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H-Town Man

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Everything posted by H-Town Man

  1. H-Town Man
    I wonder if 3D printing will eventually make things like the intricate cornice in the earlier rendering more attainable/affordable.
  2. H-Town Man
    Not talking about all of downtown, just the Loop.
  3. H-Town Man
    It will never fill up; Chicago's Loop isn't even full. And they can always tear down old stuff and build taller, just like they're trying to do in Midtown Manhattan right now with the rezoning around Grand Central.
  4. H-Town Man
    Gotta assume the rendering is very preliminary if all this is true. A nice entrance on Market Square is livable; the urban ideal would be a small entrance squeezed among retail, but this is way better than a blank side of a building or a covered driveway.
  5. H-Town Man
    Watching that video, it's incredible just how huge the proportion is of new office development in the Energy Corridor. Makes it seem like the real downtown of Houston is somewhere around I-10 and Kirkwood. If all of that interest were shifted back towards the central city, Houston's downtown would be practically doubling its skyline, like 1980 all over again. Of course, that is not going to happen. But - there is a generational shift in interest towards living in the central city that I think has yet to register significantly in terms of where things are built, because the people leading these companies and making decisions are still by-and-large the baby boomers, who have downtown's old negative reputation still ingrained in their minds (just like, in 1980, the people making decisions still had an earlier, more positive view of downtown ingrained in their minds, even as the new generation saw it as unpleasant and a hassle). I think in coming decades we will a significant shift of interest back towards downtown, that will make today's office mini-boom there seem like small potatoes.
  6. H-Town Man
    I wonder if the problem is that energy companies don't tend to be the creative type of people who would appreciate an older building, while other companies that would aren't attracted to downtown because it's so dominated by the culture of energy companies. The irony is that so many energy companies are trying to show their greenness by commissioning LEED certified buildings, when the real (much less sexy) way to be green is to adapt and reuse what exists.
  7. H-Town Man
    Not to beat a point into the ground, but having public spaces actually helps us defend our other rights. It's no accident that Ukraine's revolution succeeded because there was a large public space in the center of their city. If you've followed political events in Hungary the last few years, you've seen how the government has effectively taken over public spaces around its parliament to prevent major protests as it passes laws that squelch democracy in that country. Public spaces are important, for aesthetic/cultural reasons as well as for rights.
  8. H-Town Man
    Well cool, I'll take that as a green light to criticize. I suppose if the issue of zoning ever comes up, we can have a lively discussion then about property rights.
  9. H-Town Man
    I actually think I am seeing something they haven't thought about, but you can defend them all you want, I think they'd be impressed at your perseverance on their behalf. One wonders if, in your world, a developer ever does anything that isn't totally rational and as good as it could possibly have been. In my world, developers are human and sometimes miss things; some have more vision than others, and some build things that are inconsiderate and detrimental to the area around them. Making a public space successful is not just the "city's job," success of a public space depends on how development around it is oriented. And quit your hangup with people being "obligated," no one is obligating anyone to do anything, just voicing criticism. Sorry to belittle your opinions but you jumped headlong into this thing this morning with your mini-essay. I still can't see why my criticism of a minor aspect of this building bothers you so much. We've had this conversation before, and I thought we had made peace and agreed to disagree.
  10. H-Town Man
    Good work.
  11. H-Town Man
    They're vaguely related, but as you said, Houston has the higher per capita income. So if we want to talk about planning, fine. But if we're talking about demographics, my question stands... what "demographic" do these Dallas neighborhoods have that Houston doesn't?
  12. H-Town Man
    Not to be rude, but total numbers mean diddly squat. Averages are what's important. Austin probably has much smaller total retailer payroll than the Houston Metro, but can hold its own when it comes to neighborhoods with attractive "demographics."
  13. H-Town Man
    That's why I wrote it in the past tense. "If we stopped"...i.e., if that was our reason for stopping it when we did. That's not "demographic," that's planning. Cocorobert was talking about the demographics of Dallas suburbs.
  14. H-Town Man
    This would have been a great post in 1970. The fact is Houston is building up around downtown, and younger people are choosing density and well-planned spaces, in Houston, Dallas, LA, Denver, Atlanta, etc. Market Square already has way more use and interest now than it did ten years ago; my only point is that minimal planning would keep this side of it viable for future use as that interest continues to swell. No one agrees with my vision enough to fund it? That's funny, Hines is funding just such a vision a block away. I just can't get over the fact that you get so riled up when someone on an architecture forum thinks that a building should better address a public square. As I've stated before, if you never want to criticize anything any developer does and get upset when other people do, start the Houston Developer Cheerleading Forum. An architecture forum is going to voice criticisms.
  15. H-Town Man
    Sure. But the fact that two developers came to two different conclusions just a block away from each other shows that "the market" does not dictate either way; it's more subject to the opinion and interest of the developer. I can't control what each developer does, but I can applaud a developer who is willing to take a risk that improves the city. And this may come as a shock to post-80's America, but there are developers in this world and even in this country who care quite a lot about the public environment, and are willing to take risks to better it. It's called "civic spirit." Besides, retail on Market Square frankly isn't that much of a risk, not with 700 residential units coming online and maybe an office building in the pipeline. You think a coffee shop on Milam @ Preston isn't going to be successful, with 40 stories of residential above it and a busy park across the street? Come on.
  16. H-Town Man
    Well stated. All this relativism about "everyone likes different things" is nonsense; people all over the world prefer lively squares that are lined with restaurants and shops and full of people to squares that are on life-support because of careless, indifferent development. Whether or not we end up getting a great, lively square in Houston depends largely on whether we have people with the vision to develop it.
  17. H-Town Man
    It would not be "much harder" for them to find tenants if they didn't put a driveway on the side fronting the square. This is developer brown-nosing at its worst. You're assuming so much thought went into this, it was laid out so carefully, and that the consequences of changing it any little bit would be dire. I think not much thought at all went into which side of the building that driveway was on, and the developer couldn't care less about the square, even though it wouldn't cost hardly anything to change it. You assume that anything a developer does is what "the market actually thinks" is best. Funny how the market thinks it's best to have ground floor retail on the corner of Market Square where Hines is building, and the market doesn't think it's best to have it here. I think it's just a matter of one developer giving a damn about improving the pedestrian experience around this area and the other developer not giving a damn, but for you, every developer has this crystal ball that he gazes into to tell him exactly what the market thinks is necessary, and the consequences are dire if he doesn't follow it. Finger's retail space will most likely attract tenants as more buildings come on line in that area, and in the meantime, I doubt he's hurting too much by having an empty space in his building. But how retail is faring on Discovery Green is less relevant than how it's currently faring on Market Square, and most of that space seems to be occupied.
  18. H-Town Man
    Usually the term "ignore" in planning discussions means it doesn't make any attempt to add to or enhance the public space. Hines Market Square enhances the public space by putting lively retail on its corner. In the case of this building, having a pool where residents can look down and enjoy the square that their building otherwise deadens does not enhance the space. It ignores it.
  19. H-Town Man
    Do you really think this is a danger in Houston - pretending that we don't need cars? Do you consider it a threat to the reign of the car in Houston if Market Square is developed as a real public square, oriented towards people rather than cars?
  20. H-Town Man
    You don't think a 40 story building ignores anything around it simply by virtue of its being 40 stories? I don't get it. I don't know about visual cohesion, I tend to like visual diversity. But what I'm interested in more than how anything looks is having activity on as much of the square's frontage as possible. It's a general rule of thumb that the more activity you put around a square, the more successful the square will be, and the simplest way to do that is retail. So you are saying that maybe the auto entrance in the rendering doesn't go to the garage? That would seem strange, but I guess I hope you're right.
  21. H-Town Man
    Good grief man, I wasn't talking about you. It was a poster who was on here years ago called TheNiche. I'm not asking for "aesthetic perfection." I'm asking that the building be placed against the square rather than against Louisiana, and that it have something more than a covered driveway on that side, preferably retail. Yes, it will absolutely help the square to have this - I do not follow your logic that because the garage looks ugly, the other half of the block should also ignore the square.. And it should not make much of a difference in terms of its chances of getting built. Can the developer defenders admit that it really wouldn't be a hassle to shift the building against the square, and only a slight hassle to put retail at the bottom on that side?
  22. H-Town Man
    The message I'm getting though is that a lot of people would prefer the minimalism of most Manhattan buildings to an art-deco cream-sicle like this.
  23. H-Town Man
    If we stopped having Go Texan Day as a school holiday so we could satisfy a bunch of whiny transplanted Yankees, I'm going to be very upset.
  24. H-Town Man
    By "demographic," do you mean white skin? That's the only way I can make sense out of your second and third paragraphs. Not accusing you, just wondering what other demographic there is that makes Frisco, Allen, Grapevine, etc. more attractive than Houston's burbs. You make it sound like it's the in thing among Texas corporations to put their workforces in Houston while the execs hang out in Dallas and enjoy its incomparable demographics. Odd then that Houston has more Fortune 500's than Dallas does. I wonder why Halliburton took the demographic plunge, as it were, and moved from Dallas to Houston?
  25. H-Town Man
    I'm probably less worked up about it than you think, but you're just the latest in a long parade of people on here who have tried to stifle conversation with this "What're ya gonna do about it?" line. The worst of them answered every opinion with a professorial lecture on neo-liberal market economics, and you aren't nearly as bad as that. But I do think that a vigorous and healthy climate of architectural discussion and opinion ultimately does affect what developers do, otherwise they wouldn't keep doing things here that would never fly in cities that care more about the interaction between public spaces (like Market Square) and the built environment. The way this building is site planned, you'd think Market Square was on the Louisiana Street side rather than the Milam side. No developer in his right mind would try disrespecting an important square like that in Boston or New York or even Philadelphia; the public outcry would make his life miserable. And for good reason. Quality spaces are important to the public, and the public needs to guard them carefully.
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