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strickn

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Everything posted by strickn

  1. strickn
    The construction site has a completed layer of girders at about the sixth floor level of the Pickens Tower. I had guessed that that would be the end of it, but there are, so far, two posts continuing on up beyond a likely parapet height. I asked the ladies at the dental oncology desk and they had no news on what it all will be. But I'll take a crack at it. First observation: from today's top-floor-or-roof it is thirtysome feet down to the one below, but between that and the next lower it is only eight or nine feet, less than an office floor. The second reasonably related observation is that MDACC has to recruit faculty over job offers from other hungry academic groups in fashionable areas of the world, so that, even though this spot is right next to some physical plant operations, they're not entirely likely to put up a new AAA faculty office block and then proceed to start blocking several floors' bayou vistas unless the new project is some kind of amenity for the faculty there. So I think it will make the most of bayou views instead of filling some function more technical. There are probably enough conference areas at hand for faculty in the Med Center without budgeting one more: these ceiling intervals, specifically, make me wonder if it won't be a convenient natatorium with a couple storeys of related stuff at the bottom of the building, underneath the floor of a swimming pool. If there is a swimming space in the Houston Main Building from its Prudential days, then this could be another stage of outsourcing its roles before obliterating it. http://www.tradelineinc.com/reports/915B6407-2B3B-B525-8CF1351CFC31EAD9 does not answer any questions but it's a very worthwhile scrap of knowledge to have. I'd be glad to know of any writings similar to it that you've read.
  2. strickn
    Unprintable, I've liked your thoughtful photo project concepts likewise.
  3. strickn
    You do a dozen of these parties (well, at least seven or eight) and you have the most poignant and current possible material for the next Houston Mod book.
  4. strickn
    I don't think he was simply being pragmatic: I think he was making an appeal to some idea that this protection is a human rights concern. And a person can make that implicit in all sorts of arguments once we have the barest option of choosing to actually do it. You and the rest of us are right in concluding that we will end up subsidizing disastrous locations one way or the other. But the conscience flag professor's throwing is poorly conceived.
  5. strickn
    Professor Merrell disagrees with those who say the dike would be inadequate in 100 years because of climate change. By then, engineers will have developed better technology to address those issues, he said. The most important thing to remember about the dike is it would save lives, he said.
  6. strickn
    Disconnect. Sure there's a layer in which the design must connect the neighborhood, but on this equally lasting level, they've disconnected.
  7. strickn
    A university (not this one) uncle of mine said that the Southern way to do things is smaller and more personal than Northern institutions are comfortable with. Compare the Menil, Phillips, Witte and Kimbell to, say, the Frick, Morgan, Albright-Knox and the Stewart Gardner fossil (just because by law nothing can be moved around doesn't make it less impersonal). The Menil is even a nice landlord. But these designs' refinement is too hamfisted. The designers think the point is to be modern and sedate. But neither of their buildings have any human tactile qualities, even the 'green' mesh grid. The culture is wrong.
  8. strickn
    Right, because in-town is authentic, like the river in River Oaks, the foothills in the Heights for the mountain in the Montrose, the completely pretentious practice of naming streets for bits of English literature and Ivy League colleges so the price tag can be larger, etc. An old method of theming, and to exactly the same purpose.
  9. strickn
    Are there any new measures, do you know, for keeping what's going down there dry in the next Allison?
  10. strickn
    Both Anderson and UTMB got to be made part of the Permanent University Fund, which lately has declined as steeply as any other chunk of equity. The promises being made to bring UTMB back from the dead would probably be better spent on keeping other units' budgets out of predicaments as far as possible. The one use I have yet to hear suggested for the Astrodome is to become a giant field of medical administrator cubicles. It really begs for illustration and publicity, but let's leave it at imagination.
  11. strickn
    In Context,
  12. strickn
    Anyone's happy to leave the proving job to the fact (that tamtagon picks up on) that this is an institution backed into a corner.
  13. strickn
    Yes. If you compare nacubo's FY 2004 report, when the BCM endowment was $ .972 billion, to the 30/09/2007 one you link, when it was $ .954 billion, and then add in the statement in the back of their Winter 2008 print magazine that they have received just over $ .7 billion in philanthropic donations since 2003, they have eaten through a lot. http://www.nacubo.org/documents/research/F...etsforPress.pdf
  14. strickn
    It would take a heck of a lot of modification; so much that it wouldn't really be able to be called that house anymore. It would lose whatever purity the architect aimed to introduce. Fortunately this particular kind of purity is lost on that neighborly neighborhood.
  15. strickn
    Contrast, yes, but whether it's really of interest is troublesome since it's not even subtly different than what Legorreta might have proposed for anywhere. This design's strongest color is the red flag that it basically passes on specific interaction with the surroundings. Ricardo drew a blank this time. Thanks for the relevant link.
  16. strickn
    BCM got ahead of itself, sadly. Med schools have such vicious internal politics that that can happen more easily than you would think for such large behemoths (they will also have a doubly hard time integrating outside influence). Endowments are going to keep taking hits for the foreseeable future, so it's a question of the extent to which Rice sees that writing on the wall and decides the higher profile name placement is worth the very serious risks. If they risk it, Rice will get top billing because reputation promotion is half the game. Rice University will remain Rice University; BCM will much more likely become the Rice University Baylor College of Medicine - indicating that it's one of the subsidiary faculties (a bit more like MIT Sloan, although there was no merger there, than a merged name like Case Western) - than simply Rice Baylor College of Medicine.
  17. strickn
    Speaking of which, look how the tower cranes are inside the glass cladding (in the picture above).
  18. strickn
    I very much suspect your zeal is misplaced, kylejack. Piano is not on the project for two reasons. First, this is a campus plan. Chipperfield, AFAIR - thinking I read that any of the previous finalists could be hired to work on the actual gallery expansions - will not be designing blobs of physical structure but of rationale. Second, Piano already has a reputation about the Menil. He's lately been hired to expand Fort Worth's Kimbell, and since Kahn is worshiped, being judged to have done a Kimbell expansion artfully would offer him a bigger chance to move on up in the architectural pantheon of how timeless you are. I guess he will be spreading himself thick on that commission.
  19. strickn
    1836 is a rather significant date to be able to look back to. It's like a whole other 1800s. About the only other homestead I know of still like that is Punto-Pina, the estate for which Piney Point Village is named. Thanks for the link.
  20. strickn
    http://www.luxuryportfolio.com/browse~mc/t...ill_village.cfm has one listed for now.
  21. strickn
    ...a permanent loss, I would sooner have said. I saw two Katy houses; any pictures of his first one in Brookshire?
  22. strickn
    It's true that he did a good deal to make Houston what it is for us. But having come to this point in Houston history, it's sad that no one among us can work in his mold for the following generations. Where Vale blessed the streetscape, the economics now call for garage door, garage door, garage door... and that's not a knock on automobility: find new residential blocks that face the street all the way to the ground and the designs hold, if anything, even *less* hope of ever providing surfaces to tinker with and interact with. If it came to change, a garage door is much more easily changed out for something detailed than the blank materials that are becoming the norm. Speaking of which, I'm sorry that he found the courthouse to be his most important commission, because passing by there, it really is a dog compared to the rest of downtown Bay City. The only good thing one can say about its treatment of the surroundings is that it allows large windows by shading them with climatically appropriate louvers. Otherwise, it's a permanent shame that he didn't find a way to give us a public building that showed how to be civically proud while remaining contemporary country. http://www.rootsweb.ancestry.com/~txmatago/bc_pics1.htm
  23. strickn
    Some are saying that Dillards will be leaving Brazoria County's other and only indoor mall. I went and sat out by the side of the road in the middle of the county on Sunday afternoon listening to A Prairie Home Companion and saw about 500 cars headed north in the first hour. Quite something for a Southern Brazoria County area of 75,000 people total.
  24. strickn
    I guess Allen Center is their (Devon's, not just Hess') E&P base or something, but all other things are not remaining equal with its overall leasing needs and operations growth - Devon is building a 2,000,000 ft^2 building in Oklahoma City.
  25. strickn
    You make a good point. Bryant Park offers the Public Library; Millennium Park hosts the Art Institute of Chicago. Central Park fronts the American Natural History, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Neue Galerie and other stuff. Hermann Park has MFAH, the Natural Science Museum, and more. Forest Park gives you I can't remember what-all other than the arboretum, but I think Grant Park has Science and Industry and the Shedd Aquarium. Once Disco Green's surrounding blocks have finished filling with national-label hospitality brands, as you assume the economy will let them do, then what we are looking at is fairly straightforward. I don't doubt for a minute that it's possible to keep the Green programmed enough with local color to charm out-of-towners and the execs staying in One Park Place or the 4 Seasons Residences, and there are upsides to that (I don't remember what prior posts I have ever made about DG, but I have always been quite in agreement with ya about its capacity to be a real estate development magnet; only reserved about its capacity to be very much more in a few years, once the place is ringed by glass lobby walls not so different from the ones that sterilize Smith, Louisiana and Milam). Yet so does the programmed green at Pearland Town Center: and, once that kind of schedule starts to strike consumers as inauthentic, like the indoor mall and its public liveliness began to look to people after awhile... then I can't foresee how the GRB neighborhood gets any closer to having the built-in resources - built in like the destinations that help keep Bryant Park and all the rest very relevant and so made you think of them - for DG to appear greater than just downtown's piece of flair. To appear as much greater than that as it still could [with some wise noncommercial use of the double block on the north], anyway. Once its economic energetic job is done, you want to see it keep enchanting the community. You know the Duchamp doodle off at the edge, by the parking garage entry? For downtown, the current infill program is distressingly apt to leave Discovery Green to function like that hood ornament writ large.
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