woolie

ayelite, another 20 story in my neighborhoods.

I've mad a vow to never visit LV.

This was never a development anyway. It's always been purely a land-hold. Their plan was to resell it down the road to a "bricks and mortar" developer. The renderings are 100% marketing fluff.

I personally think 'green' would be several blocks of 5-10 stories, mixed use, spreading out the density more to help create the 'critical mass' of residents and area that serves as the anchor of a new urban district.

looks like it was added in photoshop to show more sky detail; I do it all the time. The main reason I shoot raw is that I can expose for the foreground and still retain some sky detail I can bring out in post-processing, even if in the camera-jpeg's its lost.

Tower 26, an at-grade railroad crossing: Englewood Hump Yard: Settegast Yard: Englewood Intermodal: Sorry they look a bit "overprocessed." It was an overcast, gray day. They were a bit bland so I punched them up a bit. I'll post more later after they're edited.

some of us don't have any of these, and are happy that way.

Midtown Fiesta is my favorite grocers. And Montrose Krogers. OTOH, I've been thinking about starting to enforce a "buy local" policy. I may start buying produce at the farmer's market (I hear one exists, sometimes..) and clothes at stores like American Apparel, which opened on Westheimer. Larger, "durable goods," I try to buy vintage or from ebay. Almost all my furniture is vintage modern. I just keep thinking about the huge amounts of crap that people acquire. What does it bring us? Happiness, not really....

Yeah, sounds about the same as COVAD/Speakeasy. Although, I'm curious, as ICMP is a layer below port abstractions and doesn't use them Personally, my dream is about a hundred blocks of 6 story mixed use downtown/midtown. I'd take it over a dozen 600 footers. One can dream, no?

COVAD?

PV is extremely expensive and has a low capacity factor (it only produces electricity part of the time, and peak electricity an even smaller amount.) You'd be looking at a min. of 5x grid costs, and you'd still need to purchase from the grid for the majority of electricity use A wind turbine could provide enough electricity for a building, but you still have to deal with low capacity factor (about 30%), so most of the electricity would still be from the grid. If you wanted to just offset the electricity use of the building in renewable generation without providing actual direct power to the building, it'd be simpler just to place it outside the city where the wind is strong and have it just contribute to the grid. I'm not sure there's any potential geothermal energy in the area, not enough to generate electricity anyway. You could use passive geothermal as a heat sink to help reduce HVAC costs. In the same way you could use solar water heating to reduce gas costs. Not to sound like I'm not for green building; I am, but I think expectations need to be realistic. I want contained systems. I want conservation. I want to phase out natgas and coal power and replace it with wind and nuclear. I think the best opportunities for green building in Houston are mostly in regard to site specific design and insulation techniques that reduce the need for A/C, which is one of the main components of power use that could be reduced in a reasonably simple way. What someone referred to above is a gray water system. A second wastewater system is built to separate out reusable water (bathtubs, sinks, washing machine, etc.) from toilet water. The water is minimally treated or allowed to settle. Then it's used for yard purposes or whatever. But personally I think even having grounds that need watering in the first place is completely contradictory to any environmentally based design. It's like people who live in 3000sf houses in Kingwood on quarter acre lots who think they're environmentally responsible because they drive a hybrid SUV to their job. Completely miss the point. Anyway... I'll stop my thread derailment.

doo it eeeeeeeeee-bay!!

Natural gas is expensive electricity. Combined-cycle would be too large/complex for a single building, so it'd probably be just regular turbine, at half the efficiency (twice the fuel costs.) Your residents would strangle you after the first electricity bill. It would probably be several times the cost of grid electricity. If on the other hand, you mean switching over from grid to on-demand generation via diesel generator, this is a standard system hospitals, data centers, etc. use. In this case, your residents would strangle you when they realized the premium it added to their condos w.r.t. to the small benefit. Even then, it wouldn't be fast enough to switch over before all the computers in the building shut down. You'd have to add a very expensive Uninterruptible Power Supply system for that. And if you want to offer datacenter grade electricity, start adding in various line conditioners, triple redundant generators, etc..... I think there's a reason this doesn't exist in residential buildings It'd be cheaper just to give a small UPS system to each tenant for their computers. My building has backup generators, but only because extended loss of electricity would be catastrophic. People could lose their entire life's work.

I live in in the southern part of midtown, near the Fiesta. I love it. Wouldn't want to move anywhere else.

ho ho ho.

"eh." what are the bush twins up to nowadays?

Chalk it up to the cost of living in an auto dependent society...

central market

$3000 for the camera and $300/mo for webhosting... ouch

CANDU reactors are a very interesting design and have a number of very interesting properties, mostly fuel-cycle related: - They run on unenriched, 'natural' uranium - The neutron energy profile allows "burning" of fission products from light-water reactors (solving the waste issue by burning it as fuel... very neat.) - Online refueling - Can run as breeding reactors; e.g. Thorium They should be used as PART of a fleet of traditional light-water reactors, to consume the most difficult of the fission products, and as breeder reactors. A few thrown into the mix can provide real advantages in terms of fuel cycle. I think their fuel cycle advantages will make them more important in the future, if uranium supplies ever become tight or we get serious about reprocessing or burning actinide waste, but currently they're not as cost-effective or experienced designs as typical modern light-water reactors. They are sometimes considered a proliferation risk due to the unenriched fuel and tritium breeding (because of the use of deuterium as the moderator.)

Not exactly a point of architectural interest in Houston, per se, but definitely a wonder of engineering. NRG Energy has proposed to build two Advanced Boiling Water Reactors, based on designs from GE/Westinghouse, at the STP site in Matagorda Co. If approved and issued the Combined Operating License, construction will begin in 2010 and finish in 2014 or so, at a cost of approximately $5 billion. A number of distinguishing facts about this build: - First application for new reactors in over 20 years - First to apply under the new "Combined Operating License" process, which simplifies the EIS/Safety review process - First ABWR design in the United States; six are currently in existence in Japan and Taiwan, two of which have been operating for a decade - First reactor to use an "off the shelf," pre-approved design that will be partially prefabricated and then installed on site - ABWR is a simplified, 2-loop system that reduces the complexity of the plant, decreases the number of pipes and welds required, and lowers cost and construction time Additionally, a number of factors make the STP site ideal for expansion: - Facility originally designed for 4 units - Cooling infrastructure in place - Switching yard built to handle load - Local community and elected officials supports expansion NRG has filed a letter of intent for units 3 + 4, and will submit the complete COL license application later this calendar year. On Wednesday, in Bay City, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) held a public hearing to discuss the new COL license process and to take input from the public over the new plant. Except for a few representatives from anti-Nuclear environmental organizations who drove down from Austin, most of the 180+ people assembled at the meeting appeared to be in strong support of the new plant. Here's to 2500 megawatts of clean energy for Texas, and the high technology and valuable skills it brings with it! I will update this thread over the multi-year coarse of the project's construction. -- mods: you can move it to a different forum if you feel absolutely necessary, but I think this will be one of the most important construction projects in our region in the coming years.

Occasionally I agree with Niche. When the toll roads were approved and built, (hopefully) no one was naive enough to think the toll would be the same forever. It was built with the understanding that it was a finite resource and the purpose of the toll was to fairly allocate the resource to those who felt it was important enough to pay for. In the situation where the roadway is beyond capacity even with the toll, the built-in mechanism (and only logical solution) is to increase the toll to reduce congestion. Anyone who constructed their life in any way around access to the tollway at a current price level and congestion is in fact guilty of NIMBYism. It's well demonstrated that NIMBYism is a selfish and indefensible position. It's the assertion that the maintenance of one's own status quo supersedes the property rights of all others. This is the intellectual dishonesty and hypocrisy of NIMBYism: at one moment to claim you are only defending your property rights, while in fact your claim is based on restricting the property rights of others. Beyond that, personally I've always felt the suburban lifestyle with a 30 mile commute is unsustainable because of land use, gasoline use, carbon dioxide and other emissions, etc. I think it's wasteful. So I have little sympathy for long-distance commuters to begin with. JH Kunstler provides a rhetorically entertaining view of this position.

I love those, and admire them all the time (like 3 blocks from my house.) I'd buy one if it were anywhere near something we could afford.

We should play word bingo in Dallas threads. Here's a partial list of words and phrases to get started: Houston (free spot) upscale exclusive "never gonna happen" "it WILL get built!" $1M+ editor "deleted inappropriate comments"

The real issue isn't speeding. We depend on the rule of law, and speeding is not only against the law, it's dangerous. Speeding is a violation of the social contract you agree when you use the public highways. It is correct to punish people for speeding. It makes me angry when people aren't punished for speeding. If you disagree with the traffic laws, change the traffic laws, don't say "it's not fair for the law to be enforced." Lax enforcement of laws, at officer's discretion, leads to a terrible situation that only encourages discrimination against people without power or means to 'wriggle out,' blackmail, intimidation, etc. So we should all hope for fair enforcement of laws that exist, because we can monitor what laws exist, and aim to repeal laws that are unjust. Differential enforcement of laws is the same thing as a secret law, the defining trait of a police state people here are crying about. (add: of course I believe in due process and a fair trial, but what I'm concerned about is the kind of differential enforcement we see where it's ok for certain classes of people (paris hilton, celebrities, company executives, children of politically powerful people) get away with breaking all kinds of laws that would be certain jail time for less advantaged people. Also I think plenty of laws are unjust and should be destroyed. but the process should be transparent and through political channels; it shouldn't matter if you're dealing with a 'good cop' or a 'bad cop') The real problem is privacy. Some would argue it's not right for the government to keep records of where every car is every second. It infringes, or creates an environment where infringement is inevitable, against freedom to assemble, invasion of privacy, etc. Instead of assuming no one is looking, we have to trust the government not to tell anyone what they saw.