Rice BioScience Research Collaborative At 6500 South Main St.

[KinkaidAlum]

The highly visible plot of land on Rice's campus on the corner of Main St and University Blvd. will house The Collaborative Research Center. Designed to be LEED certified by Skidmore, Owings, and Merrill, the tower will contain 477,000 square feet for class/lab space for bioscience and biotech research. Rice will operate the center in conjunction with Baylor, MD Anderson, UT Health Science, Texas Children's and a host of other TMC institutions. The building will have 3 levels of underground parking and 10,000 square feet of retail/restaurant space that faces Main St. Plans call for the design to allow for the addition of another tower on top of this one and another on adjacent land...

[WesternGulf]

Nice project and the plot of land seems to good to be true for it to be going on. Thumbs up.

Edited December 21, 2006 by WesternGulf

[texas911]

Blah.

[sevfiv]

thank goodness it's a LEED building

here's the hbj article from a couple years ago:

http://www.bizjournals.com/houston/stories.../08/story1.html

and the crc information page:

http://collaborativeresearchcenter.org/index.html

[TheNiche]

Another building turns its back to Main Street.

You know, I've been counting the number of non-residential projects under development in the TMC area, and with this one, it is now about enough to fill three of these:

Most of the development is institutional, too, so it isn't likely to get cancelled as a result of market volatility.

Edited December 21, 2006 by TheNiche

[WesternGulf]

^^Another person mentioned that on another forum. Main through the TMC should be called "the alley".

[Houston19514]

^^Another person mentioned that on another forum. Main through the TMC should be called "the alley".

From the initial post:

"retail/restaurant space that faces Main St."

[TheNiche]

From the initial post:

"retail/restaurant space that faces Main St."

Perhaps, but the architecturally-compelling parts of the building face University.

[KinkaidAlum]

That's just for the time being. Every release states that there are already plans to develop the open space that faces the university. Also, it looks as if there might be outdoor/patio dining in the rendering that shows the Main St. view.

[TheNiche]

Also, it looks as if there might be outdoor/patio dining in the rendering that shows the Main St. view.

So I gathered. Still, not very compelling on Main Street.

[UrbaNerd]

Neat stuff. More power to the Med Center.

On a related note, has there been any word on the Lyme property on Holcombe? That one is also supposed to be some sort of biomed building...

[TheNiche]

Neat stuff. More power to the Med Center.

On a related note, has there been any word on the Lyme property on Holcombe? That one is also supposed to be some sort of biomed building...

I've been wondering that myself. I spoke with the Houston rep back in late 2004 after HBJ broke the story, and at that time, he was getting swamped with inquiries. He'd said something about trying to build a fitness center into the project...but it seems that Metrontario beat him to the punch on that, so...

I'd say that the odds are pretty slim that it'll get built. Medical office is a tough sell when there isn't a hospital affiliation...and even moreso when one building is already under construction and another offering the same product in the form of condominiums has a head start in presales.

[sevfiv]

here is today's hbj article:

http://www.bizjournals.com/houston/stories...63&hbx=e_du

Approved unanimously by the Rice Board of Trustees Dec. 14, CRC plans call for eight floors of research laboratories in a tower atop a base platform that will include a vivarium, a 280-seat auditorium, a 100-seat seminar room, classrooms, 10,000 square feet of retail space for a restaurant and shops, and other common space, as well as three levels of underground parking.

The baseline plan also includes two stories of shell space to allow for expansion as the project grows, along with the potential to add a second research tower atop the base platform that could add up to another 150,000 gross square feet.

[SamHouston]

When I first heard of this from Rice administrators, they mentioned that they had Norman Foster on board for the design. Not that this isn't great, but it sure is not any HSBC building (Hong Kong) or 30 St Mary Axe.

[Montrose1100]

The Medical Center is on fire!

This project looks great, I'm glad we're scooping up some decent architecture.

[largeTEXAS]

Don't know if anyone has already posted this. SOM designed it so you know it'll be pretty rad! Looks slightly influenced by some of the new Spanish architects.

http://www.collaborativeresearchcenter.org/

[Talbot]

The front veiw isn't so impressive, but the right veiw of the building is a lot better.

[mls1202]

What happens to the doctor with the inflated ego who gets assigned to the office with the skinny window? We had a manager in our company who complained that the grass outside of his window was dead and brown while the office down the way had nice green grass.

[The Great Hizzy!]

Has a brutalist versus Post Modern look to it. I suppose it's in the area of 11 or 12 stories, right?

[Talbot]

What happens to the doctor with the inflated ego who gets assigned to the office with the skinny window? We had a manager in our company who complained that the grass outside of his window was dead and brown while the office down the way had nice green grass.

I just noticed the skinny windows after you posted that. I hope it is just a flaw on the rendering, if not then... .

Edited February 12, 2007 by Talbot

[musicman]

just hope they get the parking right. i saw they closed off southgate (into the neighborhood south of Rice). the residents have been complaining for yrs that the parking flowed into their neighborhood. i'm sure this new facility won't help the situation.

[WesternGulf]

That area is all out of whack now bordering the construction site. The street is the sidewalk now. You might catch me struggling to walk on the sidewalks in that area since I am always at my brother's place. As far as traffic, too many alternatives to get to this place. Hopefully that reflects with the construction and parking is not a HUGE priority. By the way topics can probably be merged with original.

[Jax]

Rice has put a webcam online with a nice view of the site (from the top of the HIlton maybe?)

Anyways, it's a great view definitely worth checking out. I guess progress is a bit slow, but it should be great when it's done!

http://dyer.rice.edu/crc/images/webcam.html

[KinkaidAlum]

Cool find.

This complex will have at least 2 levels of underground parking from what I remember seeing. Also, it is being built to easily facilitate expansion at a later date by adding a second tower. According to S.O.M.' website, it will be 10 floors above ground and rise to 202 feet tall. Those are HUGE floor plates!

[Jax]

It should be pretty impressive. Definitely the biggest building on the Rice campus!

[strickn]

I just noticed the skinny windows after you posted that. I hope it is just a flaw on the rendering, if not then... .

In fact, it is not only not a flaw in the rendering, it is considered quite a dignified artistic choice for a modern architect to make. If a boring box has confusing windows, it is NOT to be confused with a shoebox. On one hand, shoebox towers are so discredited in the '00s that architects are falling all over themselves to be the authors of blobs and twisted prisms, yet when the building linked below opened in 2003 and was met with horror in citizen opinion, some architects went on to call the people conservative and phobic for disliking it:

http://flickr.com/photo_zoom.gne?id=79175784&size=o

Architecture is disciplinarily obsessed with forward progress. Perhaps this is the form that the urge to be a great author most readily takes when applied to built environments; maybe it is primarily the thing which they consider integrity, based on the idea that past solutions are not suited to our world today; or maybe playing with exciting new structural and technological possibilities is the most inexhaustible trick up architects' sleeve in a generation where architects are getting unprecedented public attention and acclaimed commissions which lend them freer rein or discretion than was common in the long years of post-Urban Renewal backlash, but don't actually have very much to offer up as a justification for why their particular ideas are helping the world in a compelling or conscientious way. Regarding the last, I have been expecting the discipline to seize on environmental 'sustainability' as that [enabling] rationale when technological glory whiz-bang gets unconvincing amid a rising tide of problems; regarding the first, there are always more than enough people lining up to be authors of objects, and what we need more of is people thinking regionally, and thoughtfully training and acting accordingly. The second, based on the premise that a heady but alienating new age needs an architecture that cannot draw very directly from the human thought-& life-style in past ages, is less immediately important than the other two.

(Yet only *immediately.*) It does bear some good discussion. The Renaissance was very much a child of Medieval work, and the Enlightenment likewise of the Renaissance. The Industrial Revolution gave rise to a revaluation of rationality, and Romanticism, Realism et al. were in turn eschewed by Modernism's abstracted ordering. Modernism had some faith in Enlightenment ideals, and you can see, as you look at the detailed organizational strictures of Modernist structures, that the original postmodern text, "The Dialectic of Enlightenment", was right as it claimed, "enlightenment is totalitarian." It sought to impose its worldview on everything it could touch, right down to gridding inhabitants' worlds in machines for living. Deconstruction was to break down the hierarchy and pretense to authority that totalizing worldviews are built upon. It would reassert "the 'fragmentation' of narratives and the individual's ability to be 'the artist of his own life'", as an article last year on common strands linking postmodernism and modern commerce put it. The individual standing out against the grid. In the hands of Robert Venturi, Michael Graves, and the former Modernist Philip Johnson, among others, Postmodernism hit architecture with a wave of reference and diversity. Architects today largely distance themselves from these aesthetic solutions as being tacky and undignified. If they were considered self-indulgent, well, self-indulgence hasn't stopped. Another wave of Postmodernism had the likes of Peter Eisenman and Bernard Tschumi have taken architecture's role after modernism to be that of recognizing and portraying the disorientation of life with all of previous human existence's higher narratives undermined. The Wikipedia page on Tschumi says, "Responding to the absence of ethical structure and the disjunction between use, form, and social values by which he characterizes the postmodern condition, Tschumi's design research encourages a wide range of narratives and ambiences to emerge and to self organize. Although his conclusion is that no essentially meaningful relationship exists between a space and the events which occur within it, Tschumi nonetheless aligns his work with Foucault's notion that social structures should be evaluated not according to an apriori notion of good or evil but for their danger to each other." This disturbance and alienation of certitude and self is present in the Wexner Center at Ohio State - considered by its architect Eisenman to be a very didactic work, and you'll have to see for yourself what he means: http://www.desi.../eisenman/1.jpg

In this building at Rice, deliberately acknowledging but then thumbing its nose at a standard grid as it does... I think it's fair to suggest that, precisely along the lines of mls' comment regarding workplace window disputes, it may be that the staggering slots have been substituted for uninterestingly legible treatment of the facade as a way of asserting the individual against the modernist high-rise heritage of non-unique cubbyholes, within the ideological history described above. [Whatever is up in Spain,] SOM just doesn't succeed in making the inhabitants' cellular role less architecturally anonymous or any more meaningful by doing so here.

...In forward progress, I can't say this design has anything real to offer Houston. Not beyond an imitation of the newest status quo. As we look at those windows on the rendering, the final word on the off-balance attitude expressed in the design aesthetic and in Postmodernist theory (not just of the built environment) goes to Ravi Zacharias, a Christian speaker who, when walking around the Wexner Center, asked with a smile, "I wonder if they used the same techniques when they laid the foundation?"

Edited June 3, 2007 by strickn

[bachanon]

In fact, it is not only not a flaw in the rendering, it is considered quite a dignified artistic choice for a modern architect to make. If a boring box has confusing windows, it is NOT to be confused with a shoebox. On one hand, shoebox towers are so discredited in the '00s that architects are falling all over themselves to be the authors of blobs and twisted prisms, yet when the building linked below opened in 2003 and was met with horror in citizen opinion, some architects went on to call the people conservative and phobic for disliking it:

http://flickr.com/photo_zoom.gne?id=79175784&size=o

Architecture is disciplinarily obsessed with forward progress. Perhaps this is the form that the urge to be a great author most readily takes when applied to built environments; maybe it is primarily the thing which they consider integrity, based on the idea that past solutions are not suited to our world today; or maybe playing with exciting new structural and technological possibilities is the most inexhaustible trick up architects' sleeve in a generation where architects are getting unprecedented public attention and acclaimed commissions which lend them freer rein or discretion than was common in the long years of post-Urban Renewal backlash, but don't actually have very much to offer up as a justification for why their particular ideas are helping the world in a compelling or conscientious way. Regarding the last, I have been expecting the discipline to seize on environmental 'sustainability' as that [enabling] rationale when technological glory whiz-bang gets unconvincing amid a rising tide of problems; regarding the first, there are always more than enough people lining up to be authors of objects, and what we need more of is people thinking regionally, and thoughtfully training and acting accordingly. The second, based on the premise that a heady but alienating new age needs an architecture that cannot draw very directly from the human thought-& life-style in past ages, is less immediately important than the other two.

(Yet only *immediately.*) It does bear some good discussion. The Renaissance was very much a child of Medieval work, and the Enlightenment likewise of the Renaissance. The Industrial Revolution gave rise to a revaluation of rationality, and Romanticism, Realism et al. were in turn eschewed by Modernism's abstracted ordering. Modernism had some faith in Enlightenment ideals, and you can see, as you look at the detailed organizational strictures of Modernist structures, that the original postmodern text, "The Dialectic of Enlightenment", was right as it claimed, "enlightenment is totalitarian." It sought to impose its worldview on everything it could touch, right down to gridding inhabitants' worlds in machines for living. Deconstruction was to break down the hierarchy and pretense to authority that totalizing worldviews are built upon. It would reassert "the 'fragmentation' of narratives and the individual's ability to be 'the artist of his own life'", as an article last year on common strands linking postmodernism and modern commerce put it. The individual standing out against the grid. In the hands of Robert Venturi, Michael Graves, and the former Modernist Philip Johnson, among others, Postmodernism hit architecture with a wave of reference and diversity. Architects today largely distance themselves from these aesthetic solutions as being tacky and undignified. If they were considered self-indulgent, well, self-indulgence hasn't stopped. Another wave of Postmodernism had the likes of Peter Eisenman and Bernard Tschumi have taken architecture's role after modernism to be that of recognizing and portraying the disorientation of life with all of previous human existence's higher narratives undermined. The Wikipedia page on Tschumi says, "Responding to the absence of ethical structure and the disjunction between use, form, and social values by which he characterizes the postmodern condition, Tschumi's design research encourages a wide range of narratives and ambiences to emerge and to self organize. Although his conclusion is that no essentially meaningful relationship exists between a space and the events which occur within it, Tschumi nonetheless aligns his work with Foucault's notion that social structures should be evaluated not according to an apriori notion of good or evil but for their danger to each other." This disturbance and alienation of certitude and self is present in the Wexner Center at Ohio State - considered by its architect Eisenman to be a very didactic work, and you'll have to see for yourself what he means: http://www.desi.../eisenman/1.jpg

In this building at Rice, deliberately acknowledging but then thumbing its nose at a standard grid as it does... I think it's fair to suggest that, precisely along the lines of mls' comment regarding workplace window disputes, it may be that the staggering slots have been substituted for uninterestingly legible treatment of the facade as a way of asserting the individual against the modernist high-rise heritage of non-unique cubbyholes, within the ideological history described above. [Whatever is up in Spain,] SOM just doesn't succeed in making the inhabitants' cellular role less architecturally anonymous or any more meaningful by doing so here.

...In forward progress, I can't say this design has anything real to offer Houston. Not beyond an imitation of the newest status quo. As we look at those windows on the rendering, the final word on the off-balance attitude expressed in the design aesthetic and in Postmodernist theory (not just of the built environment) goes to Ravi Zacharias, a Christian speaker who, when walking around the Wexner Center, asked with a smile, "I wonder if they used the same techniques when they laid the foundation?"

food for thought......perhaps overthought. i like you already, strickn. critique some other buildings for us.

k

Edited June 3, 2007 by bachanon

[strickn]

I guess overthought is natural concerning a line of work where the budding practitioner is torn between

the monumental responsibility that they actually are determining, to a significant extent, the quality and naturalness of the possibilities in generations' day to day lives

and

the fact that they underbid each other to get work, and are utterly subject to the whims of the client and unpredictably prone to be hideously disempowered.

Edited June 4, 2007 by strickn

[editor]

Added this building to the great big list of new projects in Houston.

Does anyone know if construction has begun? That webcam link is 404.

[Jax]

Weird, the link works for me. Try the jpeg version instead of the javascript if it's broken for you. http://dyer.rice.edu/crc/images/crc-webcam.jpg