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strickn

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Everything posted by strickn

  1. strickn
    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.
  2. strickn
    HemisFair Park is slated to be redeveloped! http://www.google.com/search?q=hemisfair+redevelopment
  3. strickn
    It's going to be a trick to connect this tract with downtown. Any ideas?
  4. strickn
    Renderings for the inpatient phases are up on KPF's web site, along with description: http://www.kpf.com/project.asp?T=5&ID=299 The Methodist Hospital North Campus Expansion is intended to be the first step in the replacement of major elements of the Methodist Hospital on its existing urban site in the Texas Medical Center. Phase I involves the design of a new diagnostic treatment space for the hospital’s premier centers of excellence in Neurology and Cardiology and a new Emergency Department (ED), which will facilitate important adjacencies to the new centers. Phase I will also create patient space to support 280 acute and intensive care beds, and is designed to accommodate plans for future expansion up to 580 beds in Phase II. The project aims to create a building that reads as “complete” after Phase I, while still easily accommodating these future expansion needs. From a design standpoint, the project aims to dramatically change the outdated image of the Methodist Hospital through a design that architecturally coordinates the expansion with that of the adjacent Research Institute (also designed by KPF), thus dramatically transforming the presence of the hospital on Bertner Avenue. Our design achieves this in several ways: first, by creating a welcoming front door that leads to a large public atrium; second, by carefully planning wayfinding that enables clear and easy circulation through the new complex for patients, visitors, and staff; and finally by linking major public spaces and maximizing access to natural light.
  5. strickn
    To give this thread new life, and the chance of learning something: Block 142, downtown, the first site I mentioned, is valued by the county at $15.6 million. 40ksf floorplates would be feasible (although the trend is not toward such large floors); it's a 62500sf site -- $250/sf. What kind of rents over what kind of size range would one need to get, being into the dirt for that much? Anyone care to show their calculations for our benefit, please?
  6. strickn
    Every 800+ footer in the state was built when Texas *was* the developing world, like China is today. When these buildings reach the end of their design lives, will their investors see fit to reconstruct them? Now to your question. There are investors who have paid so much for their land (901-999 Louisiana, 3200 Post Oak, and so on) that the only revenue-generating thing it can be used for, besides a parking lot, under current tax codes, is a trophy property. But a trophy property need not be a very tall one. If you build something to command $40 per square foot rents, in fact, it's unlikely you would want to risk building two million square feet of it all at once: you could make a profit on your land purchase with much less construction than that. Will there come a time when enough large tenants want into a submarket for long enough without smaller buildings being built to absorb them (that a supertall makes sense for years to set in motion)? Well, the one time it happened before, it was a bubble. You know what the conditions would have to be for it to happen again. Either a second speculative property bubble, a proud homegrown corporation, a giant relocation, a mixed-use investment with residences on top, HAIF starts a wildly successful lottery ticket pool, or editor repatriates his advertising profits.
  7. strickn
    Urban form and urban quality are all about connections. However paradoxically, the most vital thing about a neighborhood's character is how it rubs shoulders with the 'hoods on all sides. There is very little street life that can be sustained in isolation. Rice Village is the isolation that proves the rule. I have given a lot of thought to how to make the Medical Center more like Rice Village, since everything that people like about the Village you'll find nowhere @TMC. It is more fun to watch metastasize, perhaps, but it is to healthy placemaking as tumors are to tissue. I've learned quite a bit from studying how that is, exactly. There is too much to say here. Ours is a city by and for engineers, and engineers I suspect have to learn the hard way to value 'soft' skills and qualities. TMC will lose talent to less banal work environments, but maybe not much. At ground level, human-scale improvements will be overridden by the pressure to do otherwise, and it will continue to lack connection, whether to its own blockfronts or to surrounding neighborhoods. The development patterns for the district's southern frontier (after the Methodist Hospital builds its new Kohn Pedersen Fox-designed inpatient block between Wilkins and Freeman, there will be few blocks left north of the bayou) are dour and unpromising. No neighborhood is brewing. It will be better for everybody if the Medical Center becomes an attractive place, not just a necessary one.
  8. strickn
    "To me, the value of this boom-hood discussion is anecdotal evidence that Houston and Dallas are becoming less similar cities."
  9. strickn
    I don't see TMC in there anywhere. But urbanistically, 'towers in a park' get failing grades.
  10. strickn
    photography by Justin Terveen (flickr ninjatune)
  11. strickn
    link
  12. strickn
    1981, evidently.
  13. strickn
    Here we are: Note how different Three Allen Center looks when more than fifty floors. Since this got it wrong, I'm not sure whether the project, referred to above as HL&P, was from before 1983 when Three Allen Center was topped out. Anyway, the picture is p.87 from the February 1988 Connoisseur magazine.
  14. strickn
    I think it's November 1986's Connoisseur magazine that had an article on Kevin Roche featuring a finished model of the tower, though no mention of the client, or whether it would have been part of the Allen Center series across the street. Of the three blocks northwest and west of Three Allen Center, I can't remember if it was on 265 or not.
  15. strickn
    Vale's First Baptist Church sanctuary in Lake Jackson turned 50 last year and is intact. Easy to visit.
  16. strickn
    "some of it is fine, and some of it is questionable" -- there were many modernisms, and all (that I know of of) the earlier great modern Texan homes had been what would be called more sustainable. One earlier one was open just a few days ago! http://events.kvia.com/Ship_on_the_Desert_Open_House/236196550.html
  17. strickn
    What are the plans for the McKie & Kamrath dental campus now that the school can relocate?
  18. strickn
    I just have a hunch that the path Subdude is describing for a good outcome is exactly the one Tel Aviv has made: that those choices are calcifying in too many ways, to now-predictable result. I'll talk about what more I see around Galveston Bay(than the patina of calamity) later in the day if the conversation hasn't changed too much.
  19. strickn
    Keep the parking lot - just pick some of its spaces to be rotating collections, construction, and so forth. We pull up and come and go among them. There could still be 20 or more slots along Main, along the garden wall, and connecting the two, which have a more permanent interface and a bit of street-wall enclosure, but all in all I s'pose it is one solution to 'dissolving the boundary' brought up by HAIF above. And making this new part of the Fine Arts Houston complex be as diffuse as its hometown experience. For all of our casual glory, though, there's a definable advantage that Galveston has. I don't want to boil it down to just San Francisco's, the feeling of being beautifully vulnerable. This press of intense weathering and certainty of natural disaster is a special light of creative destruction on both places I can come by in no other way than through being put on the spot of 'here forever, gone tomorrow' with each visit. I think having a person yield in that way among art is a worthwhile yield for Galveston to sow, but I think it's more than that, and I'll reflect some more about it. And I think the building is best left alone, and left as an empty case beneath the museum-parts to brew other users.
  20. strickn
    http://www.loopnet.com/Listing/15843402/3400-Church-Galveston-TX/?MPID=F9y75qH6w&SRID=&tab=Sale-Lease&PgCxtGuid=a4711514-b50e-445d-af85-8463a332a5c2&PgCxtFLKey=&PgCxtCurFLKey=PropertyRecord&PgCxtDir=Down
  21. strickn
    http://tmagazine.blo...-museum-of-art/ http://www.washingto...m-doubles-size/ Tel Aviv, like Houston, is a creature of the 20th Century, a center of creation, and a city in love with the future. Its complex of buildings for the encounter of artwork took on the same challenge that ours is about to, and like ours, they hired an intelligent person's architect. But I think we run the risk of losing the heart of encounter with art by doing what they did. They grew by turning their back on the historic seaport from which they wanted to part ways; we likewise distanced our selves from Galveston. Their art world continues to be a world apart from what would nurture it. I think ours even more than old Jaffa/Joppa deserves to be a place of pilgrimage, where people have all come a little way wondering. I think it better rounds out the MFAH in the imagination to have this emplacement stand separately. I'd like to see Holl blur the line between sculpture garden and parking lot with a system of spaces devoted to permanent and temporary installation, but not too much in the way of shelters. I'd love to see him propose to spread out over & above the brewery at Sheppard Park in G-town. Let it be a stilted foundation and then, on ground lease, let private concerns come in and renovate around and underneath /afterward/.
  22. strickn
    I want to note that I don't make fun of anyone, and, while both they and I are in earnest, I do know that this commission is not willing to take real risks (else they wouldn't have hired a recognized expert in taking expected risks).
  23. strickn
    They also like it because it can span lengths with a pretty free hand. www.bendheimwall.com/press/pdf/MSU-Ath-Biz_6-09.pdf Also, at $130/ft^2, what it does with light is not any more special'n what else you could do; it speaks of indulgently secure clients who didn't demand pedestrian x,y, and z for all of that investment. Artist eyes love to see potent statements achieved with restraint, even though to me it looks like spelling things out all too densely. Part of the reason that tastes somehow follow the avant garde is that institutions in every-tier cities feel the need to be followed by other tastemakers, and the only way to play It safe is to bend rules somebody else is already bending. If your principles are too unexpected we won't know whether to applaud or blow them off.* Channel glass' use and diseconomy sort of compounds the 'envy me' ability of the client-and-designer's design. *and unfortunately I think Snohetta was considered mostly for that reason, and was lost after shortlisting largely because its San Francisco unveiling hasn't been more immediately envied.
  24. strickn
    The (KC) Nelson-Atkins' corrugated siding stuff is called channel glass, and modernist architects like it because it wasn't around in the era of modernism so to them it looks un-unoriginal.
  25. strickn
    True, Purdueenginerd. Would it be any better if the parapets rose another two storeys in the middle of each side, like the other towers? Would the vacuum in place of each alternating face have more oomph then?
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