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1111 Rusk: Texaco Building Renovations


Ron4tx

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Swamplot speculating about the tower foundation...

http://www.houstonarchitecture.com/haif/topic/28162-1111-rusk-texaco-building-renovation/?page=32#comment-529571

Someone that knows better than I might be able to look back through the photos and hazard a guess, but didn't see the kinds of pilings being drilled or extensive foundation work that the other recent towers got for their foundations here. Could be apples and oranges, but Hillcorp's tower had much more rebar and Hines' Aris seemed to have a lot more pilings.

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6 hours ago, Tumbleweed_Tx said:

that's what soil samples are for... LOL

I guess that came across as me making a conclusion, I'm certainly not qualified to do so. The big foam blocks and other work they are doing for this one look superficially unique compared to the others I've seen recently downtown. They still have a partial "tub" from the old hole/building intact on the Fannin and Capitol sides too. It will be interesting to see how they tie it all together.

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  • 2 weeks later...
On ‎4‎/‎18‎/‎2016 at 8:09 PM, HoustonBoy said:

What is being built on that lot?

 

 

At a minimum, it is going to be the garage and amenity space for the new apartments in the Texaco building. There were plans to put a 40 story residential tower on top of said garage, but those seem to be at least temporarily shelved.

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More progress on the back side.  Slow but steady.  They finally put a nice green metal roof on the mechanical penthouse last week too, and are finally putting the white TPO roof on the older building (about half done at present).

 

4PXNMcV.jpg

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I'm not a structural engineer, but those columns don't look big enough to shoulder a high rise on top of the garage they're building. 

This looks like a  garage designed structure for cars and live load of moving vehicles but not strong enough to hold an additional high rise

on top of it. 

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4 minutes ago, Subdude said:

Is it possible to tell if the abandoned tunnel section from this block under Capital Street will be reopened and reconnected to the building?  

 

I haven't looked at it from the Fannin side to see if they covered over that door with the tub wall in a while, but I'll try next time I walk by.  It would be cool if that tunnel remained open and reached over in to the Magnolia and then to 609 to tie in to the tunnels.

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I'm trying to figure out what the next step is here. The surface in the new hole looks like gunite, and it was sprayed all over the base of the shoring I-beams that are tied in to the temporary retaining walls. I guess eventually that it will have a concrete foundation like the other side, but they poured that right on to the dirt. 

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The proposed tower would go over the area with steel on it already, so this side only needs to support a relatively lightweight parking garage.  I assume the white we see here is just the layer to cover the dirt that goes down before putting down the rebar for the slab, but it won't need to be anywhere near as beefy as the concrete poured on the other side.

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14 hours ago, rechlin said:

The proposed tower would go over the area with steel on it already, so this side only needs to support a relatively lightweight parking garage.  I assume the white we see here is just the layer to cover the dirt that goes down before putting down the rebar for the slab, but it won't need to be anywhere near as beefy as the concrete poured on the other side.

 

The coating is definitely just a base/stabilization layer of some sort. They prepped and leveled the dirt one day and then  few days later it was all covered over.

 

I know next to nothing about structural engineering, so it's interesting to see how they all come together to enable the end product. This building cycle downtown has been fun to watch from that perspective with many differing approaches. .

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  • The title was changed to 1111 Rusk: Texaco Building Renovations

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