strickn

Oh, and Galveston had "one of the first" ocean theme parks in the nation.

https://www.google.com/search?q=galveston+sea-a-rama

I'm sure there's a thread on here about it.

They just expanded their campus with an Aquatica waterpark, so, no, they're not looking to relocate. SeaWorld wants to be in a tourism destination, and Houston doesn't fit the bill.

Kevin Roche Study For Houston Skyscrapers, 1981

http://archiveofaffi...ise-in-downtown

http://archiveofaffi...ise-in-downtown

1981, evidently.

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.

There has been a rush of Austin as a national feel-good destination. Austin's office market is still low-rise, as you would expect from tech and institutional tenants; and its downtown office market, its office building skyline and its metro area are still smaller than Fort Worth's. Hospitality and residential are the accumulated demand, and they're not pent up from longtime Austin residents but the recently interested. The real pent-up demand is among institutional investors for real estate projects to invest in in a place with good fundamentals like Austin.

See, all this is going downtown. I can't help but think that since they don't have competing areas like we do (Galleria, Energy, Woodlands, Westchase etc), it's helping push the tall building drive in their downtown. I guess they don't have as much competition because of zoning?

San Antonio may have the same conditions in those respects, and no boom. Could it be arbitrage between the ability to build at lower local prices and the ability to charge higher national prices?

I see an average customer who's moving to Austin for lifestyle cachet from across the nation but who doesn't know they could live the same for a lot less in San Antonio.

Major projects like the Dallas Arboretum children's garden, 2001 McKinney, Fidelity and Deloitte University have been more or less under the radar statewide. One of the three might be Texas' project of the decade, for all we know. But the one might be less than Edenic, Cesar Pelli could rehash a design, and Westlake? May go south. Then you'll have jealousy on Ostintation's side.

Lovely long response. Thanks to this and prior generations of Alexanders.

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.

Just being f500 does not count you very much. The top quintile of this year's list was 11, while the bottom quintile was numbers 200 through 500. It's more of a US News and World Report type self-publicity deal. If they cared more about it meaning something... let's just say that even certified giants like Du Pont and Google (nos. 72 and 73 by revenue) are in the bottom half of the revenue made by the entire five hundred companies, since the top 14% of the 500 have more than half of the 500's sales.

Now, bringing the topic full circle, Houston's Eighties surge passed up every North American city but Manhattan and Chicago. This was another long tail distribution. In the past decade, however, not only have they pulled ahead, those dirty two, but our skyline has been eclipsed by any number of more privileged places - Toronto, South Florida, Ciudad Panama, Vancouver - and even the possibilities of a resurgent Ciudad Mexico, San Francisco, Calgary and Las Vegas. If you look at privilege, we're lagging. Not that that's a bad thing.

http://www.cclerk.hctx.net/applications/websearch/RP.aspx

lets you do pretty good searches.

input rogers john b in the grantor and grantee fields successively and you get

john b

john berry

john bruce

john butler

as the only possibilities in that timeframe.

Given the columns that provide subdivision and that provide section-block-lot, you should have very few lots to search for modernistic buildings.

Vale's First Baptist Church sanctuary in Lake Jackson turned 50 last year and is intact. Easy to visit.

Thanks for this! I had seen the general offices and missed the hotel. Please keep posting on other Texan places.

There's a pocket hood along Japhet Creek less than 2 and a quarter miles from Enron Field. Thickly treed lots, less than two dozen houses, and just enough room to do something like you talk about.

"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

I wouldn't have foreseen it, but these dark rafters blend in to the tree limbs, too. The more of that the better! Thank you for showing us again.

First let's try making East Loop the main lanes of I-45 and see how all patterns adjust. It might even help balance the Hardy Toll Road with North Freeway in the process.

What are the plans for the McKie & Kamrath dental campus now that the school can relocate?

Fantastic threadwork, bred. Wish more of us knew enough to help you with it.

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.

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.

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/.

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).

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.