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.

Unprintable, I've liked your thoughtful photo project concepts likewise.

(Since we didn't call the thread done once Attica weighed in with the right answer) - Conversely, if a surface stretched our tape measure a distance then it would be pedantic to insist that the distance couldn't count for real. Up until today I had the feel that pedants were exactly the sort of person drawn to be involved in CTBUH.

Are office rents quoted on an annual per square ft basis? Is this just because there's more flexibility in purchase sizes going on than for the kind of apartment we talk about in monthly terms? Skimming an article from the height of the Manhattan Imaginary-Future-Value Decade, I see, "...the Seagram Building. 'It’s such a beautiful building,' Mr. Durst said, 'and those rents that people are willing to pay to go there!' ...impresses landlords in two ways: It’s absolutely the hallmark to any portfolio, and it’s a huge moneymaker, with eager tenants dropping well over $100 per square foot... It’s a bit less than 800,000 square feet, so the Seagram is the only site on the list that wouldn’t clear $2 billion. It is a building however, that would probably clear $2,000 per square foot." My puzzlement is that if one could gross (800K*100+) and net fifty million or more every month, then even a multibillion-dollar building would be minting money inside of five years and it would be worth a much larger multiple of the monthly rate (than this, above) to prospective owners who bid. If it is a yearly rate, then it makes more sense.

Lofty buildings have always served to illustrate their citizens' aspirations, and the very tops [have always served] as beacons to drive the point home. This stylized design, brought to us by the Dial Corporation, daily reminds the austoned to open up their Right Guard brand underarm antiperspirant and remember that keeping Austin weird does not mean keeping Austin funky.

The only difference between a skyline of these and a skyline of seventies shoeboxes is that these are more menacing, not more artful. If we're supposed to forever swallow that The Architect is being some kind of artist as much as a building contractor, then this is not helping. It, like the previous schemes, is not viable even as mere sculpture. Shame on Pelli.

I ate there in late December, and not on a night with mariachis. I wasn't really paying attention to the food, but I remember it being along or near Jefferson in or near Winnetka Heights. Have fun.

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.

I too ran across 5477 Doliver (from the air, no less) and saw the 1999 HCAD record on the way here. I'm surprised that it could possibly be 1990s construction and not be bragged on by any architect capable of building such a creation these days. Owner is now Condon Builders, which may be a bad sign. But how about deciding with the aid of HistoricAerials.com?

-- What was this post to highlight (I'm curious)? "In my mind, it seems to define the Dallas. It's old style. It's modern style. It's location on the NTex plains." Nice, and it may be more than style too. The buildings down the left hand are the Adolphus, the Magnolia Co. (later Mobil) Bldg, and the Mercantile National Bank (only U.S. skyscraper built during WWII). Across the frame on the right is AT&T's fresh head office. Into the 1970s Houston's ole bidness had lots of downstream employment and usually exploration management but little to no major multinational headquarters operations. They were still in NYC, LA, SF, Tulsa, Chicago and Cleveland. Likewise, during the 1990s and 00s North Texas was a real hotspot for telecom specialties, but in executive terms had only TI and the U.S. base for Nortel really to show for it. Dallas watchers may be hoping that just as style, petroleum and banking/insurance clusters highlit the city during its 20th century growth phase, so also will telecommunications headquarters begin to stream in during the 21st. Perhaps this shot depicts that prospect.

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.

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.

right, I guess an audience who choose to sit on the computer making x average posts per day is probably not the one to ask for their observations on trying rooms in the yard. Maybe just knowing there's green year-round and elbow room available on all sides, spreading from block to gully to block instead of left only in narrow rows, is the biggest constituent part of Houstonians' sense of outdoor space. It will be interesting to see, as all the Tejano families with a good socioeconomic foothold here in Houston comprise the middle class, whether they will enhance their heavily used yards and the social culture that setup engenders, or whether the pace of turning inward will outstrip it and n o common language of local courtyard life will spread with the middle-class.

Disconnect. Sure there's a layer in which the design must connect the neighborhood, but on this equally lasting level, they've disconnected.

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.

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.

One side of the nation has sea cliffs and one side has fall colors, but the Gulf Coast has almost all of the English-speaking world's subtropical cities (outside of India). This could be a much greater element of the life here than either of the West or East coasts' are for them. Still, in the building blitz of the last few years, about the only attention I have seen given to outdoor living has been to: 1) the sleek new classroom building at UH 2) the renovation of the Frame House on Buffalo Bayou 3) the open-air church in Stafford I suspect this is because people have forgotten how easy microclimate is to create. It was understood in the Forties and Fifties, as before, that judicious use of yard plantings to screen and to funnel air and temperature was essential in a relaxing use of the everyday environment. Historian of the everyday environment John Stilgoe believes that this shaping fell by the wayside not so much because air conditioning seemed to decouple indoor comfort from outdoor (the usual understanding I guess (and when my uncle went to Rice in the sixties, the dorms had screen doors)) as because you less and less had a wife at home to engage the fine-tuned opening and closing of doors and windows around the house throughout the day. I wonder what is animating today's experiments in open air design. You'd think it'd be a prime place for adding and subtracting until the shape and the people suit each other well, since knocking out walls indoors has such unfriendlier higher stakes. And Houston should be a more informative set of outdoor living solutions than the other two big subtropical American cities, Miami and New Orleans, since as a place it exists so much less on behalf of the rich or the habituated than they do. Let's have a thread to describe and/or depict the most insightful things that owners have tried outside from West Houston to Port Arthur and anywhere in between. If you're seeing something thought-provoking in Galveston County or Lake Livingston, let's add it to the pot. Living in Southeast Texas and talking all about the interior-decorated public and private places is like living in Houston and overlooking all the industrial projects in favor of office/retail and condoes.

I found it about two months ago. Apparently Park Place has some hidden gems I haven't run across yet, too: http://www.houstonarchitecture.info/haif/i...mp;#entry216022 This is the only thread where HAIF has mentioned it, to date, but the link is http://www.hiddenoaksbnb.com/history.htm

Are there any new measures, do you know, for keeping what's going down there dry in the next Allison?

Try putting a top-loading washer, sink, and dryer down the right-hand wall (as you walk in; on the left in plan), so that you'll have a workspace to use [medicine cabinet behind the fold-down ironing board?] and one that will be available even when the tub or toilet are in use. You could either have a closet in the jog of the wall behind - and another door in line with the first to lead to the inner bathroom - or you could altogether avoid the expense of framing in another door as follows. Let the jog contain two of the three feet of a 3' wide passage, curtained as creatively as you like, parallel to the main door, and divide the rest of the space with a 5'6" storage divider running parallel to the main door (and not necessarily all the way to the ceiling - more lively if you won't). There should be enough room behind it for the tub and toilet cul-de-sac that you could have a bit of shelving facing back there for their toiletries too. In any case you will have to port the dryer and the bathroom humidity out-of-doors if there is no window. By the way, that galley kitchen is not likely going to work smoothly, if there's anything you can look to do about that.

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.

West Columbia Elem., I guess. I can't find any pictures digitized (does anyone have a write-up on it?). There would be plenty here: http://archon.lib.uh.edu/?p=collections/fi...contentid=27611 "In March 2005, the Houston Mod organization sponsored an exhibition at the Gerald D. Hines College of Architecture concerning Barthelme's Bousquet House (1940). At the time, the house, at 3981 Del Monte Drive in Houston's River Oaks neighborhood, was the last surviving Barthelme-designed residence in the city. It was demolished later in the year. The exhibit coincided with efforts by a class from the University of Houston to document the house for the Historic American Buildings Survey (HABS). The exhibit featured a booklet, detailed photographs and drawings of the house in 2005, a scale model, the HABS drawings, and reproductions of Barthelme's original drawings. Houston Mod donated the exhibition materials to the University of Houston Libraries, Department of Special Collections, where they were added to the Donald Barthelme, Sr. Architectural Papers."

You're welcome, marmer. And don't count the Golden Triangle out just yet - tonight, or some other time, some fellow in the shadow of the bleachers at Lamar is going to be throwing a switch like Fermi under the bleachers at University of Chicago, and Beaumont will become the fusion center of the globe and a Big B to our Gulf Coast Tarrant County. Since my post, I have some other information, regardless of its relationship to what I have written: I checked out the county census counts from 1900-1910. Dallas, Harris, Tarrant, and far Southeast Texas each received forty to fifty thousand net new residents over that decade (Galveston County, which had grown from 31 to 44 thousand in the nineties, did not lose any population on net). Houston city already before the hurricane enjoyed a population slightly greater than did Galveston County with the Wall Street of the South. Cotton leadership and money, and famous families' leadership and money, can each have sustained and developed Houston without either of them accounting for the bifurcation between us and Beaumont. Memphis, I recall, had quite a start in both of those domains, but it has been on nobody's list of wellsprings of productive labor to watch for a long time, and it's not just that we had more clever architects of commerce, no matter whether they came from Western Tennessee (Jones) or from the Great Storm. Remember that North Texas, even Dallas by itself, was more central in cotton and population until just about the Great Depression. The industries, and attendant transportation, built on cotton put both Houston and Dallas in a position that was necessary but not sufficient to become what they were postwar; in 1900, even Grayson County outside Dallas had a population the same as the more expansive Harris County. What actually made our leading cities look so different from Beaumont in later years were the status choices that local wildcatter Michel Halbouty of Beaumont recalled, and the following: Even when the Industrial Revolution made something more than muscle power available to accomplish some tasks, its 'fossil' fuel work was only as portable as your boiler room. The steamboat was good, but the locomotive was the most powerful force in Nineteenth Century economic geography because if you review it it was the absolute minimum granular size that could use this concentrated power and make it portable* - it was the point where the best fuel system could fit down most closely into the pores of active life. When a select few regions - never forgetting Tulsa, but also don't forget California, or the first oil skyscraper in Pittsburgh - brought petroleum and modern fuel oil into national life, a whole different level of lightweightness and portability was achieved, and with it, a new order of magnitude in lowering the stakes to get productive work done. This was great, and it really diffused the Industrial Revolution as never before, yet it did not make as permanent a strategic difference for Texas as you'd think from looking at Houston and the Metroplex now - but by making them the epicenters of population, this made them and their professional economies stand to benefit far more from workforce changes in the postwar era when they really set themselves apart: Ted Goranson wrote, "Building a knowledge-based economy using oil wealth is clearly possible. For example, Texas, like most southern US states, was once economically poor and declining. Although it had oil revenue, the flow of dollars into an economy, by itself, does not boost prosperity as much as one might think. So Texas decided to devote its oil money to an educational endowment. Today, that endowment is [already] equal to that of Harvard University and spread over 15 universities. The effect has been staggering: aerospace manufacturing has almost disappeared from California, but is booming in Texas. Telecom research centers and consortia have flocked to Texas, even from the Canadian telecommunications giant Nortel. Although manufacturing in the US is in crisis, Texas has one of the strongest manufacturing economies in the world." Does this make sense? * - in fact, much of the energy the railroad has ever burned has been to make coal portable to the fixed furnaces in the labor centers, and much of the decline of inland labor centers like Parkersburg has been because having people producing in proximity to the coal source stopped being the cost advantage with which nothing else was able to compete... funny that it was Western Pennsylvania where they first opened up that oilcan of worms, even before Spindletop.

I'm reading this now that the bush has been firmly beat to all sides of, I think. Michael Halbouty (v. interesting web search: http://www.google.com/search?q=halbouty ) said that the seminal event was, quite simply, when when the old Beaumont families (remember, these places were all much less distinct from New Orleans culture a century ago than they have always seemed to our generation) made up their minds that they enjoyed the city the way it was, and would have the oil shipped westward. Within a year of that decision, according to Douglas Milburn, fifty plants here had converted to oil fuel and the Heights became host to a refinery. It was not until some time later that the Humble field, much less the headquarters, would follow in train. So I think we more or less have the answer to which all others are subsidiary bullet points. Freeport's harbor, incidentally, is not natural; although heavily used a hundred years ago, it was made much more viable by the construction of a new river channel, and Brazosport High School sits just south of the earth fill dam. Velasco and even Quintana were places much more thriving than anybody talks about: mansions lined Quintana Beach until 1900, the Rothschilds of Europe had land to construct a world trade seaport - remember that the plantations between the Brazos and the San Bernard, especially in Brazoria County but on up past Richmond, were the best-cultivated in the Southwest, and while well-watered were poorly served by roads and rail as a consequence of early prohibitions on bridge-building at all of those streams (would impede navigation on the aquatic highways). While there has always been more going on down there than inlanders are interested to acknowledge (how many of you would guess that this scene was shot on the coastal plain?: http://www.flickr.com/photos/library_of_co...57603671370361/ ), the watersheds were actually *too much* for Freeport to manage to evolve under - when a river as big as the Brazos got heavy rains upstream, the flood currents at the mouth made steamship travel very dangerous. On Sunday I was sitting and talking with a new friend who had enlisted in the service six months before Pearl Harbor, so that the day after the attacks he was trucked from San Antonio to Rosenberg to Brazoria and posted on the bridge to Freeport in order to keep passing fishing boats from stopping underneath and dynamiting it. So there was still considerable traffic with the watershed even before they began to have the largest basic chemical complex around. Nowadays most of the traffic is in coolant water - the river itself. Then again, Halbouty was an Aggie; so say what you will.

Thanks a bunch, everybody. This is clearly the kind of participation in the city that will give passersby the gift of getting to have a greater sense of Houston, hour by hour years off in the future: and through those people, in thousands of concrete thoughts and situations, improve the city's idea of itself.