Buffalo Bayou’s Abandoned Basement Now Ready To Be the Subject of Your Experiments

Now have at it: SmartGeometrics has made available for free on a website launched yesterday the data from 3D scans of the allegedly leaky, 87,500-sq.-ft. 1927 underground water reservoir near Sabine St. along Buffalo Bayou. Though the Buffalo Bayou Partnership would like to do something cool with the “accidental cathedral,” as Houston Chronicle columnist and cistern sympathizer Lisa Gray has called it, there’s no more funding available. Thus, the partnership is hoping some smart cookie who knows her way around AutoCAD (and programs like it) will use this free data to come up with an idea that woos someone or something else — like, say, Bud Light — to pay to make it happen.

Image: Buffalo Bayou Park

7 Comment

  • What a fresh/cool way of trying to make something happen. I’m interested to see what people come up with… hopefully this won’t result in a Astrodome esque situation though, and one of the smart cookie designs is actually what comes to fruition.

  • This will first become an excellent FPS map.

  • How as the city not red tagged this yet?

  • What is there to red tag? It’s owned by the City and not open to the public.

  • Does it ever collect water? That’s what it was designed to do, even if it is leaky, it might retain water long enough to, well, drown people, if there was any thought to making this a public space.

  • Would sure love to record down there I’m sure the acoustics and natural reverb would be incredible.

  • Un underground car park?
    A shelter for the homeless?
    A underground extension of the adjacent skate park?
    A storage facility for Bayou canoe rental companies?

    Endless possibilities

    As Chef commented, it needs to be pluged up though.