strickn

Heard Amazon is expanding its white-collar headcount as well. But one wonders what these transplants of jobs from Silicon Valley really mean besides some discretionary income and some added work experiences in the local talent pool. The local branch, after all, does not operate like an opportunistic receiver/responder to market feedback -- as a nimble native enterprise would do -- but rather like a non-self-determining soldier deployed in the Google or Amazon army, correct? Risk is managed from on high more than from touch signals close at hand... As such, it does relatively much less to actually develop the interfirm relationships and food webs that recycle capital through a local economy. It's more like industrial agribusiness -- dump capital on, scoop each monoculture off at the appointed time. So I want to start to say, "Good for Austin," while I ponder if it is. The end result on economic fertility may be the same as monocropping.

Texas with its wide open spaces lags behind California and Florida, let alone New York and Illinois, in numbers and heights of high density projects (note: on the Skyscraperpage Diagram Search Form, you have to enter us as a "State", not as a "country".) True highrise fanboys should be bent on keeping your stats growing by whatever means, lest we fall behind. Cities like former US territory Manila have built more 100m+ structures in the last decade than Texan cities have since 1836.

Intuitively, IronTiger, vacancy is an indicator of a lack of health. But it's not that simple. For one thing, the cost to the tenant to occupy older space and get it up to snuff can actually be unattractive compared to brand-new class A space. For another thing, space that is subeconomic for trophy uses is actually a gift to neighborhood diversity -- Uptown:Manhattan::DTD:Brooklyn As long as we don't demolish aging buildings, there is opportunity for cool things to happen alongside new construction. That's an asset, especially in the Sunbelt, where there are few such neighborhoods.

It seems so many cities around the US and Canada are finally reaching critical mass right around the same time. I wonder why capacity building has taken so long, whether it's generational, whether it's primarily economic (art follows moneymaking), and whether it will take off even more as Boomers retire to walkable areas.

I wonder how they can have studied hundreds of the best campus settings, designing for urban and collegial feel, and have missed the obvious fact that if you want those feelings you don't have one architect do the whole place.

North Texas' suburban retrofit continues to progress behind the scenes. http://nctapa.org/wp-content/uploads/2014/02/Dallas-Midtown-Plan.pdf has a series of pages that show the patchwork of existing zoning overlays and a thoughtful form-based code to supersede it. It is encouraging to see small-scale plans undergird the large-scale one.

"The 64-foot high water wall corresponds to the 64-story height of the tower and ... to the all-time high on the stock market for Transco stock." - Jack Bowen, then-Transco CEO "Due to the cost of the land, which was substantially more expensive than most suburban sites because it was assembled by Hines from small pieces over five years, Hines knew he had to 'intensify the use' of the proposed mall, which led to three key new ideas... When the original Galleria opened [in 1970], Hines revealed his larger aspirations by declaring, 'A shopping center it is not. It will be a new downtown.'" (de Jong, The New SubUrbanisms, 152-3) Not quite in a pasture, Philip Johnson had already been building slick glass towers in the neighborhood at Post Oak Central (1975-), but you are right that it skipped several stages of successional growth and went straight to climax condition. Hines had learned - in Houston - that an advertising image was more important to a building's leasing rates than builders of International-Style oblongs had realized. So accounts that chalk it up to ego (1 or 2) are not quite all-perceptive. It is more about being imageable than about personal image per se.

Of purely historical (?) interest((?)) Kinder Morgan was the result of a buyout by KN Energy, of Colorado, which took the Kinder Morgan name and moved its HQ here fourteen years ago. KN Energy had shortly prior bought MidCon pipeline from California oil giant Occidental. MidCon had bought United Energy Resources of Houston just six months before being gobbled up by Oxy in a friendly bid. United Energy Resources had leased the largest block of spec space in Houston's tallest building when El Paso Natural Gas backed out. Previous to that, El Paso had been the name tenant and our tallest building was to be called El Paso Tower.

19514 says my process of forming conclusions is premature, tossed off. I at least imply likewise that Holl's process of forming conclusions is premature, tossed off. So at least we match. I don't know if that creates a double negative for him or not. The gist of my original post was in a similar vein with the 600 Travis thread: to try to get folks to imagining what justice a designer (I suggested MC2 architects) could have done after marinating in Houston's very personal public contradictions. When Holl built in Dallas he practiced a much more carefully composed approach, whereas now he may believe that the only way to take all details into account is to go with your gut. Maybe the only way to do justice to Houston's haste is to shoot from the hip, after all; or maybe it's a double negative instead. I apologize for the half of my remark that rushed to judge. The point of the whole comment was in the opposite spirit: that sustained attention pays dividends.

If you want more general details, by the way, the Museum District subforum version of this conversation is an excellent thread.

As I think about Pallasmaa more, however, he seems like not a bad influence to have. And I don't know that he would necessarily condone preserving the spirit of your first impression of a project, for instance. You ought to read up on him, if only to understand better what we're about to see on Main Street.

I saw, or heard or whatever, the Finnish theorist Juhani Pallasmaa lecture a few years ago. I've heard he has big influence on Holl. Pallasmaa made no sense to me at all, but Holl says, "Architecture depends on intuition." He makes intuitive sketches using watercolors, and because he calls the shots, the firm details them into final form. "So they go from my watercolor directly into a 3D computer drawing. That drawing goes into our 3D printer and in a matter of, say, twelve hours, in the time that I’m flying, I can have a model waiting for me when I arrive back at the office." He has six people to do that. Anyway, he has already auctioned off a concept drawing of the intuitively rendered MFAH. All I'm saying is, don't be gobsmacked if the new wing looks a little like a piece of cheese.

And by a designer whose firsthand soaking-up of locality probably began since 2011... I would have liked to see what Chung and Chuong Nguyen, architects with a deeper sense of Houston, would have formed here. Probably something less monolithic or hammily organic.

"Note the way the panels alternately overlap - by exactly 2 37/64 inches - at the edge."

It has somewhat perturbed me that I.M. Pei put a hundred thousand square foot sheet-glass wall on the west facade of Texas Commerce Tower. It appears like a move absent-minded at best, considering the glare that will blare through the floorplates of the offices inside. Why, too, plant the parking block on Main Street and the pedestrian plaza facing the permanently dead travertine windowlessness of Jones Hall, instead of vice versa? Here is what I learned. After Hines signed on to the project in 1977, he made a list of the architects he thought were most capable in the world of giving "a real gift to Houston", as the president of Texas Commerce Bank said to his friends. -- in part from Texas Monthly/May 1980; p. 117 Minoru Yamasaki (Troy, Michigan) Romaldo Giurgola (Philadelphia) Hermon Lloyd (Houston, Lloyd Jones Brewer & Associates) J. V. Neuhaus III (Houston, 3D/International) Cesar Pelli (New Haven) I. M. Pei (New York) "Tiny" Lawrence (Houston, CRS Group) -- in part from Texas Monthly/May 1980; p. 253-4 Property acquisition had begun ten years before with the site of the old Montgomery Ward at the corner of Travis and Capitol, and continuing across from the Rice Hotel. Jesse Jones' Houston Endowment had built Jones Hall in 1966 to buttress the north end of the business district as development threatened to move suddenly south. Jones' National Bank of Commerce, headquartered in the Gulf Building - which he had built - had a financial interest in remaining at the center of the exchanges of money and contact, whereas its larger rival First City National Bank had an interest in pulling the center of power away from it. First City National kept a crucial lot tied up for years adjoining Montgomery Ward's. I suppose that National Bank of Commerce (after a 1970 amendment to the federal acts about bank holding companies, it would gobble thirty or forty local banks into Texas Commerce Bancshares) could have built a taller tower around the holdout to get the same square footage with a Main Street address, but at the time they were focused on a shorter, full-block edifice. By the time the invitation went out to eight architects (one named nowhere above), focus had shifted a block to the northwest, where we find the tower today. A full block lot was available there, and some say the tunnels had shifted downtown to the west. Each designer was given an honorarium whether or not they elected to present a model, and was given a month to examine the site. Then everyone met in an auditorium at the Gulf Building for a marathon session of deliveries. Pei "talked almost as much about Jesse Jones and Jones Hall as he did his own building... and he spoke of Jones Hall as a civic monument in almost reverential tones." He would leave an acre of open space immediately opposite the concert hall and would "also face Pennzoil Place, at a 45 degree angle to the street grid, thereby reflecting light in a different direction from any of the other skyscrapers and providing a line-of-sight link between the Gulf Building, the monument of Jones' life, and Jones Hall, the building erected after his death. The enormous space created by the one-acre plaza would not only avoid the canyon effect of adjacent skyscrapers but would also serve as a natural gathering place for downtown pedestrians." The lobby would stand with the right vertical dimension to match Jones Hall's. --mostly from Texas Monthly/May 1980; p. 254-5 "Gently, persuasively, he asked me one day: 'What do you think are the greatest cities in the world?' I responded, 'London, Paris, Rome . . .' I. M. interrupted. 'Stop right there. Have you ever thought that the reason you consider them great is not because of their solids, but because of their voids? Why don't we leave a void--an open space--in this site? Downtown Houston architecture is impressive, but it has one weakness. Most buildings are built sidewalk to sidewalk.' Then he proposed, 'Let's allocate three-quarters of the block for a beautiful plaza enhanced by a major sculpture, Bartlett pear trees, fountains, and benches for people.' And so we did." - Ben Love: My Life in Texas Commerce (TAMU Press, 2005) p. 211 I would here interject for Love and Pei to think whether the reason they consider those voids great is not after all due to edges more than their interiors, and in Houston none of the expense went to perforating or activating the edges, so it failed. "But whether this is great art or simply a piece by a great artist, whether the plaza will become a notable void or simply a void, I think you just have to like this thing and admire the audacity of the conservative businessmen who put it there. It is colorful, eccentric, funny[, the Miro] -- all qualities in short supply in most business districts -- and it represents the daring, playfulness, and determination to undermine self-importance that are among the most appealing characteristics of Houston. In addition to all this, the sculpture shows that one of the ancient motivations for monumental art--self-commemmoration--has not entirely disappeared. After Miro had painted the model and it was ready for viewing, Pei, Roff, Hines, Love, and their wives visited the artist at his studio in Majorca for the unveiling [of Personage and Bird]. The three amorphous shapes at the ends of the chair legs stuck to the head were painted red, blue, and yellow. In the enthusiasm of the moment, Ben Love said, 'I want to be the red bird.' He had been a St. Louis Cardinals fan as a boy. Hines wanted to be the yellow bird, and Roff became the 'blue bird of happiness.' And the correct name of the sculpture at the corner of Milam and Capitol is Personage and Birds. Plural." --Texas Monthly/June 1982; p. 6

Those massing models you like were taken from Pickard Chilton's master plan.

Unless a pension plague keeps the Baby Boom from reaching old age, anticipate that there will be another boom in development, yes. http://www.texasmedicalcenter.org/facts-and-figures/ says that total square footage has risen to round about 46 million square feet from what was reported as 29.6 million gross square feet in 2008, which if true would mean adding 8% new facilities (compounded, mind you) every year during the recession. Reports that recorded the TMC as nearing, or among, the top ten business districts ...were exaggerations. They were comparing our gross square footage to other districts' office - and sometimes only Class A office - square footage. The typical quote, "As of October 2009, TMC’s 31 million square feet of space made it the 12th largest downtown business district in the U.S. – larger than downtown Los Angeles,13" gets by on this. For what it's worth, our South Main office submarket has enough private lease space to nudge us over the fifty million mark even if the Med Center is including (and it sounds like it is, from the "all campuses" caveat) TMC West, out in Katy, in its figure. But had they bothered to compare the other land uses in the densest 1,345 acres (2.1 square miles) of central Los Angeles, which would be an apples-to-apples comparison with the Med Center's stated acreage, forget about it. That is, when you even begin to look around with not just office-leased in mind, then there are plenty of places above 50 Msf in the United States, even if you confine that to equal land areas with the Med Center. 2.1 square miles gives you almost twenty eruptions of buildings over 100 million square feet. Doesn't get to Texas ...in fact the clusters would bore you since so many're in New York.

I don't have any blog, but I was working on a holiday essay to figure out why so many people who are serious about telling the truth in life experience are not attracted to theistic spirituality, and I've just been studying Art in Crisis, or The Lost Center, (1948), where I found a discussion of the dis-integration of culture with Christian life. There I have also found the following 1933 forerunner, never actually built, of the Humble Building. http://books.google.com/books?id=iZuXgQkwrIcC&pg=PA108-IA1&dq=%22art+in+crisis%22+brise+soleil&hl=en&sa=X&ei=jfzWUYqOE9O34AOs94DAAw&ved=0CDcQ6AEwAA#v=onepage&q=%22art%20in%20crisis%22%20brise%20soleil&f=false It summarizes the post Montrose1100 linked to answer scarface: the architecture of constant overhangs acted as a kind of venetian blind, to make "buildings of glass and metal habitable in the south for the first time."

When 800 Bell was built, it was ten years before Humble changed its name to Exxon, so this was a humble building too. Welton Becket and Associates was one of the world's largest architectural firms at that time, and practice made perfect in this case, infinite_jim.

I hope it will help this conversation to point out that TheGalleria is 5.5 miles from downtown. When Gerald Hines went out to Dallas, Ray Nasher already had a mall 5.5 miles from downtown, so he built in an analogous position on the next loop out. CityCentre / once-Town & Country is 11.5 miles from downtown, with Memorial City Mall a mile closer. The also razed and rebuilt Prestonwood Mall was 12 miles from downtown, with Valley View two miles closer.

The latest alumni newsletter had a feature on two new alumni members of BCM's board, and they were both talking like outpatient care is the future of treatment (as though Baylor is now not planning to build out the translational-medicine bench-to-bedside hospital once planned). If Baylor begins going head to head with the private physicians, it hasn't been good for town-gown relations anywhere else.

How was it? Good post again.

I wish they had colocated with Carnegie Vanguard, for students' new friendships' sake, and perhaps cost per student, but now they are going to remain quite separate.

HemisFair Park is slated to be redeveloped! http://www.google.com/search?q=hemisfair+redevelopment

It's going to be a trick to connect this tract with downtown. Any ideas?