the rendering back two blocks onto Texas Commerce Tower, count the storeys down from the top, and divide the remaining storeys into 1002 feet) is noticeably over 500 feet (if you forget to trace the line back two blocks, and just do it straight across, it's 600' ), which will matter to some fans, as far as something special at the top goes. (not far) The public realm gets a bit of discussion, and I'm really glad you care about the pedestrian streetscape. I'll just take this moment to point out something else. Ignoring tops, and ignoring interiors - which I can't speak about any more than capnmc can - just compare something as simple as its windows to what you see of Chase Center across the street. Besides rising on vertical folds, the openings in the older building are individually upright, but in Chase Center they're black oblong (horizontal) slabs. Could be futuristic mausolea for all we are able to relate to them. Mirroring the face entirely (MainPlace, etc) or stretching a facile grid up the thing like pantyhose (1000 Main, the rest of downtown Houston) are no more suited for acknowledging their function as places where people are spending millions of hours a year in close working proximity... All [of the recent strategies] are unsuited except maybe for being a bleak commentary on how forgettable and overstreamlined we have made the time we spend in such places. To inhabit a place is the most we can do for it, can say for it (since additive personal modification is NOT allowed, the more the place is supposedly "worth", and it seems all the world's an investment property). These new places ought to make that process dignified, but they don't. Anyone can message me for a 'rest of the story'.
  20. strickn
    Well, considering the developer's record on Main Street in the past year or two, Hines will be happy to make MainPlace a skeletal, floodlit garage if that were to become a "smarter" investment. Which just goes to show that "highest and best use of the land" is a slippery concept.
  21. strickn
    I encourage photo postings of this bldg as well./
  22. strickn
    good find.
  23. strickn
    Now that Anderson's Pickens faculty tower is built... http://www.kdbc.com/Global/story.asp?S=8140147
  24. strickn
    p. 18 of this month's Houston History magazine (subscribe, all of you! http://vi.uh.edu/public_history/public_history.html ) has a map said to be circa 1942 of Houston's proposed core freeway network. The Fulg, er, Gulf Freeway is listed as such. No source is given for the document (there is a small "Figure 7", so I like the sound of your anecdote, though a sourced 1950 Houston Post Parade Magazine article comfortably refers to it by that name.
  25. strickn
    One does have to question the wisdom of building Discovery Green with public dollars and having this park bounded by two-block megastructures on the north and south and a five-block monoculture on its principal side. The remaining side is likely to have Discovery Tower, One Park Place, and Embassy Suites. That accounts for the entire perimeter. The fact that downtown Houston is the biggest employment spot in the South or Southwest and yet every downtown park and plaza is vacant except at lunch hour suggests that Discovery Tower (and probably Embassy Suites) is not going to enliven the park. One Park Place's handful of residents will be the only Houstonians likely to use the park for whom it won't be "out of sight, out of mind" for a lot of the times of the day at which they might use it. The GRB and 59 will obstruct any future pedestrian traffic from the east that it might have been used by, and will provide a thousand feet of dead-zone frontage that no area resident will have a reason to cross the park to get to. This is a major blow to its function as anything other than a periodically used garnish. So that leaves us with convention hotel guests (primarily evening and possibly morning use), affluent restaurant patrons, and people in between sessions of a meeting at the convention center (sporadic use throughout the day). It's a nice park for all that money, but it's not going to mean much to distracted visitors.* Having large structures with pitifully few points of entry or nodes of dense activity deactivating the edges of the Green, where fresh pedestrian flows from streets might have fed in - something that Central Park, by comparison, utterly relies upon - means that it really will be sort of a yard for businesspeople with business there, and not someplace that a Houstonian population would have much reason to wander into. On the other hand, if the double block on the north is perforated and made very permeable at ground level, it's still conceivable we could eventually have a neighborhood public space on our hands. But if all goes as appears to be planned, we'll have gotten a speculative real estate development spark plug for all our hopes and civic efforts - and from that development, more additional showpiece property tax dollars than actual human use. *much as I want to believe otherwise, believe that it at least contributes to their minds some of the shade and the healthy division between hard work and unpresentable repine that Houston's fabric, out where conventioneers will never get to go, demonstrates and brings to grand scruffy life.
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