luciaphile

This forum's deep negativity and rush to attack and criticize every building project in this city never ceases to amaze.  We are quite used to attacks on renderings, and attacks on uncompleted buildings...

 

but now we are getting attacks on planned buildings based on having seen or heard "or whatever" a lecture by a theorist who, according to rumor, has a big influence on the work of the project's architect?????? 

I am usually indifferent to the internecine stuff on HAIF, but I find, to my astonishment, that I want to put in a word for strickn, maybe because just a few minutes ago, oblivious to this thread, I enjoyed the background he provided here: http://www.houstonarchitecture.com/haif/topic/28750-structural-logic-of-600-travis/.

Although his insistence on the idea of respecting place loses me in an urban Texas context (though, strictly speaking, this is one of "my" places, right there: baptized by Dr. Lancaster at First Presbyterian church, where, mulishness already intact by kindergarten, my mouth full of vanilla sandwich cookie, I remember quizzing my Sunday school teacher, why did God need a Son of God - why was God not sufficient?), his posts are more interesting, and certainly more literate, than the standard, "This is going to be sweet, this is frickin' awesome."

His musings about Steve Holl's design process sent me in search of further information, and I suddenly remembered that, although my interest in architecture is not deep like y'all's, but just a facet of general cultural interest, I had read years ago a New Yorker piece about another museum addition Holl did in Kansas City. Let's just say, General Reader was not carried away by it, though appreciating that everything is still up-to-date in Kansas City.

So, whelmed or underwhelmed by the new building, I look forward to strickn's thoughts on it, if he feels it's worth his bother.

Village Creek SP outside Beaumont (or in Beaumont? - I was there ten years ago) has a lovely sandy-bottomed swimming hole, a nice change from Hill Country swimming holes. You can rent a group cabin with kitchenette. You could take your kids to look for carnivorous plants in the Big Thicket, but you must dip them in DEET first.

Here is a picture I took, with a little camera whose few features I don't even really know how to operate (for instance my attempted close-ups of hummingbirds were terrible, as I was on panorama setting; nor did they capture at all the way their feathers iridesce when they turn; but maybe that was asking too much of the camera, which I got for free; and also I don't understand pixel settings one bit). Usually the cabin's photographed from the other side, with the mountain as the backdrop, but I took this to be the front porch:

Mr.Pratt eventually retired to Tucson, which was our farthest west destination. I found out that Greater Tucson deals with something most urban areas do not: enormous copper pit mines. I never saw the pit, just the huge mounds of earth moved in the process. Here is one of them:

http://clui.org/sites/default/files/imagecache/ludb-image/ludb/az/6144/2012-02-20-11-19-14adj.jpg

That doesn't convey how close the housing subdivisions are to the mines. Freeport, or somebody, is applying for a permit for a new one in the Santa Rita Mountains (Coronado NF), where we stayed, and where I saw an elegant trogon and had an upsetting encounter with a nectar bat.

I am used to seeing the strip mines of East Texas, when the coal's all been gotten out, remediated. But these mines will never wind down, seems like. They just cease or restart operations based on the price of copper.

This doesn't seem to dampen the growth of Tucson one bit, though. Wikipedia probably won't back me up, but standing on Mt. Lemmon in the Catalinas looking over Tucson, I was sure it was the biggest city I've ever seen.

And made up mostly of small houses on little lots ("All these houses. But where do they work?"). There being no turfgrass, there's not much point in having a big yard. There are envelopes of natural vegetation most everywhere, as well as the 2 units of Saguaro NP (and a new third unit, which you're discouraged from visiting, as it's not very safe). I saw not a single swimming pool. There are few or no billboards - at least, I never saw one. That was nice. In case you're not sure, or -- think that would be "boring": no, it makes a noticeably positive difference.   

I can readily believe all that you say, though ... it seems like FEMA might be more to blame: flooding concerns, more so than pollutants. I don't really know.

Where I live, the landscape is littered with retention ponds that rarely see a drop of water, taking up a truly unfortunate amount of space. I saw that some genius had made an attractive one, once; it sort of looked like a real pond, and there were bullfrogs and a heron that thought so too; so perhaps it can be done. I think they must have pumped water into it, though. It hasn't rained here in years. Usually these "ponds" are full of Johnson grass; at their ugliest they are huge concrete boxes in the ground, surrounded by chain-link fencing, so children won't fall into them. They look like they will make an excellent mass grave, at some future date. You can be a know-nothing like me and still have a sense that, this can't possibly be best practice. Perhaps the solution was less pavement, more green in the first place?

I think: it pays to heed what nature does, and then consider -- is there a compelling reason for us to do something differently, that nature will fight?

In my view, the answer is seldom yes. Your friend's comments about roads and green-space confirm me in that view; and we like to be confirmed in our views, do we not?

No offense was meant -- I don't know what Rush Limbaugh looks like. I am trying to picture him, but nothing comes. When I punch "fat man" into my mental database, for some reason Orson Welles in "The Muppet Movie" keeps popping up.

Interestingly enough, flood mitigation requirements by the Environmental Protection Agency often make it cheaper to bulldoze everything and start over. The culprit may be excessive regulations or even basic infrastructure requirements.

In fact, let's go with it!

I apologize if I'm being unusually imbecilic, but the pond was 2 acres, the trees a couple more, out of a 21-acre site, no? I am thus confused by the instant equation of "preserving the landscaping" with "not redeveloping the site." Was it such a math puzzle, on the order of sphere packing?

The neighbors must have appreciated the buffer of the maturing trees. Many (most?) nice things are insignificant. Their cumulative effect is not.

There are some places, with a vestigial sense of correctness, where the trees and pond would have been preserved as a matter of course, pretty much reflexively.

There are places where the pending destruction would have prompted a hue and cry, perhaps taken up by municipal officials, and the developer would have grudgingly yielded to local sentiment 

There are places, like Austin, where trees and pond would have been a useful point of negotiation for both sides, in a zoning battle, say.

Then there are places like Houston - I claim no exceptionalism for it - where the idea of saving the landscaping was not even entertained, except by a few hapless people; and certainly not by Skanska.

I could see where this might give rise to a heretical thought: that maybe Houston - thriving, unstoppable juggernaut - could afford to consider toning down the "We're open for business! Come ---- us six ways to Sunday!" rhetoric.

I'm not unduly concerned about the destruction of that little pond, beyond my continual amazement that people, or institutions, are so eager to waste the efforts of others -- as a rather lazy person, initiative-wise, I don't think this will ever cease to startle me, as foolish as that may be - but I do think that for every enthusiasm there is an equal and opposite indifference. So, for instance, I cannot grok at all your lively interest in what are to me completely interchangeable office towers. Even if I were perceptive of the variety that so captivates all of you -- well, I could care less about the form itself. Still, I would never suggest that your passion isn't genuine. Similarly, landscaping is 90% of my interest in urban architecture.

If you do the McKittrick Canyon hike, go up to at least the Pratt cabin before you turn around. Gorgeous place.

 

A little Houston connection: I walked up the canyon to the Pratt cabin a couple weeks ago and discovered that it's a John Staub house --  the most remote, I expect.

I believe (although not a complete loop) the next semi-circle after Beltway 8 is Highway 6/FM 1960.

 

I like that map.

To invert the aphorism, perhaps the feature is a bug.

 

Our build whatever wherever approach lets property value be realized quickly, I'd imagine designated plazas come with restrictions, not the least of which being situated next to an unused highway.

 

I always had the impression that around here, roads were built/expanded when public outcry pushed for it, and then the particulars of routing and access points were determined based upon which real estate devolper had the most pull with the planners. Roadside crap was baked in from the get-go.

Vr

I've lived here my whole life though, so macro scale visual aesthetics are something of a foreign concept.

Maybe it was the group Scenic Texas that won some restrictions? A first, as far as I know. 

I think SH130 was, actually, immaculately conceived of by TxDOT, in order to exercise its new funding mechanism.

"It's a good way to get to Luling." 

From where?

"Georgetown."

There is not much traffic on 130 yet. Small aircraft in trouble have made emergency landings on it without incident.

After it was in progress, the idea took hold that it would get the trucks off I-35 through Austin, but the truck drivers have not yet shown a willingness to go well out of their way and pay 20 to thirty dollars for the privilege. Recently it was decided to offer trucks the passenger car rate for one year to drum up business.

Some have suggested turning the toll road into the free interstate, and vice-versa, but it is leased for fifty years to the Spanish company that built it, which asks: "Can you love a road?"

http://mysh130.com/segments-5-6/project-benefits/

Macro-scale aesthetics were a completely foreign concept to me as well. I'm told I would like New England, but my preference is firmly set: I associate beauty with an absence of manmade things (except, like Dave Brower, I find telephone poles and train tracks copacetic).

I was not spelling too wll yesterday.

As a child I innocently perceived the beltway to be the very edge of Houston, because I went no farther on my bicycle than to collect the dewberries that came in on the heavily-disturbed site of the future tollway. Of course development had already overleapt it. Still, geometry lesson aside, the Grand Parkway is more distant than I would have guessed the next loop to be. Houston must have skipped a round of loop-building.

I assume sprawl's image problem will be an artifact of the last century, not something planners need concern themselves with now, with silly talk of density.

But if the image problem does persist, I think it will be because of the interstates. They really are so dispiriting, and not just to aesthetes. I would love for planners to come down from their tower and focus on ways to make sprawl "pretty." Okay, less obnoxious.

In hated Austin, the 130 toll road bypass no one's much using incorporated some features to limit roadside crap. I think there are designated commercial plazas or something.

My thoughts on this at my blog: http://houstonstrategies.blogspot.com/2005/03/sprawl-in-perspective.html

It's nice that you learned to put the compass to good use whlle some of us were idly etching the desk with it -- but while Detroit is an absorbing topic, is it stll representative of America's Most Intractable Urban Problem?:

http://www.brookings.edu/research/reports/2013/08/06-suburban-poverty-berube-kneebone-williams

Oh, Houston, you do not disappoint!

I recently read one of those Malcolm Gladwell "conventional thinking is mistaken" pieces, the thesis or even subject of which I can't remember at all, but I do recall mention of some brilliant Rensselaer* Polytechnic undergrads who have created nature's styrofoam. Basically, they place some particular variety of mold in a - well, mold, and then turn the light out; and soon have a material almost indistinguishable from styrofoam, only it breaks down rather more quickly and -- it's supposed -- harmlessly. 

Perhaps the public will come around to the idea that this is how you Sonic, by drinking your cherry limeade from a cup made of nondeadly white mold.

*Nor am I certain how to spell "Rensselaer," but I'm trying not to rely on Google so much.

speaking of our brains on drugs, one of my old college roommate still has ancient vhs of us frying many pounds of bacon and making pancakes for  a house full of people who were just ever so slightly coming down after tripping for 48 hours.... Mrs. Reagan's stern warnings to the contrary. It was that exact PSA that inspired us to cook breakfast, despite the fact that food still tasted like sand.

That is the real reason I don't like those social campaigns: not only are they are hollow, but they take up an ungodly amount of cultural space, and they just further coarsen everything, and us.

Sorry, mods, for having taken us off track.

You should not assume my intentions. I very much prefer a clean and unspoiled environment.

And here I was, thinking your hobby was fouling pristine waters. I am so, so sorry.

Is there no one that will stoop to my level and debate options, such as rebates or taxes on bags? Are you too lazy, or simply afraid that I will crush you with unrelenting logic?

In re the crushing, you must be going easy on us so far. Though, being a woman, I'm safe from being crushed by logic in any case. Crushed by anecdote -- now that is a constant peril.

There is not a pastic bag rebate's worth of difference to me, between government telling me not to use a pastic bag and its launching a campaign to convince me I don't wish to use plastic bags*; so I put it to Mr.l (however, I didn't mention the word rebate, as I've observed he has a strongly negative reaction to it, connected to a quest one time to win back $50 from a contact lens manufacturer):

"It's pretty basic." (Go on.) "Well, you ban something you want everyone to stop doing, through legal or social means. The latter is more powerful, obviously. {Obvious to him: conservative.} You incentivize something you want people to tend to do. You want to get rid of DDT - you ban it. You want people to buy solar panels - you incentivize it. The problem is you have these competing ideologies: liberals want to ban everything, libertarians want to incentivize everything. The reality is, different cases require different tools."

And plastic bags?

"Well, that's pretty easy; the great thing about things that are really unimportant is, no one will remember they wanted them -- in a generation, no one will remember they used to carry plastic bags, though right now they think they want them."

Ban or no ban, it's nothing to him, but like KinkaidAlum, it would not occur to him to oppose it. Anyway, he definitely shares my aversion to Process, and so the advantages of an elaborate carrot-and-stick program to discourage plastic bag use would probably be lost on him, as they certainly are on me. I am constitutionally unsuited to enter into such a discussion. You could easily crush me that way.

The idea in my town was not to get people to "tend not to" use bags for philosophical reasons. There is no general anti-plastic bias at work. Those who brought us the ban are very much pro-recycling, which is certainly all about the plastics industry. There has been no mention of reducing the use of plastic containers generally.

The goal was to eliminate plastic bags in the local environment completely, so that's why I think a ban was appropriate. Along those lines, where the particular litter challenge posed by plastic bags is not high among the public's concerns, one would expect neither an incentive nor a ban. Perhaps Houston is such a place.

*I'm not sure why, since I grew up with them, and they were effective on me -- I will go to my grave hoot-hoot-not-pollutiing and turning out the light when I leave a room - I would sooner stub my toe than leave a light burning -- but I now find public service campaigns about as obnoxious as you do bag bans. Maybe because I see them as infantilizing. (Perhaps they really are best aimed at children.) This reached a pitch when driving once into the Navajo town of Window Rock: mile after mile of dreary public service billboards, some quite gruesome, the whole effect giddily tragicomic. "They kept but one promise, they promised to take our land and they took it; and then they covered the res with government billboards warning us to stay off meth." Yuck.

Speaking of which, is Mr. L Jerry Lee Lewis?

I'm a little baffled, given the erosion of private life I've seen in my 95 years (I was just kidding about thirteen, but I am "spry"; mr. L is my little teacup chihuahua disagreeable old Manx cat), at the intrusion the plastic bag ban represents to you. Near as I can tell, government's goal here -- which I readily grant, you do not share or are indifferent to, so welcome to my world about 75% of the time -- is to reduce plastic bags in the environment and in the waste stream. In another post you may have outlined, but I didn't see, how a deposit system would work -- would you pay a nickel for the bag, and get it back when you returned it for proper disposal? -- but that seems a good deal more cumbersome than asking the consumer to pay for the bags explicitly (anyone to whose quality of life they are important can buy a box of them, I believe at Home Depot, and savor their freedom to use them when they follow their dog around, picking up its leavings, as required by law) rather than tacitly pay for them as part of the cost of their groceries. I don't argue that people didn't choose the bags before, by accepting their groceries in them, but this is hardly the first time government has stepped in to mandate a change in consumer behavior.

I suppose it could be said that the change will fall hardest on the dog-owning poor. Only in America.   

You don't strike as a particularly young person (I don't mean that rudely).

I'm thirteen (talk to me, RedScare!) so I can't remember that, but the plastic bags have been singled because they are a particular nuisance/eyesore.

Even the late, great Ed Abbey threw his beer cans out the window.

I recall noticing that Ft.Stockton had gotten on the bag ban bandwagon (this topic really lends itself to assonance!) and saying to Mr.l that it seemed a little surprising. He looked at me like I was clueless.

"You must not have spent much time driving around Ft.Stockton."

I'm pretty sure Ft.Stockton did not ban plastic bags because of concerns about landfill space, or how long plastic bags take to break down, or out of a cussed miserliness with respect to devoting the appropriate funds to "litter enforcement." Some people find that country bleak and evidently the view is not improved with plastic bags skewered on mesquite and barbed wire. Speaking of which, I can't think how we ever came to have so much litter, what with littering being against the law and all. I sure hope the boys in blue apprehended the scofflaw who threw the remains of their Chick Filet dinner in my yard last night!

So that you have all the information required to form an opinion about this, the plastic bag ban has not been cited as the cause of death of anyone in Austin, Texas since it was enacted.

But don't misunderestimate: A certain number of people in Austin have in fact died this past year.

Journalists may yet uncover this, which has some pretty striking and direct implications, and it would be irresponsible of them to suppress it:

http://nation.foxnews.com/plastic-bags-ban/2013/02/06/san-franciscos-plastic-bag-ban-kills-about-5-people-year

I would be interested in total conservation land. livincinco, I am a bear of too little brain to know whether msa's are too blunt an instrument to measure sprawl. I am under no illusion that sprawl could be averted in the current climate. Perhaps Portland's goal, which was later subsumed under the rubric of smart growth, was to preserve open space, ag and forest, in its immediate vicinity. Anything more than that, beyond state lines especially, might have smacked of overreach?

Anyway, I was trying to interpret this map, which needs updating obviously, but I'm not sure anyone cares about this stuff anymore:

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/core/lw/2.0/html/tileshop_pmc/tileshop_pmc_inline.html?title=Click%20on%20image%20to%20zoom&p=PMC3&id=2831069_pone.0009509.g002.jpg

Whatever their methodology, it resulted in the same size green dot at Portland as at Charlotte, and a second threatening green dot closer, seemingly, to Charlotte than to Portland.

No time for further googling, sadly!

ETA: I am having misgivings that I interpreted that correctly. It is hard to believe that Charlotte lost a similar amount of open space as Portland did in the niineties, when Charlotte's msa was a good deal smaller than it is now. Go ahead, rip it to shreds!

I have no problem with Portland utilizing the model and I'm a big fan of forests and farmland, so you're not going to hear any complaints from me on either of those points.  My issues come when people start imply that Portland is a model city and that every city should be like Portland.  The concern with urban growth boundaries is that they start to inflate the costs of housing due to the scarcity of the land.  Cities that have natural constraints, such as New York, San Francisco and Hong Kong, have the same issue.  The result is that they start to price out the middle class and create a lower class that is essentially living to pay their rent.  The middle class family is pushed out into suburbs and you still end up with urban sprawl.

 

As a result, you get a city that is congratulating itself for minimizing growth, but has also created class division and just moved the people that they don't want to think about into the suburbs.  Portland is a good example of that.  The city and state have limited growth outside the urban boundary, but that's just driven the sprawl into Washington state with a bunch of people that then commute into the city of Portland.  It hasn't eliminated sprawl, it has just redirected it.  If Washington implemented the same urban growth boundaries that Portland has, I think that you would see a very different economic equation in Portland.

I think redirecting sprawl may be all a city can hope for, given the population growth this country looks forward to. Every city for itself.

I didn't know about this daily in-migration into Portland. That's good to know. As some sort of economic justice issue, it does not particularly move me, though.

Someone who has never, to the best of my knowledge, given ten minutes' thought to urban issues --  (that's why y'all are so fun!) --

was reading the Sunday paper, which was bemoaning, in a Lengthy, Hard-hitting Feature, the fact that x % of our firefighters and schoolteachers live outside the city limits of our town, and the wrong people live in the areas where they should be living.

(He would know, if he paid any attention, that this is a regular drumbeat with them.)

"Why the ----- should I care where firefighters choose to live? Why is that a legitimate concern of government?"

He's no libertarian, but it is hard for me to see how that's not a libertarian sentiment.

Perhaps less interestingly, the population of Houston's metropolitan area was just about that - 2.2 million - the year I was born in a box on the freeway.

No wonder it seems so much larger to me!

This is some unfortunately-rather-dated information (c.2000? - it didn't say) from the Sierra Club website:

Oregon adopted several statewide planning statutes in 1973, including one requiring the adoption of plans which zone for affordable housing within urban growth boundaries and the creation of protective zones outside of them. The plan has meant the protection of 25 million acres worth of farm and forest lands. It has also allowed Portland's population to grow by 50 percent since the 1970s while its land area increased by a mere 2 percent.(18)

Not that I mind tangents, but maybe we can bypass a discussion of "Why do we need forest or farmland?" Perhaps we can at a minimum agree, that a certain demographic likes to know it's there, and leave it at that.

Of course, the Sierra Club has a vested interest in smart growth policies, having abandoned, in the 80s, in a rather messy internal fight, population control as one of its planks, as incompatible with the politics of its more vocal members.

In the absence of the goal of curbing sprawl, densification in a place like Houston, whether as a matter of ambience, or of replacing one population with another, does seem counterintuitive as a model. If the urban area will eventually encompass several counties, why punish the people most distant from the edge, by encouraging development that removes trees and private green space from the city? Why target single-family neighborhoods? No, there were no protections for anyone not in a deed-restricted subdivision, and no one had any "right" to expect them. But I gather, particularly from posters on Swamplot, that people did expect such protection for the simple reason that a metropolitan area with no limits to its expansion -- eager to grow outward, in fact -- would have no evident need to rebuild its urban core neighborhoods.

Smart growth seems like a good model for Portland, though, especially for those people who need people.

Well, I don't know why you mention it, but I'll court the moderators' displeasure and admit I'm mildly pro-choice, too, RedScare; though, of course, it's a much braver stance in a man.

I'm unlikely to turn to litigation - ever, for any reason - but I'm not sure on what grounds I would sue you.

I don't know how truly horrible Portland is. I haven't been there! Have new friends that have lately moved from there. They are natives of the PNW, and claim the weather casts a pall over everyone; so much so, that if you are feeling really blue, you have to explain that no, it's more than the customary weather-related blahs.

I was pondering -- and I'm sorry, I'm no good at digging up city data, as y'all are -- if it were the case that far more per capita of the 70 or eighty million checks the federal government writes each month, flowed to Houston, rather than Portland, would that indicate that the amount of governmental assistance its citizenry receives is a metric of how "libertarian" a city is? Or would that just be coincidental?

Yes, "government dictation" of people's lives is bad! I know that because I watched hundreds of rowdy women, who did not look like they were in much danger of getting with child, screaming and cheering for killing babies the other week, and it was not a pretty sight, and I assume I would never have seen such a thing were it not for the uterus-tingling threat of "government dictation." 

Anyhoo, I wonder which model - or "no-model" - the libertarian or the Smart Growth (if that's all it really is, 'cuz there's not much there) - more fully bears all its costs locally. 

Which group more thoroughly pays for its principles, that is.

A number impossible to know, I guess.