You may have seen a few old small, blurry model photos of the Asia Society headquarters Yoshio Taniguchi has been designing. But more detailed plans and views of the building planned for Caroline and Southmore in the Museum District haven’t exactly been in wide circulation. Maybe that’s because the architect is apparently not done tinkering:
Even though the noted Japanese architect has spent the past four years developing his design for the new Asia Society Texas Center headquarters, he recently scoured a table-top model of the building like it was the first time he had ever laid eyes on it.
“Each time I meet with my client, I feel like I’m under pressure,” he said, while examining the model of the $50 million Asia House in a nondescript office near the Galleria. “I have to make it better. I can’t make a mistake.”
On this recent morning, Taniguchi was concerned about the height of a stone fence that will jut out from one corner of the building. He wants it tall enough to define the space but not so imposing that it blocks out the surrounding neighborhood.
Since January, Taniguchi and his team have suggested 85 small changes to the building before construction officially gets under way after today’s groundbreaking ceremony.
After the jump: More building details! Plus . . . an old small, blurry model photo!
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Read more about: Art, Institutional Buildings, Museum-District, Museums, New Construction
One highlight of David Beebe and John Nova Lomax’s Richmond Ave. walking tour mentioned here last week was Lomax’s description of this strange vision on the #25 bus route to Mission Bend:
Towards the end of the line, the bus turned left off Richmond and into a weird suburban residential neighborhood. Ashford Point, the street we were on, was bisected by a greenspace in which there was a sunken trail, which ducked under the streets in little tunnels.
And then there was… this thing, this sprawling empty complex, this five-story square building topped by a 40-foot golden geodesic dome, flanked by two smaller domes. Two exterior staircases flanked these orbs – the overall effect was something like a sawed-off Mayan temple of the sun.
The whole compound was ringed by an iron fence, and then there was another huge fence around the entry to the building. The vast parking lot was empty, and there were no signs nor apparently even a mailbox. It was completely surreal. Neither Beebe nor I had a clue what it was – Beebe thought it might be the private residence of a very weird Arab sheik. I thought at first that it might be a mosque, but it didn’t look much like one closer up.
After the jump: What was it?
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Read more about: 77082, Ashford Point, Houses of Worship, Houston Architects, Institutional Buildings, Kingsbridge Park, Neighborhood Disputes, Religious Structures
Tonight’s art opening at the new Box 13 ArtSpace will serve as a grand opening for the new East End art venue as well.
The space is a 2-story former furniture store on the corner of Harrisburg and Cesar Chavez (or — as the organization’s website uh, “artfully”(?) calls the street — “Cesar Chivas”). It features 13 studio spaces for artists in residence, three interior galleries, a storefront-window display space, and an “outdoor performance exhibition space,” known more conventionally as a parking lot.
The artist-run nonprofit intends to acquire a second building, at 6701 Capitol (directly behind the 6700 Harrisburg building), within a few months. “The Capitol building lends itself toward sculptors and installation artists,” declares the website.
After the jump: A quick tour of the new facilities!
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Read more about: 77011, Art, Art Studios, Galleries, Harrisburg, Institutional Buildings, Openings and Closings, Parking-Lots
More buildings brewing on campus at Rice: The new Brochstein Pavilion, behind Fondren Library, opens later this week!
Designed by architect Thomas Phifer, the 6,000-square-foot building features natural lighting from light scoops, plasma screens, couches and chairs, all surrounded by floor-to-ceiling windows that look out on a 10,700-square-foot wraparound plaza. This exterior seating area is covered by a trellis designed to filter light, as live oaks do along Rice walkways, and is encompassed by an elm grove, fountains, live oaks, new sidewalks and a freshly sodded Central Quad.
A new freestanding structure dedicated to the increasingly popular liberal-arts discipline of . . . Caffeine Studies?
Does Swamplot have any readers at Rice? Send us your reports! Uhh . . . how’s that coffee?
Drawing: Pavilion architects Thomas Phifer & Partners
Read more about: Institutional Buildings, New Construction, Openings and Closings, Restaurants, Rice-University
April 18, 2008 – 10:32 am
Where’s that giant climbing wall in the atrium?
Rice University’s new recreation and wellness center will have
2 indoor basketball courts, 4 racquetball courts, 2 squash courts, cardio, weights, dance studio, a 50 meter outdoor competition pool, an outdoor recreation pool, and 2 outdoor lighted basketball courts.
That sounds just a bit smaller than UH’s giant 264,000-sq.-ft. Wellness Center on the other side of town. Groundbreaking for Rice’s new building, designed by Lake/Flato Architects with F&S Partners, is scheduled for next week.
After the jump: More muddy images of the complex!
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Read more about: 77005, Institutional Buildings, Proposed Developments, Recreation, Rice-University
October 26, 2007 – 8:25 am
DiverseWorks gave graffiti collaborative Aerosol Warfare free reign to paint the arts organization’s satellite space at the corner of Alabama and Almeda in Midtown, and this is the result.
You remember this house, right? It’s the one that used to have giant Sesame Street characters airbrushed all over it.
Read more about: 77004, Graffiti, Institutional Buildings, Midtown, Painting, Renovations
October 9, 2007 – 4:19 pm
Will something like this be coming soon to a home near you? Up now: a green roof atop a renovated building that will serve as a fabrication shop for architecture and industrial design students at the University of Houston. Unlike most of Houston’s (few) commercial and institutional buildings with a planted roof, this one has a slope to it.
Photo of Burdette Keeland Jr. Design and Exploration Center: Green Team Houston
Read more about: 77004, Gardening, Green Design, Green Roofs, University of Houston
October 5, 2007 – 9:16 am
Why did St. Luke’s decide to sell the Texas Medical Center’s most recognizable building?
Once the tower sale goes through, St. Luke’s — which plans to lease back its current space on floors nine through 12 for continued hospital operations — plans to extensively renovate and update the 27-story patient tower, which opened in 1971. The original seven-story hospital building, built in 1954 and now used for administrative functions, will be torn down, and new facilities will be built on that space as well as possibly on other nearby undeveloped land owned by St. Luke’s, according to [St. Luke’s senior vice president David] Koontz.
“That is the ‘why’ behind the move to sell this medical building,” he says.
For sale: The Madonna tower. Designed by Cesar Pelli. Officially named only a couple of years ago for donor and breast-implant litigator John O’Quinn.
After the jump, a picture-postcard-perfect view of the original 1954 St. Luke’s Episcopal Hospital building, not long for this world.
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Read more about: 77030, Demolitions, Highrises, Leasebacks, Medical Buildings, Office Buildings, Office Space, Renovations, Texas Medical Center
August 28, 2007 – 10:38 am
How fitting: The former St. Catherine’s Montessori School across from a Reliant Stadium parking lot is gone, but its spirit will live on. The school itself now has a new location on the other side of the South Loop, but the concrete bones of the “castle-like” building it left behind at 2510 Westridge will be . . . reused!
That’s right, organ-donation organization LifeGift will be spending $7 million to graft new space onto the existing structure, which will be renovated and kept alive presumably with an infusion of stucco. The completed building will be the organization’s 26,000-square-foot headquarters. A new blue-glass prosthesis will connect it to a parking lot along Lantern Point Dr. and serve as the front entrance. Among the features inside: LifeGift offices, an organ-donation education center, and operating rooms for onsite tissue extraction and organ recovery.
Let’s hope the transplant is successful. But really, this is nothing new for the patient: Before it became a school, the building was a firearms museum.
After the jump, more views of the bionic building from m Architects and Burwell Architects.
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Read more about: 77054, Astrodome, Building-Reuse, Development Strategy, Institutional Buildings, Medical Buildings, reliant-park, Renovations, Texas Medical Center
