strickn

What I would prefer is that -- instead of building regional high speed rail from point to point around the Texan Triangle and expanding all our half-dozen international airports quite piecemeal -- we built three legs of rail that met in the middle at a shared airport city. Then our urban zones would be like neighborhoods of a highly specialized metroplex, one with 1,492,162,294 square feet of flex and warehouse; 764 million square feet of office (second in the country) even before Houston's current campus boom comes online; and 913 Msf of retail (also second in the nation).

Texas culture and why so many native Texans resent it. Texas pride and why so many native Texans apologize for it. Texas bravado and why so many native Texans ______ about it. I remember reading an old-timer on some forgotten forum say that when Southern California was mushrooming, it just couldn't do anything right in the eyes of the Eastern establishment, who were constantly criticizing it. Now SoCal has settled down into a known quantity that did not run New York out of business, so it no longer draws much ire. Texas is the leading edge of that great Sunbelt migration, and therefore it takes the blame for whatever anyone dislikes about the new kid on the block. Now if Kinky Friedman has a place in the East Village, I am sure there's something good about New York; there will always be native Texans who identify with what it has to offer artistically, intellectually, stylistically, and see us not collectively devoting sufficient love or priority, here, to those pillars of the Establishment. They infer that we ought to know better, that as up and comers we ought to set ourselves up to do better, and that we do not in fact know better than the folks we are eclipsing on the coasts: something unfair is happening. Success is going to what doesn't deserve it; to what doesn't deserve to be identified with. Going with what seems to work will always draw more "voters with their feet" than refinement will. It's why popular movies and popular music and popular sex are so often so worthless. Is it any different with urbanization? Not if resentment is what's going on. But I suspect that an embarrassment is closer to the truth.

http://www.houstonarchitecture.com/haif/topic/4384-galleria-expansionrebuild-300-unit-highrise/page-8 -- The Galleria III is learning. I wish some Houstonians would actually go read and discuss design theory, instead of letting the thread drop. We are so patriotic when it comes to defending the hometown, but so lazy when it comes to improving its level of architectural literacy by doing our homework - something that might have patriotic substance. Speaking of learning.

Top US industrial market areas at midyear: 1,798,445,948 square feet in 62,094 buildings Greater L.A. 1,551,754,178 square feet in 45,629 buildings NY Tristate 1,146,064,622 square feet in 22,066 buildings Greater Chicagoland 1,015,889,237 square feet in 19,663 buildings Delaware Valley (Philly) (986,835,007 square feet in 36,885 buildings Los Angeles County alone) (806,806,921 square feet in 17,096 buildings Northern New Jersey alone) 780,024,632 square feet in 20,014 buildings Metroplex 652,373,381 square feet in 15,880 buildings North Georgia 581,220,887 square feet in 19,663 buildings Bay Area CA 558,954,625 square feet in 16,733 buildings Detroit 515,196,576 square feet in 16,618 buildings Houston-Galveston (509,053,130 square feet in 12,590 buildings Inland Empire alone) 497,125,479 square feet in 11,793 buildings Greater Boston 476,790,108 square feet in 12,297 buildings Cleveland-Akron Total flex and warehouse ("industrial") inventory in the US was pushing 21 billion square feet, so these are a really high proportion of the nation's total, right here. Edit: Either that, or they don't do a good job of tracking industrial space outside the major markets. Hmm...

http://www.costar.com/News/Article/Market-Trend-Tulsas-Office-Deliveries-Construction-and-Inventory/151183 Hou19514, You are correct insofar as the Tulsa metro has much scarcer Class A office space than we do [less than 6.2 Msf out of total 49, or one-eighth of the total, compared to fully forty percent Class A throughout Houston], but remember that it was the oil capital before offshore moved it to Houston, so it does get underestimated by common knowledge. I also separated metropolitan divisions in the case of SoCal. In these two cases there was big disparity between metropolitan moving parts, with warehouse and distribution space predominating in the Inland Empire and in Fort Worth-Arlington. In the Tristate metropolitan divisions, or the Bay Area, I think that office was more evenly provisioned.

A Labor Day weekend look at labor: Some US metros' Office per capita (in square feet) 2Q 2013 reports divided by Census Bureau July 2012 MSA population estimates 105 Greater Washington 79 Greater Washington excluding 155 Msf of federally owned space circa 2003 (the latest overall total found) 66 Delaware Valley 65 Dallas-Plano-Irving 64 Tristate NYC 60 Bay Area CA 59 Greater Boston-NH 55 Greater Atlanta 54 Mpls-Saint Paul 51 Pittsburgh 50 Birmingham 50 Tulsa 49 Orange County 48 Chicagoland-Elgin-Gary-Kenosha 48 Baltimore 44 Greater Houston-Galveston 43 Charlotte 43 Los Angeles 42 OKC 41 Portland 37 Phoenix 25 Fort Worth-Arlington 24 Tucson 16 Inland Empire

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

There are so many New Yorkers that Washington may now be largest per capita, though.

They recently eclipsed Chicagoland* despite having a population of 5.9 million compared to 9.8 million. But that's only in office space, and it goes to show how much DC's workplace is a paperwork factory. For instance, metro DC has even more office space than Chicago at the same time that it has almost a billion fewer square feet of industrial space; less than half what comparably sized metro Houston** has. *464 million to 460 million square feet, respectively, according to Costar for last quarter **515 million to 210 million square feet, respectively, according to Costar

Yes, they do, although if you only look up the reports CoStar filed the same day for New York and Los Angeles, for instance, you will miss by just how much they lead (since separate reports are made for New York City, Long Island, Northern New Jersey, Westchester / Southern Connecticut, Los Angeles, Orange County, and Inland Empire (if I haven't missed any)). The way to search for these on yahoo, google or bing, at least, is to type: [keywords] site:costar.com But since I've already looked them up, above are links for those I've mentioned. And just as a cheat... they together still account for 18.24% of the whole nation's 'office supply.' The Texas Triangle metros together now account for only 7.39% (Chicagoans fill about four and a half percent). If it's any consolation, we have 11% of the US' owner-occupied inventory, and NY-LA has only 15%, reflecting difference finance patterns.

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.

With all due respect to Edmonds International, the architect, I just wish its diagrid weren't so much like the tallest building in the /other/ oil capital, Calgary. And for the fifteen days a year their square-block plaza'll be a tolerable place to be, they probably could do something much less retrograde.

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."

Chicago held an excellent seat between East and West when that became the dominant axis of the country and the continent. If the axes have shifted to north-south, then the Texas Triangle is in the hot seat for the next few generations.

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.

Looking through the 1956 AIA Directory, I found a Baytown architect, Lowell Lammers (born Chicago, educated at MIT and the Armour Institute of Technology), who had moderated a KTRH program by that name in 1952. Do any archives exist that might preserve the conversations?

http://communities.aia.org/sites/hdoaa/wiki/Wiki%20Pages/Browse%20Pa.aspx The closest names who were ever members of the AIA are Victor E. Pannell (Louisiana/Texas) or James B. Pannell of Montana. No Parnell is recorded. This doesn't mean he had no architectural education, but I'd be interested to know whether this house was at the start or at the end of his career.

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.

I'd suggest that all but the largest of them be about like this ( link ), where peds are clearly in charge but there's multimode access.

How about weaving a lacework of lanes through the blocks? The downtown grid is so long to a side that - even if you do have more than a single entrance - most of the street face is inert.

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.

It's not off-topic from the original poster; these two most dense (and both brand-new, leading to their natural comparison on each count) sections of our state are not coming along well in terms of true urbanity or true Texanness. It's just off-topic from what people want to make this thread. It could be a thread that people learned from and thought about. Instead it became what it is. We could restart it now from a more thoughtful angle. Let's do so. tierwestah said, "...speaking of Uptown Dallas developments and how it's coming along as far as urbanity. A certain member pointed out in another thread that Houston's TMC has similar developments as Uptown Dallas urbanly speaking. For one thing, the light rail runs right through..." Now, how could we both make this a thoughtful dialogue AND make Tex/urbanity more thoughtful than Sunbelt development + 'Bigger Is Better', which is what it is right now?

How about: If a place were approaching perfection, we would be able to say that there is something characteristically Texan about its urban form. Such places will be neighborly without being nosy; dignified without being presentable; have a sense of spaciousness, density notwithstanding; what else will they be? What other qualities of Texans can we interpret and express, make tangible?

It seems like if you apply that two-sentence philosophy to everybody, it ascribes ultimate value to our comfort zones. That becomes mighty impersonal, interpersonally.* So, taken on its own terms, it is likely self-defeating to put the person at the center of life. *For example, the rest that doesn't matter includes other people's comfort zones.

How was it? Good post again.