strickn

As far as I can figure, that pavilion was itself just a reference to the Church of Saint Mary in Sompting, Sussex, England. The name for that kind of roof geometry is "Rhenish helm"

Kohn Pederson Fox now has a slicker sleeker updated take on the same idea completed in Shenzhen last year: 600 meters even though the spire wasn't built (so 230 meters higher than BOTSW's roof)

Silicon Valley has half the skyline of Fort Worth, too, and by your "more is better" logic, what sense could that make? -- but most tech firms need to communicate more than hierarchical organizations. Being twenty-five floors apart doesn't lead to collaboration.

I visited an actual world-class city this week. It's striking that urban Texans bandy the term about so much these days without much philosophic thought as to what it would mean. That philosophical void is a central part of why Texas doesn't have any world-class cities yet. Profound thinkers that Texas shaped almost always had to leave to make their contributions; the contributions people come to Dallas or Houston to make, by contrast, are about "who brings in more money," not about humanity. The two are not mutually exclusive, or have not always been, but here, Texas' leading industrialists merely give donations to creative and intellectual organizations rather than really participating riskily in becoming a nucleus of intellectual circles themselves. (Check out https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lunar_Society_of_Birmingham for a prototype of a better way of doing things. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Science_and_invention_in_Birmingham is almost exhausting, but highlights include industrial chemistry, the steam engine, the first rocket engine (by the polymath grandfather of Francis Galton and Charles Darwin), social, religious, financial and educational/pedagogical reforms, modern postal service, the cavity magnetron, and computer scientist Conway Berners-Lee, better known for his son Tim -- which seems a pretty good place to close this web forum parenthetical.)

Doesn't a slowdown produce the opposite of filling up? Houston's port is 16th in the world if you count every ounce of gunk that gets shipped from the refineries. If you don't, it's 64th. Not entirely outside the topic of this thread, though, so thanks for bringing it up, since new Dallas development is what drives a lot of that container traffic on the coast. Speaking of waterways, everybody knows the Harris County water was purely responsible for fueling Tom Brady's rally, so congrats on having it. For those interested, the Bureau of Economic Analysis' 2016 GDP metro estimates will be released on May 11th.

Sorry, it just gets old.

Could you do all the taking down a notch in private message, or is the attempt something that just has to be public to be entertaining?

I went to the Benton County assessor to settle the Crystal Bridges question, but they didn't measure the exempted improvements, so no luck. But it has only eight galleries and I think Architectural Record was onto something when it reported 93,000 total square feet at the time of opening. Several other sources including the Schnabel (engineers) and Safdie firms at that time said 93 or 100,000, and then it seems perhaps the 217 figure resonated with somebody later (or they pulled a St Louis and counted the parking garages). After the 63,000-square-foot downtown Bentonville center opens, that will put it more like the size of nearby Tulsa's excellent Philbrook art museum (which opened a 28,000-total-square-foot downtown location three years ago, in addition to its main campus of between 110 and 125,000 square feet), and not large enough for this list. I guess the Cloisters were included in the Met's facilities figure, but I can't prove it. Thanks for the appreciation. It is sort of my parting gift to the forum. I am leaving this weekend and moving to Europe. All my documents are in order, but I don't know if it'll be for good or not. Maybe if Kaine is president I'll come back

Correct. Again not claiming scientific accuracy, here are the largest US museums after current expansions, first by actual gallery space, then by usable space minus plazas and parking: (in thousands of square feet): 750 - the Met, NY (20__ -- Chipperfield expansion of 180 to >2200 now on hold) link link 284 - NGA, DC (2016) out of 1400 link 284 - Philadelphia (202_) out of almost 800 after Gehry subterranean additions 280 - Art Inst. Chicago out of almost 1000 270 - LACMA, LA out of 500-something (staying about the same in its controversial expansion) 250 - Mass MoCA (2017) out of ___ total indoor link 240 - dia:Beacon (2003) out of ___ total indoor link 221 - MFA Boston (2010) out of 617 total indoor link 212 - MFAH (2019) out of 669 total indoor 205 - MoMA (2018) out of 1023 total indoor in three sites (Midtown, P.S.1, QNS) 196 - Smithsonian (Hirshhorn 60, Freer/Sackler 41, Old Patent Office 95) out of 197+115+333 N/A - Dallas (1993) out of 516 total indoor 161 - Minneapolis (2016) out of 473 total indoor 152 - Detroit (2007) out of 658 total indoor link 145 - SFMOMA (2015) out of 460 total indoor 140 - Brooklyn Museum out of 560 total indoor 137 - Milwaukee (2015) out of 341 total indoor link 135 - SLAM (2012) out of 350 total indoor 134 - VMFA, Richmond (2010) out of 545 total indoor link 130 - Cleveland (2014) out of 636 total indoor 130 - Nelson-Atkins (2007) out of 400 total indoor 117 - Denver (2010) out of 406 total indoor link 110 - Carnegie, Pittsburgh ( ) out of ___ total indoor 106 - the Getty, LA (2006) combining two sites: Getty Villa 210 and Center 940) out of 1150 100 - Peabody Essex (2019) out of ___ total indoor 94 - High, Atlanta (2010) out of 312 total indoor 86 - Toledo (2006) out of 370 total indoor link N/A - Cincinnati (2003) out of 282 total indoor 84 - de Young, SF (2005) out of 292 total indoor link N/A - Kimbell, FW (2014) out of 221 total indoor I left off Oakland and Indianapolis since I couldn't get satisfactory breakdowns. and by total indoors: 2250 - the Met (two sites - including the old Whitney building) 1400 - National Gallery of Art complex 1150 - the Getty, LA (both sites) 1023 - MoMA (all sites) 1000 - Art Institute of Chicago complex 800 - Philadelphia 669 - Houston entire upcoming campus 658 - Detroit 645 - Smithsonian four art museums, downtown DC 636 - Cleveland 617 - Boston 560 - Brooklyn 545 - Richmond, VA

Just so I'm the only one who wastes my time, here's the fine breakdown: 160,000 sf (Caroline Wiess Law) 193 or 216 (Audrey Jones Beck) 42 Glassell (now demolished) 42 Ctrl Admin and Junior School -- before the latest expansion our facilities were/are around 450,000 square feet, then. If you count Bayou Bend and Rienzi then you have to track down the houses owned by other art museums, to be fair. So many other museums were expanding art facilities that we are now around #13 nationally, by this measure. 160 law (73 gallery) 193 beck (85 gallery) 164 kinder (54 gallery) 80 replacement glassell 42 central admin and junior school 30 blaffer atop existing garage 669 total (212 gallery), drawing from http://www.houstonpress.com/arts/light-touch-6565162 and other sources or 160 law (62 gallery) 216 beck (68 gallery) 164 kinder (54 gallery) 80 replacement glassell 42 central admin and junior school 30 blaffer atop existing garage 692 total (184 gallery), drawing from the more recent offcite.org/ontologically-every-thing-is-unique-behind-the-curtain-at-the-mfah/

There are at least five ways of adding up the physical plants of the largest art museums. You've got total indoor space; total indoor public space; total indoor and outdoor programmable space; total indoor gallery space. The fifth would be to include parking garages, which I've only seen St. Louis try to do. The MFAH's quick facts page must use one of the first three methods to arrive at their statistic of "300,000 square feet devoted to the display of art," because the Houston Press and the Rice Design Alliance have found figures between 130,000 and 160,000 square feet for our actual gallery space. Reports at the time Moneo's Beck Building opened said that MFAH was leaping to sixth-largest nationally. As far as I can calculate, when we include not only the new Kinder Building but the new Glassell replacement and the new 30,000-square-foot Blaffer Conservation Center, MFAH's total indoor space (the first measure) will soon be back in the top ten nationally, maybe even number six again. Museums use their bragging rights rather unscientifically, so I don't blame Twinsanity for being unable to make a definitive listing.

Building on what CREguy13 said, Chevron subleased 345,000 sf of Devon's space at Two Allen Center in 2013, a couple of years after signing a seven year renewal on 311,000 sf at Continental Center I (1600 Smith Street). However, United Airlines is in the process of downsizing by a half million square feet -- most of that in 1600 Smith. At the time of the 2010 merger, Continental occupied at least 700,000 sf downtown (220,000 at Continental Center II, 600 Jefferson (now 1801 Smith) and 480,000 at Continental Center I). They are now at half that, and when the contracts expire in a couple of years, they will leave completely for 609 Main at Texas. I believe that lease was announced at 225,000 sf. Chevron, unless unhappy with 1600 Smith, will have much more freedom simply expanding into United's vacated space than waiting years for a costly development to be built to suit.

Georgia-based Axiall, which dropped this year from #564 to 613, is to be consolidated into Uptown Houston-based Westlake Chemical, vaulting it from #549 this year well into the "500" next year. Jacobs Engineering will also be moving to downtown Dallas and Baker Hughes will not be folded into Halliburton, so Texas' count is effectively up by 3 over what it was going to be.

So updating 19514's post from 6 May 2013, 2012 List CA 53 TX 52 NY 50 IL 32 2013 List CA 54 TX 52 NY 52 IL 32 2014 List CA 54 NY 54 TX 52 IL 33 2015 List CA 54 TX 54 NY 54 IL 34 2016 List NY 55 CA 51 TX 51 IL 36 The lists do look drastically different once you put CT + NJ back in with NY. But, then again, fifty years ago the Northeast spat on California, and now they take them seriously. Fifty years from now when Texas is uninhabitable desert, maybe Canada will be taken seriously, too.

What about applying that line of thinking to the students themselves? Do they have enough freedom from competitive pressures? I mean, even in high school there's this feeling that the admissions verdict from a competitive college is, in Frank Bruni's words, "the great, brutal culling" between the upwardly mobile and the hoi polloi. He continues, "the nature of a student’s college experience — the work that he or she puts into it, the self-examination that’s undertaken, the resourcefulness that’s honed — matters more than the name of the institution attended. In fact students at institutions with less hallowed names sometimes demand more of those places and of themselves. Freed from a focus on the packaging of their education, they get to the meat of it." This kind of painstaking personal filtering is more - much more - important than the talent filtering that our colleges pretend to perform. And I would argue that our current academic draft system does not lead high schoolers in the right direction to undertake any of this. Colleges are happy to up the hype, even as the majority of parents in American families basically just want their kids to be able to afford training for a decent line of work. "...Yet there’s a frenzy to get into the Stanfords of the world, and it seems to grow ever crazier and more corrosive. It’s fed by many factors, including contemporary America’s exaltation of brands and an economic pessimism that has parents determined to find and give their kids any and every possible leg up. And it yields some bitter fruits, among them a perversion of higher education’s purpose and potential. College is a singular opportunity to rummage through and luxuriate in ideas, to realize how very large the world is and to contemplate your desired place in it. And that’s lost in the [admissions filtering] mania."

http://www.theguardian.com/science/2013/dec/06/peter-higgs-boson-academic-system Higgs, the British physicist who theorized the Higgs boson, doubts that enough peace and quiet is available in present academic culture to achieve a similar breakthrough before being fired...

This is worth a serious discussion, maybe in another thread: http://www.houstonarchitecture.com/haif/topic/32822-modern-education/

Bookmarking this from the UT Houston thread today: ​Thoughts? And I know it's all too often considered heresy to question the idea that competition makes everything better, but this thread is a safe space to ask how to help nurture and competition play nicely together.

Speaking of the antenna site atop 600 Travis, here's a funny story: in 2004, Houston Networks applied to the FAA to mount another antenna on the roof there, one which would have reached 1088 feet above ground level below. In due time (within 30 days), the FAA wrote back with their determination -- As all of us here know, 600 Travis is already above the regulators' maximum height; Emporis, which measures from the sill of the front entry, measures 1002 feet for the tower, which sits on a four foot high plinth (accounting for why some almanacs say 1,006). Add the mech penthouse and the many 20' fingerling antennae and we actually reach higher than the Library Tower in L.A. and the BoA Plaza in Atlanta, both of which were built to beat us. But get out your hacksaws, friends, it's time for some regulatory compliance. Let's take it down to 73 floors for safety's sake.

Yep. Wish Houston had a great supertall on the Asbury Place site across the bayou from Lazy Lane, but I doubt even Cathexis can get it done.

Not to be catty (hat tip to your sig pic), native, but if you do the comparison you find that Uptown Houston is 5 miles out, and this Midtown Dallas thing is 10 miles out. So West Sam Houston Tollway is the accurate comparison here. Preston Center is the Dallas skyline that is five miles out, and (on the subject of new Dallas development) the reason it's not getting tall is that it is surrounded by the most affluent neighborhood in the Sunbelt outside of Southern California -- they don't want strangers looking down in their back yards any more than say River Oaks does. Even a 27-floor (some said 22) tower was shot down pre-approval last year there.

Just for readers' convenience, and in case Lockmat up and opts to change his sig quotes anytime soon, here is the quote in question: "You know, the vehicle to improve the American city is the American corporation-that's where the money is." - Gerald D. Hines

I like your sig quotes, lockmat, and I wonder especially today about the Gerry Hines one. Maybe the corporation looks like the means to fix the American city not because it's the solution but because it is the problem to begin with. The renderings are built to attract large lease transplants, not the seeds of future personality. It may have been the Supreme Court who declared companies to have the rights of persons here (We the corporations of the United States of America, in order to form a more perfect union...) but in America's cores it was already accomplished fact: The urban scene becomes a canvas not for individuals, but for their corporate investment interests. This arms'-length process filters out all but the most mechanical lifelike features en route to finished product. Artifice, not life, results, like Naviguessor said. What is to be done? Well, I think the tactic most to the point would be a really simple overlay: for every 100 square feet of ground you own, up to a thousand square feet, you pay property tax at a base annual rate. This rate increases more than linearly at every "space bracket" -- if you own less than ten thousand, about a quarter of an acre, you pay much less for each square foot than if you have a hundred thousand feet of dirt. In fact you can smoothe these brackets into a continuous, logarithmic curve with perfect transparency. This would uniformly calibrate and restore our urban form to make hands-on intricacy the practical economic norm. Development would mean replication by division, like a healthy cell, each with its individual imprint, instead of by bloating into socially undesirable gigantisms of ownership, which are the root cause of loss of intricate detail (of which charm-free retail power centers are just the latest symptom). The nonsense will no longer be financially sensible. Right now NIMBYs have it right, I'm sad to say: a developer's increase in density in modern American neighborhoods usually means a decrease in lovable charm. The good news: This is not intrinsic to density itself.

Uh, I'm not sure toxicity is a real strong argument to make in favor of Southeast Texas, of all the knocks you could've chosen.

Working on it