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Does Houston's newer architecture stink?


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I didn't say you were, I just suggested it as a possibility. The people funding these buildings like their looks enough to pay for them. Perhaps they are applying a different aesthetic than the posters here. How people feel about the appearance of buildings is largely subjective.

Maybe, but the people funding these buildings are banks, and although I'm no expert, it seems to me that they couldn't care less about asthetics as long the money is going to someone reputable, and with a track record.

While it's true that art is in the eye of the beholder, there are also invisible lines drawn that the majority of people recognize as good/tastefull art. Some like "Cubism" and some like "Impressionism", but most that pay attention to these art forms recognize a great artist, versus a mediocre artist.

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Maybe, but the people funding these buildings are banks, and although I'm no expert, it seems to me that they couldn't care less about asthetics as long the money is going to someone reputable, and with a track record.

So aesthetics play no part in the financial success of a building? I find that hard to believe. If so, why are so many buildings so pretty to so many people?

While it's true that art is in the eye of the beholder, there are also invisible lines drawn that the majority of people recognize as good/tastefull art. Some like "Cubism" and some like "Impressionism", but most that pay attention to these art forms recognize a great artist, versus a mediocre artist.

Are you talking about Christopher Alexander's "Quality Without A Name"?

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Are you talking about Christopher Alexander's "Quality Without A Name"?

Not at all, but I love this quote from Alexander... "In my life as an architect, I found that the single thing which inhibits young professionals, new students most severely, is their acceptance of standards that are too low".

So aesthetics play no part in the financial success of a building? I find that hard to believe. If so, why are so many buildings so pretty to so many people?

I'm not sure what you mean by "so pretty to so many people". And I still don't think that the asthetics of a design play a giant roll in lenders giving money to builders. Maybe someone can answer that.

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I'd like to go a little bit from what memebag said about the owners of the buildings being fine with their designs. We may never know what other designs architects had for a lot of structures, like 3100 Post Oak, or Hilton Americas, or many other buildings. However, the local stakeholders carry so much weight and have the final say that, IMO, a blah result is what "we" (even though "we" don't own the buildings specifically) end up with. This goes back to some of the mini-lamentations that I've shared here about my opinion that Houston has lost the bravado that it was known for in the past. To make a city happen in a poor location took a lot of likely unfeasible and even unrealistic chances, but thanks to irrationality, we have a near-6 million person metropolis that grew out of a being advantageously located on a port that wasn't naturally created.

Nowadays, the en masse Houstonian attitude that I see the most falls into a few select categories: "what will 'work'", "what is 'efficient'", "what is least expensive (upfront)", "what is 'practical'", "what is cost-effective", and "what's already available off the shelf (design, equipment, etc). A very utilitarian and piecemeal mindset IMO. That, to me, translates some into the design of our city's built form in general. I agree, there are some projects that are great examples of design--but overwhelmingly it's a "build it the way that we know has worked before" setting. And if everyone builds similarly, there's no competion to sort of 1-up the other in "edginess". We're seeing it some with every new thing popping up here going for LEED certification.

That being said, I agree that designs make some notable changes--beginning with MainPlace, the Ritz in BLVD Place, the River Oaks District towers, and 2727 Kirby. I'm also wondering how the Dynamo Stadium will turn out.

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I'd like to go a little bit from what memebag said about the owners of the buildings being fine with their designs. We may never know what other designs architects had for a lot of structures, like 3100 Post Oak, or Hilton Americas, or many other buildings. However, the local stakeholders carry so much weight and have the final say that, IMO, a blah result is what "we" (even though "we" don't own the buildings specifically) end up with. This goes back to some of the mini-lamentations that I've shared here about my opinion that Houston has lost the bravado that it was known for in the past. To make a city happen in a poor location took a lot of likely unfeasible and even unrealistic chances, but thanks to irrationality, we have a near-6 million person metropolis that grew out of a being advantageously located on a port that wasn't naturally created.

Nowadays, the en masse Houstonian attitude that I see the most falls into a few select categories: "what will 'work'", "what is 'efficient'", "what is least expensive (upfront)", "what is 'practical'", "what is cost-effective", and "what's already available off the shelf (design, equipment, etc). A very utilitarian and piecemeal mindset IMO. That, to me, translates some into the design of our city's built form in general. I agree, there are some projects that are great examples of design--but overwhelmingly it's a "build it the way that we know has worked before" setting. And if everyone builds similarly, there's no competion to sort of 1-up the other in "edginess". We're seeing it some with every new thing popping up here going for LEED certification.

That being said, I agree that designs make some notable changes--beginning with MainPlace, the Ritz in BLVD Place, the River Oaks District towers, and 2727 Kirby. I'm also wondering how the Dynamo Stadium will turn out.

I think one of the things I was looking for was answered in Governors post. There seems to be a lack of desire for builders to outdo each other here. Almost like everything is about the bottom line.

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I'm not sure what you mean by "so pretty to so many people".

I mean if the financing "couldn't care less about asthetics", then why does anyone bother with making buildings pretty? Aesthetics must play some role in the return on investment or money wouldn't be spent on them.

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I mean if the financing "couldn't care less about asthetics", then why does anyone bother with making buildings pretty? Aesthetics must play some role in the return on investment or money wouldn't be spent on them.

Your probably right that aesthetics play a roll in banks loaning money, but how much? It seems to me that aesthetics would play a minimal role in comparison to making the numbers work/bottom line.

I still think that Governors comment regarding a lack of competition among builders is odd in a city as great as Houston.

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After reading a few threads (Pavillions, etc) about how some view Houston's current trend of architecture, I thought it might be a good idea to start a new topic.

Is our architecture that bad, and is it really built on the cheap when comparing to other cities of similar size? Also, have we taken a dive into the architectural abyss when comparing our current boom to that of the late 70's/early 80's boom?

milk carton housing with no yard, so close together you can't walk between houses, :angry2: sucks!

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I have been doing a project that takes staring closely at all of the major structures in Manhattan, as well as Chicago and Houston and Miami.

Your probably right that aesthetics play a roll in banks loaning money, but how much? It seems to me that aesthetics would play a minimal role in comparison to making the numbers work/bottom line.

I still think that Governors comment regarding a lack of competition among builders is odd in a city as great as Houston.

I believe I can resolve both halves to good effect. We *do* have a wonderful amount of competitive space. But take Gotham for instance. Anything you get into the market there, as a builder, is going to cost much more - say, $200M here versus $5-600 there, just to guesstimate for the kind of thing that HAIF citizens get excited about - and take much longer to permit. The combination of high entry floor and inflexible timetable make for protection from competition. But the kicker is this: in most neighborhoods that would justify that kind of investment in the first place, a $12M budget item for an architectural feature of the building makes for just a couple per cent additional cost and yet has the upside of setting the building apart from other landlords to the tune of a *hefty* premium for much of the life of the building. It was in Houston that Johnson/Burgee reinvigorated this idea for the current generation, when demand was outstripping supply here during the 70s-80s. But in Houston now, unlike New York, a major design complexity could conceivably represent more like 5% of a project budget without the ridiculous lease premiums to capture as a result.

And after all that - here's a secret, but even in the superstar cities, the present era of construction has relatively few significant high-rise highlights.

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post-3116-1216927512_thumb.jpgI would have to agree with Dee-Nuts.

"milk carton housing with no yard, so close together you can't walk between houses, sucks!"

Has the FRONT DOOR gone the way of the Chevy Suburban and the dinosaurs? In Devonshire Place, six of thses structures are being built. Only ONE has a main access that is NOT the garage entrance.

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I was complementing our architecture from the boom days. Houston seemed to have been considered somewhat of an architectural leader back then.

I lived in new York City back then. I remember specifically a lengthy article in the Times about a (then) new building in Houston - the Texaco building\Heritage Plaza. Anyway, the article not only complimented the design of the building but also talked about how Houston was cutting-edge where modern & inventive architecture was concerned.

I don't find the architecture here to be lackluster at all. There are some very interesting and nice looking buildings. There seems to be a trend toward more traditional styles, but that's not necessarily a bad thing. It's just how things are going now.

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  • 2 weeks later...

Houston's new architecture, that is of critical design merit, has scaled back it's presence in the public eye; although I can concur with comments about how the Hobby Center or Beck bldg have fallen flat in terms of both architecture and public opinion.

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  • 2 months later...

Re: Heritage Plaza

It figures the NYT would herald what I consider to be pathetic architecture and one of the biggest missed opportunities in Houston architectural history, given the irreplaceable opportunity for that site. IMO, the Heritage site was/is Houston's front door and a picture-postcard opportunity to further improve the very cool Allen Pkwy/Memorial approach.

I remember when Ken Schnitzer was quoted as saying that the Wortham/Van Lieuw (sp) Heritage project was the single most irresponsible development in his career. I didn't have a dog in the 1980's leasing fight/bloodbath, but I recall his words in a different context as I grit my teeth looking at a nondescript box with an Astroworld-fake looking Mayan pyramid slapped on top.

This trite yawner of a building would rightly fade away most anywhere else, but instead blocks attractive distant views of Pennzoil, BOA and

other signature architecture associated worldwide with Houston. Gee, thanks.

Many of you are too young to remember when this blot arose on our cityscape and therefore will have little or no recollection of the previous view

from AP/Memorial, but IMO Heritage sucks for what is: a box with a plastic-looking pyramid top, and for what it did: obscure a superior downtown

view. I don't care that it was some kind of engineering/arch feat to incorporate Western Union and all that cable. It soiled our skyline.

I still drive visitors up Memorial who wonder if Heritage is a nod to our Middle Eastern petro-masters (the pyramid). At first blush, it's a logical

assumption!

That was the last major chance we had to enhance the western view of downtown (which is the signature view). What a mutt. Lost opportunity.

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Architecture is a lot like film in this regard. Every year there's a ton of crap, and one or two really great pieces. What movies were made in 1968? Space Odyssey. And what else?

The Menil Collection was built in 1987. What else graced the City that year? A few decent buildings. A boatload of crap.

On a somewhat related note, what really bugs me is how architecture schools seem to glom onto the latest building. When I was at Rice, the Beck Building opened at the MFAH. To listen to the professors talk, you'd think it was the best thing since sliced bread. I'm sure it was the same at UH. And in other cities it happens, too. Irritating. But worse, it's limiting for students.

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On a somewhat related note, what really bugs me is how architecture schools seem to glom onto the latest building. When I was at Rice, the Beck Building opened at the MFAH. To listen to the professors talk, you'd think it was the best thing since sliced bread. I'm sure it was the same at UH. And in other cities it happens, too. Irritating. But worse, it's limiting for students.

I agree with that last statement regarding academia latching on to the latest thing. When I went to school, everyone was going gaga over CNC technology and the potential to create pre-fabricated blob-like buildings entirely with digital technology. All hail Greg Lynn and his $20K salad bowls. While digital design is interesting and potentially relevant to architectural practice in the future, I would have rather the faculty focused on more timeless principles of design (i.e. proportion, lighting, and preventing leaks).

I strongly believe that the basic principles of design are not emphasized enough in architecture school, giving rise to many of the egregious design errors present in our built environment.

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I still drive visitors up Memorial who wonder if Heritage is a nod to our Middle Eastern petro-masters (the pyramid). At first blush, it's a logical

assumption!

That was the last major chance we had to enhance the western view of downtown (which is the signature view). What a mutt. Lost opportunity.

But the design is supposed to be Mayan influenced. I hardly see Middle Eastern design elements.

On a somewhat related note, what really bugs me is how architecture schools seem to glom onto the latest building. When I was at Rice, the Beck Building opened at the MFAH. To listen to the professors talk, you'd think it was the best thing since sliced bread.

That very much surprises me. What did they like about it? I always thought it was mediocre at best. One architecture review compared it to a big box store.

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I think a lot of the change in architecture has to do with the change in who's commissioning the architecture.

It used to be that men built buildings and they reflected the personal views or messages of the men behind them.

Now corporations build buildings and they reflect the personal ambition of the corporation -- to make money -- and thus, you get cheap boring cookie-cutter architecture.

Sure, there are exceptions -- but those are most often from companies with strong personalities at the helm (Trump, Hearst, the Pritzker family, etc...) who are still interested literally building a legacy.

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I would say most of the stuff in Houston that was recently built is crap, but then again it isn't really different than other cities with the exception of places like San Francisco, New York, and Boston, since these cities don't cater to big box stores and mcmansions.

On the other hand for a sun belt city, Houston does have alot of cool buildings.

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An architect wrote, in part, reviewing the movie of The Fountainhead:

For decades, it was the standard path for a college freshman to read this and imagine himself "different." Probably still the case in Texas. ...I suppose a case can be made for respecting greatness, and another for striving for genius. But this particular presentation is so bogus it undercuts these ideas at every turn. This movie chooses architecture, possibly the worst example. A writer or any artist would be better. A filmmaker even better because it is an expensive, collaborative endeavor. But architecture is unique among all the clever things in the world. (These days architecture includes inventing conceptual spaces as well.) This movie makes the mistake that architecture is somehow equivalent to sculpture, that what results are objects and not environments, that buildings are monuments and not experiences, that creativity somehow sticks to something once it is set free in the world.

I'm sorry, but although I was a skyscraper enthusiast for a decade, all of the reference points this thread's enthusiasts are citing project by project, pro and con, amount to something that ought not properly to be understood as the architect's job. When one signs on to design an office building, a condo tower or a townhome, the basic form is set to be a filing cabinet - the crafting of environment is already signed away. The only user experience left on the table is the experience of the filing cabinet's sculpture. Once it's reduced to that, not much about it reflects on architecture anyway, merely the /profession/ of architecture. The detractors of bloated Gehry buildings and so forth forget (But so do the critics of uninspired buildings). What's actively uninspired in both places is the daily experience of all the phoned-in environment, whether or not they get an impression out of us.

That settled, or raised, is there anything left that affects our perceptions of Houston relative to other comparison cities?

Well, shaped space has two different forms. In a neighborhood it is given definition by built structure, whether that neighborhood is a village or an urban precinct; outside of that manmade environment, shaped space is marked by the land, by the realm between any architecture. When we think of a big city, we refer ourselves to space that's architecturally defined, with what David Sucher calls the "oatmeal" of background walls and "raisins" of standout symbols. But Houston very seldom is. There is a lot of potential movement across the land here that would never be possible in an Eastern seabored classical city. An architectural gesture is going to find it hard not to be overwhelmed here, because the space is just too fluid to bounce it an echo back. But understood as environments for human wandering and habitation, it's hard to be disappointed by something that lets you in as much as our 'space city' does. It's just that you have to dwell on the space part for the experience, not the city part. Neither the raisins nor the outmeal but the bowl, and the spoon. Which is all the city was mediating anyway.

San Francisco, New York, Boston, and the other touchstone exceptions don't cater to any user, because they're calcified. Modifying your surroundings is a citizenship unthinkable to the whole way of life you're buying into, so you just have to like it or lump it unless you're moving there a millionaire proud of your taste. And since stakes that high make for impressive moments, it's possible to like it. But is it worth it?

There's a song from the EP "Knuckleheads and Icons" called 1653, one that must have been just recorded on a hot back road in Houston somewhere by the band Groceries in 1999 or 2000; I don't know what the name implies, and I haven't asked its writer. Nor is it online as far as I know. But you must get it if you can. There's an indefinite world in back of the performers, in back of the song, and if you're listening you won't forget it, because it creates space where any [other] song is happy merely to fill it with show. Cities like songs do connections, because connection is what we do, and so cities are easy to find exciting. But parts of Houston maintain a world that any designy city just couldn't bear to leave unsubdivided.

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Re: Heritage Plaza

Many of you are too young to remember when this blot arose on our cityscape and therefore will have little or no recollection of the previous view

from AP/Memorial, but IMO Heritage sucks for what is: a box with a plastic-looking pyramid top, and for what it did: obscure a superior downtown

view. I don't care that it was some kind of engineering/arch feat to incorporate Western Union and all that cable. It soiled our skyline.

The engineering/architectural feat belongs to the Johnson/Burgee Republic Bank (BOA), not Heritage Plaza. It doesn't even have that going for it.

I agree with your criticisms of this dreadful building; Heritage Plaza is to Houston's skyline what Heritage USA is to theme parks.

To add to its offensiveness, the construction of Heritage Plaza occured just as there was a downturn in demand for downtown office space, and was probably the deciding factor in killing the brilliant Bank of the Southwest tower. Had the timing been slightly different, our downtown skyline would have been a hell of a lot more attractive.

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  • 5 years later...

Architecture is a lot like film in this regard. Every year there's a ton of crap, and one or two really great pieces. What movies were made in 1968? Space Odyssey. And what else?

The Menil Collection was built in 1987. What else graced the City that year? A few decent buildings. A boatload of crap.

On a somewhat related note, what really bugs me is how architecture schools seem to glom onto the latest building. When I was at Rice, the Beck Building opened at the MFAH. To listen to the professors talk, you'd think it was the best thing since sliced bread. I'm sure it was the same at UH. And in other cities it happens, too. Irritating. But worse, it's limiting for students.

 

 

So is it a new day in Houston, or do the things we like to glom onto prove the rule that most of even mid-boom architecture still stinks?

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i have to agree with the post you quoted.  every once and awhile, we get a gem, something worthwhile; all of the rest is just filler.  such is life.   we can always hope for decent "filler" rather than those lame attempts to be original that end up looking stupid (see memorial hermann's tower at memorial city as a prime example).

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  • 3 weeks later...

The bigger problem in Houston is not that there aren't great architectural ideas, but that we too often settle for the crap once a good idea has been stripped down to a lowest common denominator.  In cities that have stricter code, this isn't allowed to happen, but in Houston, you can basically build whatever you want.  When companies have the option of cutting corners, the result of "whatever you want" is often going to be fugly.  

 

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Some would say that Houston's environment, and the sunbelt's more generally, is defined by the spaces between buildings, where in older cities they were architecturally defined.  I have no disagreement with your comment, only intending to add that in walkable environments people have to look at what you build, while here in high speed driving culture the general public's moving through the space in a way that's receptive to much less detail and, so, constructive of much less accountability.

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