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Monarch's comment prompts me to consider what I've noticed, as someone who enjoys all people.  At ROD, the crowd I've seen (and I walk through there almost every day) is overall affluent looking.  Even within that complex, different establishments seem to draw a different mix of demographics.  Amorino and HopDoddy seem to be the most diverse ... a lot of folks of middle-eastern or far-eastern descent.  A fair number of hispanics and african-americans ... as at The Tuck Room.  The fancier restaurants, more anglo-americans or wealthy latin-americans, but not exclusively.  If we were to focus the conversation on AA's, its interesting to me that some restaurants in the Galleria and inside-610 area draw a lot of upscale AA folks, but others are very white.  It's curious ... sometimes I think its different tastes in food, other times it just seems that people feel more comfortable patronizing places where they feel like they don't stand out.  Anyway ... feel free to comment, these are just my impressions.

The former "tallest Holiday Inn in the world" may be there until it collapses under the weight of so much concrete and oxidizing rebar.  Unfortunately for me, I won't live long enough to enjoy that sight :-)

Another big building is nice, but I wish developers in the TMC area (as well as the rest of Houston) would lean more toward yielding facilities with more attractive designs, especially from a pedestrian's viewpoint.   I am left feeling that the prevailing opinion is that the market here won't support anything better than the bland designs that are utilitarian, but also generally uninviting.

I suppose I'm in the group of people that feels that the motivation to support innovative design in Houston died off after the oil bust of the 80s.  Hines and a few other developers continue to do better-than-average stuff, but that is few and far between.

I walk through ROD almost every day and I see more empty storefronts now.  Which I expected.  I want the project to succeed, but i think the path forward is more difficult than it would have been if the original developers had brought it to market earlier without scaling it back as they did.  

I am not privy to how the various business are doing, but it's obvious that some of the restaurants are drawing almost all the customer traffic.  The high-end clothing and jewelry shops always look empty.   

I think the Downtown Living Initiative was (and is) a really good idea.  A question in my mind regards whether it has built up the resident population downtown enough to support a lot of the things many of us would like to see created.   In view of that, I think it would be risky to build tourist attractions too early in the overall process of reconstructing a vibrant downtown for Houston. People who visit one tourist attraction will want to have others easily accessible nearby, plus interesting places to eat that are open after the downtown workers get off work.  We've improved in that regard, but downtown Houston (to me) doesn't offer as much to do as it did when I was a kid here in the 50s and 60s.

I think the "Mercado del Sol" project east of downtown is an example of investing public + private money too early in a particular sector of the process.  Perhaps the re-use of the Albert Thomas Convention Center is another example, but it does have a few surviving businesses.  Discovery Green has been rather successful and (I think) hasn't been completely leveraged yet.  

I agree, it is nice to see an attractive replacement for a very ugly parking garage ... which IIRC replaced some cool old buildings that were there before.  Also, its nice to see that Harvey is the general contractor for the new project, I've heard good things about them.

I am glad to see that at least some developers are choosing designs that prevent otherwise-hideous parking structures from overwhelming the appearance of their projects.   My local poster child for the opposite approach is the Aloft Hotel on Westheimer.  Perhaps there are worse examples, but I drove by it again today and was still annoyed by it - the ugliest Aloft I've seen.   

Thanks for the additional information.  I was just passing along a tidbit that a local developer mentioned to me.  I think the article you linked was from 2016 and $550 million is a lot more than I would have guessed.  In any case, I think that in the long run, this development will be good for Houston, especially if the 1 or 2 high-end hotels adjacent get built.   However, I think it would also benefit by addressing one of my pet peeves, which is improving pedestrian access from the other side of 610.   Better sidewalks on the inner-loop side would help, but the death-defying trek across 610 is daunting.

ROD is nice and since I live nearby, I walk there a lot.  It seems to be drawing more people now than it was initially, but mostly because of the restaurant business.  The high-end clothing shops still look pretty empty.   I was told that Chase Bank took ownership a while back after the original developer from San Diego exited.  My gut feeling is that the whole project would have been more successful if the developers had completed it a couple of years earlier, so it would have gotten established before the local economy slowed down.

Since Houston's economy has been going up and down with the price of oil, timing is important.

It's not one of I.M. Pei's most eye-catching buildings, but it's nice.   (Earlier on, didn't he design the Brutalist Boston City Hall?)  Perhaps the people who don't like the Houston building would prefer one of his group's later buildings in Dallas, which I think is/was named Fountain Place -- more glass and a non-flat top.  I always rather fancied his building in Hong Kong that (I think) was named after the Bank of China, at least for a while.  I was told that it was designed with Chinese feng shui principles in mind ... i.e., glass facing both the mountainside and the ocean, such that (supposedly) a dragon could pass through it coming down to the ocean.    

I like the design, but there is something that bugs me ... which is very common in Houston.  The first two pics show what I think is mildew, which is surprising for a new building.  I have my own ongoing battle with mildew on the concrete balconies of my condo.  Chlorine bleach applied with a stiff brush is the best solution I've found for the smooth surfaces at my place.  I suspect that solution is a bit more difficult for some of our older buildings that have facades of fossiliferous limestone (e.g., City Hall and older ones at UH).  As I recall, the facade of City Hall was cleaned by power-washing (or maybe even sand-blasting) years ago.  That's very destructive to the surface.  My place has some exterior surfaces that are artificial stone (actually cement) that some guys cleaned by power-washing, but it was obvious that the process eroded the surface and left it less smooth. 

I don't know enough to judge how racist he was in private words or actions.  Regardless of how bad he was in that way, he did publicly say and do some good things.  Some people evolve over time ... perhaps he did, too.  I dunno.  

As president, at the signing ceremony for the Higher Education Act of 1965 in 1965, Johnson reminisced:

He ... offered me a job at $125 a month to teach a Mexican school at Cotulla [Texas] when I was a sophomore, and it was necessary that I leave that year to teach.

I shall never forget the faces of the boys and the girls in that little Welhausen Mexican School, and I remember even yet the pain of realizing and knowing then that college was closed to practically every one of those children because they were too poor.

And I think it was then that I made up my mind that this Nation could never rest while the door to knowledge remained closed to any American.

BTW, after finishing his teaching degree, he went on to teach public speaking at Sam Houston High School, here in Houston.

On a related note, I really think "they" (probably the Uptown TIRZ) should construct some safe ways for people to cross Westheimer between The Galleria and stuff on the north side of Westheimer. It's ridiculous (and quite unsafe) how people feel they have to run for their lives to cross Westheimer and and also navigate across the median landscaping.  The crosswalks at Post Oak and McCue are pretty far apart and many  people don't want to take long detours to use them.   I suppose the most practical solution would be an overhead walkway.  

Beyond that, as more development occurs on the other side (east) of 610, the need for safe pedestrian passage to there will only grow.  Currently, I seriously feel that I'm risking my life trying to make that crossing.  As a resident of the area, at least I know what I'm getting into when I cross there.  I worry even more about the out-of-town visitors who have to scurry through that gauntlet of crazy drivers.

I assume you mean the strip mall on the east side of Post Oak, just north of Westheimer.  Unless it's changed hands while I wasn't paying attention, I assume it is still owned by the Weingarten REIT, along with the property across the street where Sakowitz used to be.  Its interesting how they have kept these properties for so many decades, without developing them with higher density.  While I'm not a big fan of the dedicated bus lanes going in (but I do like the Boulevard Project aside from that), I wonder if it will make some higher-density redevelopment more attractive there. 

That is a good question.  Personally, I wouldn't invest in one right now, if it were only to rent it out.  There are so many downtown rental units on the market now, with more on the way.  

3 hours ago, jmitch94 said:

This has to be Mr. Davis' best effort yet, nothing to write home about but not offensive like some of his others...

I agree.  And even if I don't particularly care for the facade, at least someone is building a condo building downtown, rather than more rental apartments.  Consequently, I hope this one sells out quickly and helps induce more downtown condo development. 

No need to get fancy.  The sun is far enough away to make it good enough to calculate plane-wave reflection coefficients and also it's not necessary to introduce frequency dependence.  In the past, I experimented with a lot of various equations for sound waves in the earth.  I imagine that for visible light this far from the sun, it would be sufficient to use an equation that allows for angle dependence and there is no mode conversion to speak of, as would be the case for sound waves.   In any case, just to my eyes, I don't need to fuss over which equation to use:  Randall's new building starts hurting my eyes once the sun comes up.   

Ultimately, its just another building that is better to live inside of, so that one doesn't have to look at it from nearby.

On 5/16/2018 at 7:58 PM, hindesky said:

I hope they will soon do some mildew remediation on this building. Houston seems to have particularly tough problem with this issue. 

 

Well, the sun is about to rise.  Time to put on my sunglasses so that the Arabella won't melt my eyeballs.  It has the highest reflection coefficient of any building I can see from where I live. 

There had been talk of a luxury boutique hotel on the empty lot north of ROD, across Bettis.  If the hotel mentioned above is in the property to the west, formerly occupied by Sullivan's and Le Peep, I suppose it might preempt the other one.  I also agree that it will be great to see the old convenience store and nail salon building go away. 

I agree, the updated facade is a big improvement.  As to the lack of pedestrian amenities in the area, I'm guessing the the demographic that would buy here is one that is less interested in such things. 

Maybe it's turning out be slightly less of an eyesore than The Arabella.  I can't help but wonder if Randall Davis could sell out his condo buildings faster if he would use more attractive exterior designs.  The recent glaring-white facades, particularly the bare parking podiums at the base would be a real turn-off to me.  Hopefully it's just a phase and his future projects will be more attractive on the outside. 

I hate to say this, but I worry about flooding.  Perhaps if we really build the proposed bypass channel for Buffalo Bayou, projects like this will be less likely to be affected by that.

One more thought:  I've long felt that the architecture in the TMC is a lot more bland and uninspired than the rest of Houston.  And that's even though I think we've been slacking in the rest of Houston since the early 80s.  Aside from individual buildings, I get the impression that the TMC's ongoing development doesn't really follow an attractive overall plan.  I'm sure that there are people giving some sort of guidance, but it doesn't seem obvious to me from what I see.