Swamplot Archives by Category: Institutional Buildings

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Tuesday, November 10, 2009

Raising Funds for the New Houston Ballet Building: Just Wait Until Nutcracker Season

November 10, 2009 – 2:38 pm

An article on Bloomberg.com forwarded by a reader provides an update on the progress of fundraising efforts for the Houston Ballet’s new building Downtown planned for the block surrounded by Congress, Smith, Preston, and Louisiana streets. You’ll remember that back in August, Ballet managing director Cecil C. Conner told the Chronicle’s Molly Glentzer that the board had raised “about 70 percent of the funds” needed for the $53 million building — which the organization hopes to have ready for move-in by 2011.

What’s the latest news, 3 months later?

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2:38 pm | 4 Comments | Read more about Financing, Institutional Buildings, Neighborhoods: Downtown, Neighborhoods: Theater District, New Construction
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Monday, November 9, 2009

That New Thick-Skinned FBI Operative Moving in Next to Oak Forest

November 9, 2009 – 5:06 pm

What fancy high-tech firm just moved into that shimmering new green building off 290 at 43rd St.?

It’s your FBI. And hiding behind those dark shades in the new Houston Field Office:

The building includes a crisis management operations center, room for several crime and gang task forces, an arrest processing area where suspects are brought in, polygraphed, interviewed, booked and fingerprinted.

There’s a “complaint duty” office where anyone can walk in and lodge their concern with an officer on duty.

It also features a heavily equipped exercise room, a clinic headed by fulltime occupational health nurse Tisha Millard and the annual Citizens Academy led by Ronnie Cutlip, outreach coordinator.

The building includes the requisite extra-long-walkway anti-porte-cochere, specially designed to thwart vehicular attacks. But its real innovation is the external green-glass skin, hung away from the building on a lightweight metal frame, and specially formulated so the agents inside will be able to keep their cool when that Texas heat is on:

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5:06 pm | 8 Comments | Read more about Green Design and Development, Houston Architects, Institutional Buildings, Neighborhoods: Oak Forest, New Construction
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Friday, October 2, 2009

Chipperfield Sculpts the New Menil: Goodbye, Richmont Square

October 2, 2009 – 5:08 pm

The Richmont Square apartments on Richmond Ave. get knocked down in the new master plan for the Menil Collection campus. Speaking at a public forum last night, British architect David Chipperfield referred to the Menil’s big multifamily property as “this thing getting in our way.”

Cite magazine’s Raj Mankad describes more details of the Chipperfield plan:

The car park along Alabama would be strengthened with the new bookshop, cafe, and auditorium nearby. The key change would be to connect West Main across the site [to Yupon] through the area occupied by the northern end of Richmont Square. The complete street grid would surround a new green space that would also be made possible by the clearing of the north side of the apartments. It would connect, slightly off axis, with the current Menil park between the main building and the Rothko. The Drawing Institute and Study Center and Single Artist Studios would be sited around the new green space. And along Richmond itself, the plan calls for dense residential and commercial development.

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5:08 pm | 13 Comments | Read more about Apartments, Art, Institutional Buildings, Museums, Neighborhoods: Menil Collection, Proposed Developments, Redevelopment
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Thursday, September 17, 2009

Comment of the Day: Where’s Our Taniguchi?

September 17, 2009 – 4:54 pm
   

“What’s the hold up on this thing? It’s still a vacant lot. In the past few weeks, utility work on water/sewer has been done on the street, but not sure if it’s associated with the Asia Society construction. Groundbreaking was in Nov. 2008??? It’s already Sept. 2009 and no sign of construction.” [David Hollas, commenting on More Images of the Asia Society Headquarters Design]

4:54 pm | 2 Comments | Read more about Art, Comments, Institutional Buildings, Museums, Neighborhoods: Museum District, New Constructions, Quicklink
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Thursday, August 13, 2009

Satellite Dish: Museum of Natural Science Leaves Mall, Takes Prison

August 13, 2009 – 1:51 pm

Opening October 3rd in Sugar Land: A branch of the Houston Museum of Natural Science, smack dab in the center of the former prison farm now known as Telfair. The museum is a rehab of the old Central State Farm Prison building, but it has a better-sounding new address: 13019 University Blvd., at the corner of New Territory Blvd.

Meanwhile, far to the north, HMNS’s Woodlands Xploration Station in the Woodlands Mall is shutting down on September 7th. The Woodlands Children’s Museum next door to it will close a little less than a month later. Going into those vacated spaces: Forever 21.

Photo of new Houston Museum of Natural Science at Sugar Land: HMNS

1:51 pm | 4 Comments | Read more about Adaptive Reuse, Historic Preservation, Institutional Buildings, Malls, Neighborhoods: Sugar Land, Neighborhoods: Telfair, Neighborhoods: The Woodlands
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Tuesday, August 4, 2009

Peeking into the New Houston Ballet Center for Dance Downtown

August 4, 2009 – 9:09 am

When the building is finished in 2011, what will wayward pedestrians poking past the new Houston Ballet Center for Dance from the intersection of Congress and Smith streets Downtown be able to glimpse of the action inside?

. . . the architects . . . envisioned the granite like a proscenium stage, framing views from the street through windows on several floors of the north and west facades.

Those windows, [Gensler managing principal James] Furr added, are like a “billboard for dance,” enabling passersby to see classes and rehearsals.

Furr spoke to the Chronicle’s Molly Glentzer, and Gensler provided more-up-to-date images of the 115,000-sq.-ft. facility, which will be clad in black granite on one portion and “a light plaster” on the other:

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9:09 am | 3 Comments | Read more about Houston Architects, Institutional Buildings, Neighborhoods: Downtown, Neighborhoods: Theater District, New Construction
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Wednesday, July 29, 2009

New Physics Building at Rice: Fifties Courtyard Block

July 29, 2009 – 4:39 pm

Why is it so hard to get a definitive image of Rice’s new physics building? There’s no real uncertainty about it — it’s already under construction. It’s just that the thing is going in so close to its neighbors it’s hard to find a good angle for a solo portrait.

The Brockman Hall for Physics, funded in part by $11.1 million of — yes, stimulus money doled out by the National Institute of Standards and Technology — and designed by Philadelphia architects KieranTimberlake, will plug up an unnamed courtyard on the fifties-and-science-themed north part of the campus.

Here’s a rendering showing the 110,000 sq.-ft. building blocking the path between the legs and through the open portal of 17-year-old George R. Brown Hall:

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4:39 pm | 13 Comments | Read more about Institutional Buildings, Neighborhoods: Rice University, New Construction
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Friday, July 24, 2009

Places, Everyone! Houston Ballet Center for Dance Starts Digging in Downtown

July 24, 2009 – 11:43 am

Shhhh!!! The curtain hasn’t gone up yet on the new Center for Dance the Houston Ballet is constructing at 601 Preston St., between Louisiana and Smith, at the northern end of Downtown. There have been no big public announcements about the project, no local news stories, nada. But it looks like preliminary construction work on the building has already begun.

Yes, the new Ballet building is the mystery construction project Abc13 reporter Miya Shay posted in her Twitter feed yesterday, prompting an impromptu guessing game here. After some smart guesses from Swamplot readers and Tweeters, Shay revealed the answer this morning. In a later tweet, she gave a few more details: that fundraising for the building had reached more than 50 percent of the organization’s goal and that the building’s skybridge — which would connect it directly to the Wortham Center, so performers’ ballet shoes wouldn’t have to touch the street — was “def[initely] in.”

Shay also posted a second photo showing work going on at the construction site:

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11:43 am | 3 Comments | Read more about Houston Architects, Institutional Buildings, Neighborhoods: Downtown, Neighborhoods: Theater District, New Construction, Proposed Developments
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Friday, July 10, 2009

Main Street Theater Reaches the Renovation Stage

July 10, 2009 – 1:19 pm

Main Street Theater’s lease on its Rice Village building — which it’s held for 27 years — went month-to-month last year. So the 34-year-old company has announced it wants to buy and renovate the building at 2540 Times Blvd., near Kirby. (The theater also stages productions at a separate facility in Chelsea Market, at 4617 Montrose Blvd.)

This dramatically lit rendering from Studio Red Architects is meant to attract donors to the organization’s $3.5 million capital campaign. It shows what a theater-owned and renovated building might look like shortly before an evening performance — if, say, no one decided to park in front of it.

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1:19 pm | 2 Comments | Read more about Houston Architects, Institutional Buildings, Leasing, Neighborhoods: Rice Viillage, Proposed Developments
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Wednesday, June 10, 2009

Transubstantiation for Augustine on Graustark

June 10, 2009 – 12:15 pm

A Swamplot correspondent, concerned that readers of this site

so often have “before” and “after” photos, but rarely a “during”

sends in these action shots from this morning, showing the demolition-in-progress of the University of St. Thomas’s Augustine Living-Learning Community at 4119 Graustark.

UST’s news department reports that the building’s destruction will at last allow the liberation of the programs formerly sequestered within:

. . . the heart of the Living-Learning Community, an intensive experience in the integration of faith, academics and life, will continue to beat in a program bearing a new name – Augustine-Without-Walls.

“The name signifies more than the removal of the residence’s brick exterior: the program will now be open to all UST students who want to share in Augustine events, which focus on integrating academic learning with faith convictions and real everyday life,” said Sister Paula Jean Miller, FSE, Augustine-Without-Walls Program director.

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12:15 pm | Add a Comment | Read more about Demolitions, Institutional Buildings, Neighborhoods: Montrose, Neighborhoods: University of St. Thomas
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Wednesday, May 20, 2009

A Peek Inside the New Downtown Sweatbox

May 20, 2009 – 7:27 pm

Out from Kirksey: new interior renderings of the built-and-named-by-Tellepsen YMCA now going up Downtown.

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7:27 pm | 6 Comments | Read more about Houston Architects, Institutional Buildings, Neighborhoods: Downtown, New Construction
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Tuesday, February 24, 2009

HISD Neighborhood Lunch Program: The Eating of Glenbrook Valley

February 24, 2009 – 10:02 am

In a letter demonstrating the virtues of direct and forthright language, HISD has notified the owners of 8 homes on Glenloch St. in Glenbrook Valley that the new Lewis Elementary School will eat up their property:

This letter is to inform you that growth in Houston has created a serious shortage of permanent space within the Houston Independent School District (”HISD”). In a response to this need for space necessary to provide the best education for our children in your area, HISD will be replacing the Lewis Elementary School facility and it will be necessary to expand the existing school site.

The Superintendent of Schools has recommended, and the HISD Board of Education has designated, a tract of land for this expansion. This tract includes property you may own (see attached map).

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10:02 am | 14 Comments | Read more about Eminent Domain, Institutional Buildings, Neighborhoods: Glenbrook Valley, Proposed Developments, Schools
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Monday, February 2, 2009

The Richmond Lights Shall Not Be Moved

February 2, 2009 – 10:21 am
   

Deputy director Emily Todd lists the “guiding principles” behind the Menil’s planned expansion for the Chronicle’s Douglas Britt: “Just going down the list: environmentally sustainable design principles; no alteration to the original museum buildings or the Cy Twombly (Gallery); the Dan Flavin/Richmond Hall installation cannot be relocated. … The relationship between the Menil buildings to the Rothko (Chapel) and the Byanztine Chapel have to be taken into account - something that is so beautiful. The … scale, ambience and residential quality of the neighborhood is of paramount importance, which I think is sweet. Any new buildings in the immediate vicinity of the president buildings will be of the scale of the Cy Twombly Gallery. Significant trees will be preserved, and building on an outdoor environment that encourages visitors and especially families, which you see if you come over here on the weekends.” [Arts in Houston; previously in Swamplot]

10:21 am | Add a Comment | Read more about Art, Institutional Buildings, Neighborhoods: Menil, Proposed Developments, Quicklink, Redevelopment
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Friday, January 30, 2009

Spur 5 Hop: The University of Houston Grows East

January 30, 2009 – 11:46 am

The University of Houston has been given the go-ahead by the system’s Board of Regents to negotiate the purchase of the University Business Park, the 69-acre former Schlumberger Technologies corporate headquarters complex that faces I-45 South, just east of UH’s central campus.

The university currently leases 150,000 square feet in the business park, for offices “and other uses.” The new campus extension would be used for academic and research programs, administrative offices, storage, “industry partnerships,” and other functions. And it comes with 30 acres of vacant land.

UH has already completed the purchase of an adjacent 5-acre site, for about $2.5 million:

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11:46 am | 14 Comments | Read more about Buying and Selling, Commercial Real Estate, Industrial Properties, Institutional Buildings, Neighborhoods: University of Houston, Office Space
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Tuesday, January 27, 2009

What the New Collection of Menil Collections Might Look Like

January 27, 2009 – 10:56 am

The firm of British architect David Chipperfield has been selected to design a master plan for the expansion of the Menil Collection campus. What’s to be added?

Those facilities include the Menil Drawing Institute and Study Center, an auditorium, a café, additional space for Menil archives and buildings devoted to the work of individual artists.

The Menil Foundation is also interested in developing “income-producing properties” along the coming Richmond rail line, reports Douglas Britt in the Houston Chronicle.

Fitting in so many new buildings, of course, will be a lot easier once the Menil decides which of its many neighboring properties it wants to knock down. And owning 30 acres in the area means there are plenty of possibilities!

Which will go first? The gray-washed arts bungalows? The small rental properties? Richmond Hall? Richmont Square?

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10:56 am | 16 Comments | Read more about Art, Institutional Buildings, Neighborhoods: Cherryhurst, Neighborhoods: Menil, Proposed Developments, Redevelopment
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