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strickn

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Everything posted by strickn

  1. 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
  2. strickn
    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/
  3. strickn
    Sound like frozen Baltimore MTA transplants who don't know the potholes are bigger in ...
  4. strickn
    I think SH35 will still be connected to the Gulf Fwy at Reveille / 610.
  5. strickn
    You seriously think this is spurious?
  6. strickn
    https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/919_Milam
  7. strickn
    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
  8. strickn
    For sure.
  9. strickn
    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
  10. strickn
    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."
  11. strickn
    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
  12. strickn
    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.
  13. strickn
    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.
  14. strickn
    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.
  15. strickn
    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.
  16. strickn
    Just lean over the edge of the scaffolding for a sec...
  17. strickn
    Thank you. A fresh post on 1000 Louisiana / WFP, of interest to this thread's readers, is in a different thread:
  18. strickn
    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.
  19. strickn
    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!
  20. strickn
    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.
  21. strickn
    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
  22. strickn
    It's attractive all right. Less elegantly modern than Chase but much more likeable. San Felipe Plaza in the distance was designed by the same firm (Houston had a Skidmore, Owings and Merrill office at that time; Chase's designer IM Pei had a Dallas office in the 1980s) that designed Wells Fargo Plaza, with the quarter-circles offset a different amount in the footprint. Here's a picture of SFP that shows it, from the May-June 1982 Texas Architect article (with a lot of other fun pictures) on the state's crop of new towers. Many of them were post-deregulation investments from prosperous lenders who required heavy taxpayer-funded bailouts a few years later, to help keep the state's cities from becoming world-class tumbleweed farms.
  23. strickn
    Found an early analysis of that shape published in Texas Architect in a 1981 article. Little known fact -- URL linking to a specific page number 64 within a PDF requires (or used to require) you to type #page=64 after the '.pdf' for some browsers to handle it, and #page64 for others. Here's the link, and here's another if that didn't take your browser straight there.
  24. strickn
    Going from postmodern architecture in Houston to postvernacular now? I wonder what our city would look like, if that were to become a wave as widespread as the earlier ones.
  25. strickn
    There's not a lot of space to buy low and sell high when a field is already as superheated as life sciences has gotten. This literal field owned by 2ML, can still sell higher, yes; but the industry itself? TMC is great, but as an industry cluster, if you look at the burn rate required of the top ten areas just to stay in the top ten, Houston has almost no shot to ever break into the top six or eight, let alone five. So is rising from third tier to second tier in a currently important prestige niche actually important enough to justify the opportunity cost? The cost of not putting that toward an area that is more distinctive to our local character and would make us more headway? IMHO no. Life sciences are just something like "cyber" that seems totally investable and inevitable -- that is to say, lucrative without the risk of looking professionally foolish that, say, going to bat for something more creative but less recognizable would carry. In that sense, this highly costly upside opportunity is the functional equivalent of what mixed use development itself suddenly became for the commercial real estate and institutional investment fields of business.
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