luciaphile

I guess Town-and-Country's previous incarnation was just a mulligan then.

I tend to be comfortable when others are hot. My Houston family must be air-conditioned at all times. I have never known them to dine al fresco even once, at any time of year. Moreover, they prefer the air to be conditioned to a fairly arctic degree, because "the men are wearing suits," Mother used to say. But men aren't wearing suits all that much anymore, and my family are a collection of old fuddy-duddies, and I'm pretty sure none of them has ever been to a park anyway. As HAIFers often point out, Houston has drawn a very international crowd of newcomers, most of whom have gotten along just fine without air-conditioning in their home countries. I suppose it's possible they came to Houston for the A/C. Still, a big chilled dome park seems, forgive me, a bit dated. "Passive cooling" seems much more of the moment. And I think people value outdoor spaces a good deal more than they used to, especially now that we've finally figured out about hydrating. There is so much more enthusiasm for parks now. I agree with all who have argued for the shell of the dome overarching a green space or open venue of some sort. Also, an impression I've had, and I don't quite know how to put it, but I think a trend is people sort of bringing their own entertainment again. They just need places to gather and do whatever oddball things they do; there is less desire for things to be programmed from above. Turning the dome into a sealed rainforest just seems like overthinking. Sometimes "the solution to an architectural problem is not a building," as I've read somewhere recently. The "world's largest gazebo"?

Thanks for the article. I [a] don't know enough to have an opinion on the effort to keep the bayou from meandering where it will - beyond asking that, the next time you see a liburbarian complaining about environmentalists and open space in other parts of the country "driving up the cost of housing," etc., recall this controversy: were there a truly ample buffer of open space, the bayou's movements, be they natural or runoff-worsened, wouldn't be so threatening; and I am entirely sympatico with the writer's seeming sympathies. But, and it is a very big but, she errs greatly in putting about the notion that this is an "intact forest." The last time I visited Bayou Bend, about a year ago, I observed a more or less intact understory of Asian privet along the bayou. You could film scenes of jungle combat there.

^ I'm sorry. My import must not have been clear. Or perhaps we may be living in alternate universes; in mine, the gap between reality and this orderly 7% solution stuff is ... well, nevermind, I must be being pranked. Back to the topic of the anachronistic park.

Just the other day my co-worker pointed out where the Austin paper reported on its front page that a tornado near Blanco "threw a home 150 years off its foundation." I said I reckoned when those people walked out of their house: "Comanch!" Not race, no, but ethnicity. From the pro-immigration Immigration Policy Center (http://www.immigrationpolicy.org/just-facts/how-united-states-immigration-system-works-fact-sheet): Per-Country Ceilings In addition to the numerical limits placed upon the various immigration preferences, the INA also places a limit on how many immigrants can come to the United States from any one country. Currently, no group of permanent immigrants (family-based and employment-based) from a single country can exceed 7% of the total amount of people immigrating to the United States in a single year. This is not a quota that is set aside to ensure that certain nationalities make up 7% of immigrants, but rather a limit that is set to prevent any immigrant group from dominating immigration patterns to the United States. I'm sorry for being mischievous, this may not get at what you meant at all -- but no matter where you stand on immigration you've gotta marvel at the unironic tone in which is explained the purpose of the limit.

Oh dear, the bigger picture. On the one hand, the Bayou Preservation Association, an organization I know little about but would guess - is probably not deeply-pocketed but successful enough to have staff and the money to launch a major restoration project on Buffalo Bayou, with a long list of members many or most of whom would not balk at the word environmentalist; and with an explicitly environmental purpose, if we are to do them the courtesy of taking their mission statement at face value - I don't see anything there about health care or the arts or women and only a little bit about education. I am getting a pretty strong vibe: environmental group. That group in charge of, or at the very least almost certainly leading the push for, a project you claim to support.On the other hand, a likely small and probably well-meaning group of folks who differ on the need for the project, or may not grasp the difference between native vegetation and privet (I haven't the time to learn their specific objections). And who have created ... a Facebook page. And your takeaway is that the environmental movement is the enemy? I would feign surprise, but why bother. Environmentalists bad, the last bad people in fact: this is the one-note chorus of the times, and when people are all parroting something in unison, it generally means someone has gone to the trouble of brainwashing them.It is not coincidental that the movement has never been weaker, and that the odds are all against the environment.Oh, those powerful baddies, the environmentalists ... Your conclusion is exactly backward. Environmentalism was so mainstream in the sixties and seventies that Nixon was perfectly comfortable with it, and was arguably its most effective presidential advocate in modern times. But it was threatening to both left and right, and they, and their mindless dogsbodies, libertarians, with the easy cooperation of the media (worst: Wall Street Journal, second worst: Washington Post; probably Rush Limbaugh, or maybe Fox News, are worse, but the WSJ and WP are influential because "respectable") have colluded in the last 15-20 years to convince the public that concern for the environment is "elitist," the very opposite of "progressive." Oh, and kind of "airy-fairy."* Precisely because environmentalism is not about people {though people are in so many ways its beneficiaries, and not just because of clean drinking water!}. Indeed, it is sceptical of the future, of the whole idea of limitless human progress without cost, and above all we cannot tolerate that. Down the memory hole! So leftists with the eager encouragement of neocons (by all means, do our work for us!) were successful in belatedly assigning ideological baggage to the environmental movement, that the people in the trenches, who were busy establishing parks and preserves, and saving or recreating wetlands (thank you, Ducks Unlimited!) and bringing species back from extinction, and working to ban DDT, and keeping sewage out of rivers, and fighting the damming of the Grand Canyon, and bringing the science of ecology into being, and monitoring the health of the ocean, and starting even things as simple as campaigns to encourage people not to litter - yes, that was environmentalism! - never had. Or reverse the formulation: curtailing domestic population growth, something Americans were in near agreement on in the seventies, is now a completely taboo subject. That was done by the right, neatly co-opting the language of the left. Caring about nature, simply qua nature, has been turned into something you have to apologize for. Witness how the first thing out of anyone's mouth is: "Well, I'm not an environmentalist, but..." and then nine times out of ten they proceed to say something that proves their sympathies, their natural home, lie with environmentalism.It is not a dirty word, and what it is about has not much changed, only become more refined as we knew more, until the last fifteen or 20 years -- when those efforts to undermine environmentalism began to bear fruit in terms of changing the dialogue within environmental groups. Now, we are told, it's not about biodiversity, it's about "people in the environment." See as a single example last month's New Yorker article on the damage that has been done to the Nature Conservancy by a CEO who is convinced its mission has something to do with people, and with fooling the free market into ... doing something or other. His legacy so far is some sort of $10 million mapping software. The Conservancy's actual mission of "conserving land and water" - for wildlife, specifically endangered species - and the work people do and have done for that organization, which if you know anything about this, is hardly considered anti-Establishment: he loftily considers all of that old-school thinking. He has indicated that he considers preserving landscapes, work at the species level - to be part of that outmoded thinking.I wonder where he got that idea? If people matter, it is because life matters. That should be axiomatic. The backlash against the environment has been skillfully and cynically orchestrated and has so weakened the environmental movement that it will die with the last of the Boomers. Take the billboard issue, which reared its ugly head this week: once our grandmothers and their garden club would have readily signed a petition to remove the blight of billboards. The issue was seen for exactly what it is, scenic roads: no less and, crucially, no more. Is it better to live amid beauty or ugliness, when one has the luxury to choose. Is it better for people, if you like: a matter of common sense. Try it in 2014: don't you care about people and their jobs? Are you a radical that hates people, hates the free market?!! Hates freedom? Teddy Roosevelt: two threads to the history of environmentalism in America unite in T.R.. One might be called professional or practical perhaps, the other owes much to the Romantic movement. Although T.R. is usually identified with Gifford Pinchot, and thus with former strand, Pinchot's stewardship of the national forests resulted in some very bad practices from which American forests have yet to (will probably never) recover. And the two of them sometimes wanted forests to be where they didn't even belong. That was the Progrssive faith in wise stewardship. But it was other spirit, the purely romantic attachment to wilderness felt by Teddy Roosevelt, that we honor in him, and that holds up even better to scrutiny now. It was this impulse that led to the mad, heroic all-nighter of the Midnight Forests, which even my husband - professional conservationist, worshipper of T.R. - admits led to some odd public land designations.Anyone attempting anything like the Midnight Forests now - would be quickly branded a radical. And it was radical, no question.Were he living now, T.R. would be depressed all right. And you would never have heard of him. *What a brave stance your professor took there. I've never heard anyone make fun of tree huggers before! Especially not on an urbanist blog!Maybe he was thinking of John Muir, who said of the redwood forest bought and named in his honor, "This is the best tree-lovers monument that could possibly be found in all the forests of the world."John Muir with his dozens of ascents of American mountains, without equipment, before climbing was heard of as a sport in this country.Well, I'm a tree-hugger. That's pretty much all I am. I'll never apologize for that, just because some people really do hate nature, and some others feel threatened by anything that is not human-centric, and some couldn't care less either way, but find it easier to make money when environmentalists are marginalized.

http://www.bayoupreservation.org/ By any definition, an environmental group.

Not to rain on your hysteria, but you do realize that the group that's trying to do these things that you applaud - is an environmental group?

I worked at the Bookstop out on Memorial. There was a substantial magazine selection. That was the internet, I guess. I remember an elderly gentleman with a number tattooed on his forearm would come in most weeks to buy a copy of Der Spiegel. I was sixteen and found it great fun to work there. My favorite of my co-workers was a somewhat shady, eccentric laid-off petroleum geologist, for whom the Bookstop was pretty much the last stop. He liked to buy books for me, in an effort to get the nonsense out of my head, but disdained our store and preferred to buy them at Detering's.

Just for the record, so that it will accurately reflect that Texas is a place where people have chosen blight, those protections have been overruled where there was the political will to do so.

I can't speak to the perceived need for the Grand Parkway or its probable future expansion, but my impression as a non-flier who has driven all over the state: in most Texas counties, the "only impossible scenario" for widening a road is because it was needed, or "successful." TxDOT is a fairy godmother who confers importance on the local panjandrums.

I agree in preferring a use for the dome that would have respected its place in some people's hearts, but that would have reckoned with the mostly gaping hole in the city's fabric that it created even when it was an active sports stadium. Houston has already enticed the Super Bowl. I hope I'm not shrewishly anti-football, but tying the facility to hopes of being noticed again by the NFL seems well short of visionary. In any case, it seems possible that football is facing the sort of crisis baseball did in the nineties. {No need to get indignant - no, I don't know anything about football, so just ignore the previous statement if it was outlandish.} I thought the predominant sentiment amongst HAIF-ers was that Houston should focus on its residents, not on trying to lure out-of-towners and tourist dollars you have the great good fortune not to need. No doubt some of you would enjoy attending a Really Major Sports Event once in a great while. I understand that. But as an ousider the one thing I have observed to unite the disparate voices on this forum is your shared approval for the Discovery Green, a place I found ... well, nevermind that. To each his own. The point is you really like it, and it can't help but prompt the thought that y'all are missing an opportunity to have a Discovery Green-type thing on a bigger scale, something that might please the most people, more of the time. ETA: maybe it's the wrong place for it - I readily concede my ignorance there, and of course my built-in bias that there can be no wrong place for open space.

So if the architect is at the (no doubt well-earned) tossing-off stage of his career, that may "do justice to Houston's haste"? You have hedged your bets, strickn. Interpret us, for us: that sounds like more than Steve Holl is paid to do. But as a native and layperson I am casually curious to know how this might be done. However, if all the marinating produced only nods to the heat and the usual stuff about boomtowns and youthful energy, unbeholden to the past, etc. -- I would just as soon admire Holl's building in absolute isolation, with no accompanying text.

I am usually indifferent to the internecine stuff on HAIF, but I find, to my astonishment, that I want to put in a word for strickn, maybe because just a few minutes ago, oblivious to this thread, I enjoyed the background he provided here: http://www.houstonarchitecture.com/haif/topic/28750-structural-logic-of-600-travis/. Although his insistence on the idea of respecting place loses me in an urban Texas context (though, strictly speaking, this is one of "my" places, right there: baptized by Dr. Lancaster at First Presbyterian church, where, mulishness already intact by kindergarten, my mouth full of vanilla sandwich cookie, I remember quizzing my Sunday school teacher, why did God need a Son of God - why was God not sufficient?), his posts are more interesting, and certainly more literate, than the standard, "This is going to be sweet, this is frickin' awesome." His musings about Steve Holl's design process sent me in search of further information, and I suddenly remembered that, although my interest in architecture is not deep like y'all's, but just a facet of general cultural interest, I had read years ago a New Yorker piece about another museum addition Holl did in Kansas City. Let's just say, General Reader was not carried away by it, though appreciating that everything is still up-to-date in Kansas City. So, whelmed or underwhelmed by the new building, I look forward to strickn's thoughts on it, if he feels it's worth his bother.

I can readily believe all that you say, though ... it seems like FEMA might be more to blame: flooding concerns, more so than pollutants. I don't really know. Where I live, the landscape is littered with retention ponds that rarely see a drop of water, taking up a truly unfortunate amount of space. I saw that some genius had made an attractive one, once; it sort of looked like a real pond, and there were bullfrogs and a heron that thought so too; so perhaps it can be done. I think they must have pumped water into it, though. It hasn't rained here in years. Usually these "ponds" are full of Johnson grass; at their ugliest they are huge concrete boxes in the ground, surrounded by chain-link fencing, so children won't fall into them. They look like they will make an excellent mass grave, at some future date. You can be a know-nothing like me and still have a sense that, this can't possibly be best practice. Perhaps the solution was less pavement, more green in the first place? I think: it pays to heed what nature does, and then consider -- is there a compelling reason for us to do something differently, that nature will fight? In my view, the answer is seldom yes. Your friend's comments about roads and green-space confirm me in that view; and we like to be confirmed in our views, do we not? No offense was meant -- I don't know what Rush Limbaugh looks like. I am trying to picture him, but nothing comes. When I punch "fat man" into my mental database, for some reason Orson Welles in "The Muppet Movie" keeps popping up.

The details are a bit vague, but it looks like the neighbors made a fatal error when they sold the land to Arco, or whomever, years ago; the homebuilder had built the pond, it seems, as a little neighborhood "amenity." This fact made the Skanska rep's job rather easy, PR-wise.There seems to have been a dispute about whether the pond came into being because it was a spot that once naturally stored floodwater - the neighbors wanted it to be so. Whether it did or no, the re-developer will be building the standard retention feature elsewhere on the site. And though the wording in this article is a little unclear, I believe it's saying Skanska has sold a 9-acre parcel where the trees were for apartments: http://www.houstonchronicle.com/business/real-estate/article/More-growth-for-Energy-Corridor-4787970.phpSo no - the scraping of the trees wasn't the *EPA's fault*. But the suggestion had an amusing Limbaugh-esque quality, which I enjoyed.In fact, let's go with it!

I apologize if I'm being unusually imbecilic, but the pond was 2 acres, the trees a couple more, out of a 21-acre site, no? I am thus confused by the instant equation of "preserving the landscaping" with "not redeveloping the site." Was it such a math puzzle, on the order of sphere packing? The neighbors must have appreciated the buffer of the maturing trees. Many (most?) nice things are insignificant. Their cumulative effect is not. There are some places, with a vestigial sense of correctness, where the trees and pond would have been preserved as a matter of course, pretty much reflexively. There are places where the pending destruction would have prompted a hue and cry, perhaps taken up by municipal officials, and the developer would have grudgingly yielded to local sentiment There are places, like Austin, where trees and pond would have been a useful point of negotiation for both sides, in a zoning battle, say. Then there are places like Houston - I claim no exceptionalism for it - where the idea of saving the landscaping was not even entertained, except by a few hapless people; and certainly not by Skanska. I could see where this might give rise to a heretical thought: that maybe Houston - thriving, unstoppable juggernaut - could afford to consider toning down the "We're open for business! Come ---- us six ways to Sunday!" rhetoric.

I'm not unduly concerned about the destruction of that little pond, beyond my continual amazement that people, or institutions, are so eager to waste the efforts of others -- as a rather lazy person, initiative-wise, I don't think this will ever cease to startle me, as foolish as that may be - but I do think that for every enthusiasm there is an equal and opposite indifference. So, for instance, I cannot grok at all your lively interest in what are to me completely interchangeable office towers. Even if I were perceptive of the variety that so captivates all of you -- well, I could care less about the form itself. Still, I would never suggest that your passion isn't genuine. Similarly, landscaping is 90% of my interest in urban architecture.

Oh, Houston, you do not disappoint!

You know, I wandered into this thread in my oblivious way and missed the last few posts. Perhaps at least everyone may unite in being annoyed with me for drifting off the topic, which folks are so passionate about. I thought all might enjoy this recent story from Austin. From the Austin Chronicle: http://www.austinchr...2-21/headlines/ "Ridgetop neighbors awoke Monday to find this old, defaced home returned to its original site at 4505 Red River, where it was built in the early 1930s. The owner had sought to demolish the home in May, but neighbors and Historic Landmark staff fought to preserve it, either by rehabilitation or relocation. An unidentified caller said it was moved to Lockhart in October but was moved back to Red River "in the dark of night" bearing spray-painted messages that suggest a disagreement over payment." Photo by John Anderson There have been some interesting house moves in Austin. One did quite a bit of damage to the street it left, then got as far as the river and sat sort of askew on Mopac for a few days, then lingered a few miles farther on for about a month. Another sat at the corner of 360 and 2244 for a few weeks.

Okay! Though here, those neighborhood rules vary across the city, and this is not a big deed-restriction town. I am genuinely and neutrally curious whether you would feel this way if you lived somewhere that was actually historic in the usual sense of the word. Anyway, the buzz about the Heights seems stronger than ever -- the interesting exception to the Houston rule. We should all have such problems? Off this topic, Houston's geography seems to be far more egalitarian than it was in the 70s/80s. At that time, one actually heard the phrase "social address" used without irony. There was a sense you would sink out of sight if you lived in the wrong area. Now there seems to be a more evenly distributed "energy" and resurgent neighborhood pride. I wonder if this is partly due to the flight from the public schools, or at least from HISD. For the parents of my generation -- apart from a less-than-absorbing interest in their kids -- I think there was a feeling that attending public school was a part of the civic contract. Indeed, a sense that ... if a kid couldn't make it in public school, there was something weak about him/her. Now, certain areas seem to be undergoing a revival perhaps partly because people feel no need whatsoever to be tied to the local schools. My mother says that no child in her neighborhood attends public school, and the bus does not even go there. Most of the houses are adorned with signs for various private schools. I find this very strange. Sorry, this may be a topic you have thoroughly exhausted somewhere on the HAIF, or have long since ceased to notice.

It seems to me that constraints are placed on homeowners all the time, without anyone being grandfathered. We are not in the floodplain, for instance, but the government's data is not terribly accurate and at some point we got a letter stating that we were suddenly in a hundred-year floodplain, by fiat. I can't pretend it really matters, as my husband is too tight to ever expand the house, but still, it amounts to a taking. For a handful of neighborhoods in this city, ordinances have been passed which are designed to prevent the building of "superduplexes" (builders were routinely submitting plans for houses with eight game rooms, or something) and the overshadowing of smaller existing houses by newer ones, and to preserve the character of the streetscape to some degree. It's true that the implementation, for those who choose to enter the process of building a new home, seems like it could be quite maddening. And I myself find a sea of single-family houses kind of dull. But those neighborhoods are greatly outnumbered by areas which are charmless, like that where I live, where people may do mostly as they like, and the city benefits if they do. It sort of usefully channels their energy where it is most needed. The McMansion I would dislike in another context, I would more or less welcome on my street. Windows: Big Brother has taken an unusually strong hand here about windows. There is a window in my shower, above eye level, very handy for quickly drying the room and keeping mildew down. It was drafty and not terribly private however, so almost immediately upon moving in I encouraged my kid to throw his ball against the house in that general area (see cheap husband, above) and soon enough was able to replace it with a nice double-paned frosted window. The guy who did the work said that the it violated code as someone might slip on the tile and crash through it. Another time I replaced a leaky aluminum bedroom window that always stuck -- I had to use a screwdriver as a sort of lever while pushing on it, and was the only one who mastered this, which would have been unfortunate had we needed to leave that way in an actual fire -- and decided to replace it with an easily-sliding double-paned vinyl thing, tripartite, because that looked the best. Again, a window replacer advised me that I was in violation, because a five-hundred pound person might not be able to get out of it in a fire. He did it for me sans permit anyway, but said that was why his truck was not marked with the name of his business. Ironically he had come to town to profit off of a then-city-program designed to offer rebates to homeowners in disadvantaged areas to replace old windows and thereby achieve energy savings. It was quickly discovered that in nearly all cases simple window replacements would violate city code, bigger openings would have to be cut, and few of the targeted people could afford to undertake this greater remodeling. The program was thus mainly a failure. I understand these rules were devised to prevent tragedies, but my house is so small, nearly every window and door is visible from any point. Egress is truly not a problem. And sometime in the offing, here, the city will require new construction and remodels to conform to universal design. They trotted the idea out already, withdrew it after a hue and cry, but one sensed it was just the opening salvo. Not to mention, two entirely new taxing jurisdictions have been created since we moved here -- and said taxes happen to be dedicated to things to which I have as great an antipathy as some people do for preservation ordinances. ETA: I'm not insensitive to the fact that, in Houston, the rules you face in the Heights may seem particularly galling, unused as Houstonians are to a lot of regulation, and because they fly in the face of the freewheeling ethos there. That ethos doesn't seem exactly endangered, though. It seems like it just give the anointed areas a certain cachet.

Thanks for that video. I watched it 3x. (Also, thanks, Nena E., for that Soldier's Creek link.) There is still a train, though, right? At least, I rode it two or three years ago with a small relative. As with most things, it seemed like it had become an excuse for a gift shop -- in fact, I remember thinking they had missed a trick not running it directly through the gift shop. {It's interesting to observe the small relative in a shop: she was a late blessing and has consequently been rather materially spoiled; and so she momentarily covets everything, or anything, or thinks she does. Most recently at the natural science museum, the "Titanic" exhibit with its obligatory tour-specific (and necessarily dreary) gift shop blocking the exit, she declared she would purchase the first thing she saw, a tiny $20 pewter model of the ship. I pointed out that we had souvenirs, the Titanic boarding passes we had been issued at the start with real passenger's names. (She perished; I lived. I was a little surprised that they hadn't separated the tickets so that children might always be handed that of a survivor. She worked it out in her mind that she wouldn't have died, though; she would have climbed up on the iceberg.) We managed to walk out without buying anything, there was a hint of a pout on her face, but it lasted two seconds, and then she visibly relaxed and looked happy to be past the gift shop. The wanting, and the freedom from wanting. Me thinking, you'll be experiencing that for years and years; and then one day you'll stop wanting things altogether, and that will be kind of alarming to interpret.} What stays in my mind from the display of Titanic artifacts was a couple dozen ceramic gratin dishes, intact, not even a chip. There was a photo next to them of how they looked in situ: nested in perfect array, as though by hand, in the seafloor. I concur, boarding that Hermann Park train when you were little was a pure thrill, and on the very same day that you would see the lonely gorilla in his air-conditioned house.

If any other insomniacs are now worriedly trying to get up to speed on Julia sets, thanks to lockmat sharing this cornucopia of delights, this is the best treatment I've found so far. As is often the case with mathematical topics, wikipedia was too arcane: http://www.jcu.edu/m...ettes/Julia.htm

Replying in Way Off Topic.