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strickn

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Everything posted by strickn

  1. strickn
    I encourage photo postings of this bldg as well./
  2. strickn
    good find.
  3. strickn
    Now that Anderson's Pickens faculty tower is built... http://www.kdbc.com/Global/story.asp?S=8140147
  4. strickn
    p. 18 of this month's Houston History magazine (subscribe, all of you! http://vi.uh.edu/public_history/public_history.html ) has a map said to be circa 1942 of Houston's proposed core freeway network. The Fulg, er, Gulf Freeway is listed as such. No source is given for the document (there is a small "Figure 7", so I like the sound of your anecdote, though a sourced 1950 Houston Post Parade Magazine article comfortably refers to it by that name.
  5. strickn
    One does have to question the wisdom of building Discovery Green with public dollars and having this park bounded by two-block megastructures on the north and south and a five-block monoculture on its principal side. The remaining side is likely to have Discovery Tower, One Park Place, and Embassy Suites. That accounts for the entire perimeter. The fact that downtown Houston is the biggest employment spot in the South or Southwest and yet every downtown park and plaza is vacant except at lunch hour suggests that Discovery Tower (and probably Embassy Suites) is not going to enliven the park. One Park Place's handful of residents will be the only Houstonians likely to use the park for whom it won't be "out of sight, out of mind" for a lot of the times of the day at which they might use it. The GRB and 59 will obstruct any future pedestrian traffic from the east that it might have been used by, and will provide a thousand feet of dead-zone frontage that no area resident will have a reason to cross the park to get to. This is a major blow to its function as anything other than a periodically used garnish. So that leaves us with convention hotel guests (primarily evening and possibly morning use), affluent restaurant patrons, and people in between sessions of a meeting at the convention center (sporadic use throughout the day). It's a nice park for all that money, but it's not going to mean much to distracted visitors.* Having large structures with pitifully few points of entry or nodes of dense activity deactivating the edges of the Green, where fresh pedestrian flows from streets might have fed in - something that Central Park, by comparison, utterly relies upon - means that it really will be sort of a yard for businesspeople with business there, and not someplace that a Houstonian population would have much reason to wander into. On the other hand, if the double block on the north is perforated and made very permeable at ground level, it's still conceivable we could eventually have a neighborhood public space on our hands. But if all goes as appears to be planned, we'll have gotten a speculative real estate development spark plug for all our hopes and civic efforts - and from that development, more additional showpiece property tax dollars than actual human use. *much as I want to believe otherwise, believe that it at least contributes to their minds some of the shade and the healthy division between hard work and unpresentable repine that Houston's fabric, out where conventioneers will never get to go, demonstrates and brings to grand scruffy life.
  6. strickn
    Our Pru definitely has lines. Even shorn by semi-necessity of most of its tropical gardens, it's still a neater place than the other semi-vintage Prudential buildings that I know of in Newark, Chicago or Boston - though the Newark one is wonderfully sound: http://www.emporis.com/en/il/im/?id=465805 What I have figured for the last year or two is this: Right now it's headed for teardown, and we know the Med Center's architectural record is as abysmal as PageSoutherlandPage's new Pickens Academic Tower for MD Anderson that had to be built before teardown could begin. Buildings built before the advent of advanced calculation were not optimized down to minimum materials with modern structural margins of error; they are far stronger than we now know they "have to be" (and MUCH more laborious to demolish than any of our recent accomplishments would be). The building's frame could be used to anchor and support truly 21st Century class/office/lab interdisciplinary floors, building out from alternating floors of the existing tower. You'd be getting hundreds of thousands of square feet of brand-new space while paying for only one or two load-bearing walls instead of four, nevermind demolition and debris removal costs in an age when institutions are bragging about how much needless life-cycle waste they saved in their construction. Would this really work? Use Internet Exploder with the following bird's eye view http://maps.live.com/default.aspx?v=2&...9&encType=1 For one or more wings of the tower, the semi-cantilever could be done on both sides of the same floors, tripling them in size, or for vertical circulation loads the additions on one side of the building could take place to floors 1,3,5,25... with interstitial space of less than a full storey left over next to floors 2,4,6 - while the additions on the other side met floors 2,4,6,24... with the ductwork and wiring chases next to floors 1,3,5... The building's floorplates would double in size, and support functions in the cores would already be in place. There is such a deep L on the back of the building, all the way down to bare ground (and that's not even in sight!), that spatial fitting on the site is less of a concern than economic stewardship. And this plan, unless the building's foundation is really cracking, makes keeping the Pru a vastly more sensible proposition than it has sounded like in the two options (renovate the old space, or scrape the site) administrators have been given so far. I think they have enough imagination and pragmatism to see the wisdom in a solution like this. And for architects, a good starting canvas like this building increases the chances that the design outcome will be a neat improvement, too. (The 40 Storey Hotel/condo Tower will take care of itself.)
  7. strickn
    Well, they're envisioning only 400K gross square feet, so if a tenant interested in the building's naming/signage rights for that kind of visibility were to prelease as much as 120K rentable square feet, Hines would have met its 40% cutoff and might be in a position to expand the tower. What I particularly like is that, since this deal has to meet a congregation's approval, the whole reasoning is explained much more fully than real estate projects typically care to let the public understand. I say that not in terms of "eye candy" but of planning method, I guess. And thanks, Puma...
  8. strickn
    http://www.trinity.edu/mkearl/death02/deat...e/01Define.html is likely to get a "modern" neighbor. The site is on Memorial Woods Drive, 77024, facing the Katy Freeway directly west and south of its interchange with 610. Kirksey has designed a 16-storey speculative office building and 1,500-space parking garage on what is currently First Baptist Houston's west lot. First Baptist's homepage suggests, "Parking off-site is one of the easiest ways that HFBC members can support the church's ministry. Doing so opens up on-site spaces for visitors, families with young children and individuals with physical limitations. Refer to the online map for available parking options, shuttle routes, and drop-off/pick-up locations." From the day we moved to this location (April 17, 1977), finding room for parking has been a challenge. In fact, the first published "master plan" for this site specified a parking garage on the west parking lot. Since that time, financial constraints and questions concerning feasibility have thwarted at least three attempts to construct a parking garage. This opportunity is the first that brings no additional financial obligation to HFBC and actually returns funds to HFBC in the form of lease payments to the church and the elimination to the church of parking leases and shuttle fees. In April of 2007, representatives of the Gerald Hines Company met with Pastor Gregg and several Deacons to explore the possibility of commercial development on our west parking lot which would include a parking garage containing about 1500 spaces. Following the meeting, Hines paid for a feasibility study including traffic, engineering and architectural issues. In a presentation to the Deacons in August of 2007, Hines asked for a vote of approval to investigate the economic viability of such a project. Now, in January of 2008, they are asking for a congregational vote ensuring the "surety of the proposal." In other words, if Hines can locate the tenants, Trustees of HFBC have the authority to enter into a ground lease. Garage construction would begin no earlier than January 2009 and take approximately 1 year to complete, while the office tower will begin upon 40% pre-leasing. Fun-to-learn-from bunches of renderings, site plans, floorplans and graphical timeline in http://www.houstonsfirst.org/pdf/hines.pdf , so I won't merely post the pictures. Latest design & info as 9/2015: http://www.houstonchronicle.com/business/real-estate/article/First-Baptist-owned-land-to-get-office-tower-6504225.php
  9. strickn
    It would just be a shame to put the greater investment in a region where it will only serve fewer and fewer people... Not that this is a particularly significant investment. I figure the take-home from this is that if the company got more traffic from the promotional than they were expecting, they'll definitely give more of this away in the future than they had been contemplating doing before this week ran its course.
  10. strickn
    For better or worse, neato "that's just about right" visions like that first 4:52 graphic are why we get disproportionately giddy about high-rise development :-)
  11. strickn
    I understand your [edit: TheNiche] tone, as usual; yet it bears mentioning that one would think that Sixth and Seventh Avenues in Midtown Manhattan would be the most urbane part of the island instead of the least by that measure of progress. Rigidity is just rigidity, and intense concentration of a use can just mean distortively large flows of materials and visitors at certain times of day and vacancy at other nice times of day. Better to have a real neighborhood feel that endures: and all great neighborhoods are puny in your economic standards. The parts of DTH that are heavily developed don't epitomize anything; they're glamour walls that will never be an enduring neighborhood, and any positive development has to work around those blocks rather than, heaven forbid, emulate them.
  12. strickn
    A lot of people have been waiting for this wrinkle in the Med Center's development, and if this were 18 months ago I'd imagine it would fill up quickly and inspire either an expansion or additional projects. Now? Though medical practice isn't going anywhere, money's getting tighter and people know it's only going to get tighter; a significant part of the money floating around in America was based in prospective value that didn't exist because the supposed riskiness (according to the MIT grads going to NY investment banks) of the speculative future revenues was in fact unrealistically low. In other words, that money wasn't any surer a thing than all the internet startups' future riches; it's just that "risk management" firms made things so complicated that no-one but them could understand much of the market... and their understanding, for its part, was incented - during these financial industry boom years, those volumes looked so good, and so expected, in the annual balance sheet - to be overly optimistic about the securities being bundled. I.e., they were wrong. Hopefully the developer, Medistar, already has their financing in place at reasonable rates. Anybody have an idea of it?
  13. strickn
    Houston has cracked 32% today; keep up the good work.
  14. strickn
    swamplot always goes for the easy line and the smartass tone, which serves them right because the easy line so often undermines their pretense: For instance: a 40-storey hotel and condo tower is neither going to be taller than a 31-storey office building nor a 27-storey hospital, because interfloor heights are more than a third lower for residential and especially hotel space.
  15. strickn
    Yes, this is going up. "Colgate-Palmolive is awarding all nine participating hospitals a Fun Center..."; however, "Voting remains open through February 29, and the hospital that receives the most support will receive an additional Fun Center" - presently Houston and Detroit each have 31.2x% of the vote, with Atlanta and Philadelphia running a distant third and fourth at about half that. http://www.colgate.com/app/Colgate/US/Corp...-love/vote.cvsp will take you all of ten seconds to complete, if you will. You can vote once per 24 hour period, so a total of thirty seconds of your workweek would be appreciated. Moderators, your vote too would be good; two days from now, edit the title to reflect the outcome -- or just merge with the low-profile thread in Other Houston, but don't merge before the first of March, please.
  16. strickn
    I appreciate your fact check, 19514.
  17. strickn
    In a word, no. Remember how crappy it was when Hines plopped a half-block parking garage in the Main St. light rail pedestrian corridor last year? How is having Disco Tower's full-block garage on the future Rusk St. light rail pedestrian corridor going to be? One more unrewarding block to keep any interesting activity from developing, and one more sterile expanse to remind people in the neighborhood that it's not worth going out. I hope it dies long enough that when the developers come back, they're compelled to propose something less bare. Unless you were going back to commenting on City Centre rather than on Discovery Tower now.
  18. strickn
    I thought about comparing this reception to that of another new permanent, prominent fixture on the face of Downtown. You see, this thread contains a dozen separate Jiffy-Lube catcalls about the fire station's clunkiness; the MainPlace discussion isn't dragging with a similarly continuous inability to get over it clunking into the amateurish, embarrassingly visible form of a 600-foot pipe wrench, electric can-opener or cigarette lighter. Since a taut glass prism, shining and revealing as little humanity as possible in between its architectural features at the scale of a dozen feet and the scale of a few hundred feet, is absolutely nothing new, while even the sky court was done better than this in 1984 at Innova/Koch 20 Greenway Plaza -- since, in short, a tower that would have been crisply banal and non-revelatory a generation ago is not intrinsically superior to a station that would have been crisply banal and non-revelatory two or three generations ago -- it sounds like unoriginality has less to do with objections to Station 8 than annoyance at the temerity of the architects not to have embraced impressive ideas about progress which MainPlace fits much more proudly.
  19. strickn
    If that turns out to be the tract, hopefully they (or any high-rise developer who eventually breaks ground here) are able to line up the big 'un on center with the axis defined by Transco and its waterwall.
  20. strickn
    Don't hold your breath. Regardless of mass transit or auto transit, people generally (almost without exception) like to live on the same side of downtown that they work on; it is not a nice prospect to have to cross the center in rush hour congestion to get to work and to get back home. Once favorite sides of downtown develop, new jobs and new housing feed outward on one another, making it all the more unlikely, over time, that residents of the region will work or live on the disfavored sides of downtown. Houston has spread so far to the west now that *downtown is on the wrong side of Uptown*. While there are still plenty of directions to get to it from, and , compared to crappy East and West Coast roads, the drive can be feasible even from the west if you happen to enjoy being behind the wheel, it simply is going to be a rarer occasion to find the tenant base for going real high-rise downtown as opposed to uptown - or the energy corridor, where costs don't need to bother going high-rise.
  21. strickn
    Anyone have an idea of the designer and construction history of the house?
  22. strickn
    Only an enclosed space, not something with finished floor materials, interior walls, light fixtures, ready-to-use plumbing setup, or the like; much less furnishings.
  23. strickn
    crud. And here I had been assuming from the name that it was going to be laboratory space for research renters. Lab space in Houston would be extremely nationally competitive compared to the construction prices and carrying costs in Chicago, California, Massachusetts... and if enough of it were built near the universities and hospitals, Texas could begin to consolidate a position in life science. Otherwise I think that the growth will be in North Carolina, Florida, and maybe Georgia.
  24. strickn
    So perhaps this means that St. Luke's got the malpractice lawyer's donation but, almost as soon as the paint has dried this year, the new owner will go ahead and christen the tower something else.
  25. strickn
    Well, if you're giving people the proper amount of credit, and most just don't rub shoulders with any engineers often, then Houston must have slurped up more engineers from everywhere else than even I thought...
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