strickn

The JLL rendering includes a seven story building with ground floor drive-thru loading, so not necessarily. The 1.38 acre site may be subdivided and only .69 acres are being marketed for multifamily

There's less artistry in section than in plan view on most of these, so I would call them alphabet pancakes: yet the word pancake in a built environment context is rightly linked to structural collapses. Quesadillas don't have the same custom connotations that alphabet pancakes do... so maybe alphabet griddlecakes? Denver and Toronto (both their urban and suburban submarkets), Seattle and Northern Virginia shared with Houston and several other Sunbelt city regions east and west the characteristic of having parallel growth within many separate business sectors at the same time. This meant that office space on highly visible, relatively spacious sites could be financed, built, and perhaps re-sold without ever determining and designing for an intended industry of occupant, let alone an intended tenant within that industry, during the bubble period around 1980. Texas was China before China was China. Trying to make a property be more uniquely individual and less of a commodity -- but without spending extra for engineered inefficiencies -- made clients willing to have architects put more corner offices in the floorplans just as long as awkward wasted spaces didn't result in cross-section. They still did make Houston skylines memorable up to a point. As I understand it, Pennzoil Place's design was probably more wasteful and therefore less directly influential in this regard, within the profession, than Johnson/Burgee's three oblique Post Oak Central towers, each of which sampled the corner detail of the Cory and Cory* architecture firm's 1929 Starrett-Lehigh Building. Starrett-Lehigh was the member of a pre-Depression wave of intermodal warehouses with built-in showrooms and multitenant workshop floors** which Philip Johnson had, possibly personally, added to the International Style canon-forming exercise in the 1930s MoMA exhibition, although if anything it was designed in the style Paquebot. Also, Douglas Milburn devotes two pages in his 1979 guide to Houston to appreciating Post Oak Central, and I don't know of anything earlier in this area (nor Denver nor Toronto) which set the stove or stage for praise of alphabet griddlecakes quite like they did. * https://www.docomomo-us.org/designer/cory-cory ** https://hiddencityphila.org/2015/11/indestructible-at-broad-and-callowhill/

Sound like frozen Baltimore MTA transplants who don't know the potholes are bigger in ...

I think SH35 will still be connected to the Gulf Fwy at Reveille / 610.

You seriously think this is spurious?

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/919_Milam

That's an insightful perspective. Thanks. I think Hines saw fit to use the styrofoam form left over from the inside of the box this older 2009 tower had shipped in. I blame that for any awkward dimensions and angles. http://phillyskyline.com/bldgs/residencesattheritz/ritzrender1.jpg

For sure.

You're right that the majority of Austin's highrises are condo, apartment, dormitory or hotel, with negligible floor depths. The skyline appears wider and busier with these slender facades. There's also a secondary visual illusion resulting from the fact that AFAIK 20 years ago they had only two buildings with roofs that reached the 350' mark (plus only ten, including UT and the State Capitol, between 250' and 350' -- not far ahead of Corpus Christi's skyline at the time). Placed alongside such short buildings, the slender ones have gotten even more sense of height since there's nothing chunky for comparison. 600 Guadalupe has a pretty chunky massing, but for office the floorplates are not exceptionally deep. https://skyscraperpage.com/diagrams/?searchID=96230337 https://skyscraperpage.com/diagrams/?searchID=96230381

If the building is really not wanted, will the family or the buyer please consider contacting Cypress Top, to see if they can take a donation? That one was a country store donated to Harris County and maintained as a historical park and community venue by the Cypress Society. Even if that precedent is lost in Clodine, the building could potentially add to what is going on in Cypress. https://www.chron.com/neighborhood/cyfair-news/amp/Cypress-society-preserves-life-the-way-it-used-to-1693955.php Here's the entry on page 301 of the Houston AIA Guide (1999 2nd, not the latest, edition) while we're here: "The country store in Clodine (pronounced Claw'-dean) is the real thing, not a gentrified ersatz. It sits here, seemingly innocent of its vulnerability, just beyond the advance line of suburban invasion that has already engulfed Addicks, Piney Point, and Alief. Clodine Road (FM 1464) goes south for ten miles to Main Street (Highway 90A) through the lush, rural countryside of Fort Bend County. The subdivisions are almost in sight, however."

This building, the New York Daily News on 42nd Street, was built from 1928 to 1930, but its designers were familiar with the illustrations you mention, and so were Philip Johnson and John Burgee. An interesting new interview on Rice Design Alliance's "Cite Digital" website reveals the exact source of Transco Tower's squarish shoulders (which IMHO make it so much better architecturally than the rounded slender tapering slopes of many bland new supertalls in HK, South Korea, San Francisco, China and Southeast Asia). They include a photograph of its 1927-1928 inspiration: https://www.ricedesignalliance.org/cpk-ko-interview

Aren't there noise and asthma/air quality reasons not to put a residence for young adults along Gulf Freeway? Even in the middle of Houston Botanic Garden you can't forget the uncomfortably close sounds of this traffic.

Is there any evidence that Houstonians who would have been "locked up" for property crimes and other misdemeanors have a great attraction to violent felonies? The original poster's Insurance Journal link cites an uptick in 30 of the 34 largest cities (2019 to 2020). Here is a good group for statistics: https://www.bjs.gov/index.cfm?ty=pbdetail&iid=7046

In urban evolution those are less of a cul-de-sac than this is. They will be torn down and replaced piecemeal. After its "phases" are finished East River will be finished and difficult to upgrade.

It is surprisingly hard to get an urban atmosphere without financing it the way urban atmospheres were actually financed. These building blocks are never going to add up to that feel. Midway cannot fake one management/decisionmaking process as another, and a unique neighborhood atmosphere involves thousands of different owners' choices, not a couple of design firms decorating for one owner. Houston Heights was promoted by a central player with an 1890s financing stack, yes, and so were denser parts of many cities all over the country that now have lofts and offices and workshops -- but the pieces were small enough that many could add to them and modify them personally over time. Look at these plans and ask yourself where that would ever happen here.

Kbates2 is right to use supertall to mean buildings in the 300-600m range. But Transco/Williams at 275m still has more appeal than this one. This 98 Red River design is like a joke that's especially edgy because it's at the exact present edge of political correctness but if you were to hear the comedian again in a decade it would be a useless joke. The best possible outcome is that, if equally tall towers are ever built near I-35 on the old waterfront newspaper headquarters site, then they will form a visually dramatic river gateway together with this.

I was wrong in that I just found where CTBUH says they don't generally count entrances below grade as significant since the building entrance ought to bring the public to elevators that permit access to higher floors. Rather than to GFR storefront spaces and that sort of self-contained thing (the 30 Rock entrance to and from the ice rink comes to mind). But if Dallas' and Houston's unusual system of ped tunnels mean that elevator lobbies are present on both levels, or even that elevator cabs have double-decks to serve two elevator lobbies at once, then in these sorts of cases, by the SkyscraperCenter logic, an outdoor entrance admitting visitors from the Lousiana Street plaza to that space is the lowest outdoor door to measure from. 992' is not because the CTBUH staff went back and double checked their listings for correctness before making a line diagram; this figure pre-dates their mid-1990s invention of the official definitions, since it was appearing in World Almanacs for years before then. It probably just hasn't ever been remeasured according to the uniform reporting standards (which, within 2 to 3 years of their invention, infamously made the world's tallest buildings ones that were visibly less tall in all but rulebook than Sears Tower, 1WTC and John Hancock too.)

Just lean over the edge of the scaffolding for a sec...

Had been wondering the height of 1301 McKinney's nonarchitectural rooftop lattice tower: 794' https://wireless2.fcc.gov/UlsApp/AsrSearch/asrRegistration.jsp?regKey=128410

Thank you. A fresh post on 1000 Louisiana / WFP, of interest to this thread's readers, is in a different thread:

I would like our valiant editor to ask Keating if he knew from blueprints that 1000 Louisiana was taller than 600 Travis, and just kept it impishly to himself all these years. I'm afraid Austin's Rainey Street building proposals, if they get out of the ground, won't accidentally build a few feet shy of the tallest mark. Sources, of course: 600 Travis used to be measured from the ground as 1,006' but had to be remeasured from the lowest public outdoor entrance, four feet higher (the three basements beneath the raised plaza and four beneath the tower lack outdoor public entrances other than loading docks and the like, which are not officially counted), for 1,002' 1000 Louisiana, starting from the same terrain level of about 50' elevation, is officially measured from the tunnel level because the plaza has outdoor entrances accessible by public stairs. Its recorded height of 992' starts from about 20' below street level. But government records show that the top of its penthouse is 999' above ground. For instance when it received a 14' temporary antenna on top in 1984, it reached 1,063' above mean sea level, 1,013' above the 50' site elevation, with the building being all but 14' of that. Other records typically run within a foot of this figure; moving from the FAA in 1984 to the FCC in 2005, for instance, we have a report of 304.8m or 999.99'. Adding a recorded 14.9m or 48.88' above mean sea level, this time, their rooftop without antennae is at a total height of 319.7m or 1,048.87' above mean sea level, again very close to the comparison 1,049'. ...Whether we use 999 or 999.99, we have to add the height from the official starting point at about 29' or 30' above mean sea level where the public entrances are. For comparison, CTBUH took away 18' from the World Almanac height of Dallas' tallest tower because its pedestrian tunnel plaza level didn't have outdoor access from street level; it is a private patio court but not a primary entrance. They did not do so from 1000 Louisiana. So it means that we can accurately answer the first HAI rhetorical question, "But does the tower's essential subterranean element count towards this goal, and would it change the ranking?" The answer is that it already is being measured, and does count officially; the real question is why they are not already officially including the oval, teal colored, integral penthouse of Wells Fargo Plaza in the measurement figure, which would total somewhere between 1,019 and 1,021. It was never intended to be able to be replaced or changed independently of the rest of the architectural design it is part of; it should be clear that it was not a mechanical tack-on. Rectifying this oversight would answer the second HAI question, and would change an additional ranking error as well -- the Library Tower in Los Angeles, built 1,018' tall to eclipse 600 Travis, was never tallest west of the Mississippi River 1989-2016. Have a good Friday evening.

Ok, answered. 2929 Allen Parkway (AIG formerly America Tower) https://wireless2.fcc.gov/UlsApp/UlsSearch/licenseLocDetail.jsp?pageNumToReturn=1&keyLoc=14681311&licKey=1836847 Terrain elevation 18.0m or 59' Mast 207.0m or 679' Mast 208.0m HAAT (height above average terrain in a larger radius than the immediate site's terrain -- makes sense since downtown is about 10' lower at 49'), indicating that the 207.0 meter height is not measured above mean sea level but above the ground onsite here.

This graphic from that brochure shows the space as being on the plaza level. Can anyone report whether Adair Downtown restaurant, which opened in this spot a year ago this week, has an entrance door from the plaza, as finally constructed, or entrances only from WFP lobby and the tunnel? Thanks!

Its architectural height either officially included the flagpole (so it equals the height to top of building) or did not (so it is equal to the roof height). Either way, one of the three heights has been misreported.

Have we settled how tall the flagpole is? The online databases I've seen tend to do like Emporis and say that the height to tip, architectural height, and roof height are all identical. https://www.emporis.com/buildings/117718/american-general-center-houston-tx-usa