COMMENT OF THE DAY: IT’S ALL HAPPENING AT THE UNIVERSITY OF HOUSTON! “. . . You do realize that over the last two years, UH has opened up over 2,000 NEW rooms on campus, right? There’s a two year old graduate level loft building and a brand new all freshman dorm. Additionally, the Moody Towers will be getting a much needed rehab soon. The dining facility there has already been turned into a ‘fresh cooking’ concept that is getting rave reviews. AND, in the best news of all category, the Cougar Place apartments are in the process of getting razed right now and will be replaced with new housing. On the academic side, UH has added new space for the Honors College, MD Anderson Library, a new Cemo Hall, a Social Work Bldg rehab, expansion for the theatre school, architecture school improvements, a new home for PBS and the communications department, a new science bldg, and the school is currently building a massive bioscience/health science facility that will house a free eye clinic through the optometry school. This doesn’t even begin to mention the plans for the old Schlumberger property!” [doofus, commenting on UH: Fundraising for Robertson Stadium Replacement Halfway There]
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University of Houston
University of Houston athletic director Mack Rhoades reports the university has raised $40 million of the $75 to $80 million it thinks it needs to raise by next spring in order to begin construction of a new 40,000-seat football stadium on the current site of Robertson Stadium at Cullen and Holman streets. The university’s plans for the new stadium — projected to cost $120 million — were announced last summer, along with an extensive renovation plan for the neighboring basketball venue, Hofheinz Pavilion. Construction cost savings, revenue from 22 luxury suites, 200 loge box seats and 650 club seats at the stadium, the sale of naming rights, and financing would make up the difference, Rhoades tells the Chronicle‘s Sam Khan Jr.
COMMENT OF THE DAY: THE GREAT UNIVERSITY OF HOUSTON STRUCTURED PARKING BOOM “Many more garages are in the works. The newest bid just went out for the Athletic garage which will be build between Robertson Stadium and Hofheinz Pavilion. Will provide parking for up to 2,200 cars and will have a retail component. Rumored tenants are Raising Cane’s, Starbucks, and Chipotle…” [doofus, commenting on That East Garage Spirit: Pride of Parking at the University of Houston]
Chron columnist Lisa Gray takes note of the new UH East Parking Garage:
On the Spur 5 edge of campus, the University of Houston recently finished a garage that takes garage pride a step further. It’s trimmed in jazzy vertical strips of Cougar red and white — a parking pep rally, a garage that serves as a billboard promoting its institution. If Renu Khatour, UH’s chancellor and tireless promoter, were a parking garage, this is the garage she would be.
Oh, it gets better . . .
A reader writes in to complain about the not-quite-complete renovation of the former Sterling Bank building overlooking I-45 South at 4600 Gulf Fwy. The building was stripped down to its structure and is being reborn as the largest Planned Parenthood administrative headquarters and healthcare facility in the nation.
Is anyone else really bothered by the fact that on the stair-stepped portions of the curtain wall the spandrel glass doesn’t line up with the spandrels on the rest of the building? I mean if you’re going to design a facade that’s all about geometry, shouldn’t the geometry work? There had to be better ways to do this, really.
A close-up view:
Wedding DJ, videographer, and UH student Sammy Butts loves his dorm room at Moody Towers:
3 years down, still a few to go… reserved the room again for next year. Just love the view of Downtown/Campus/Med. Center.
- 1624 [Vimeo]
Here’s the latest installment of Swamplot’s fun-pix-from-around-town feature!
Above: While visiting last weekend’s Gulf Coast Green symposium and expo at the Reliant Center, Sean Morrissey Carroll catches the Astrodome peeking in on the action.
A few more images loom:
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:
What is it with these Landscape folks and their capsules? Last spring, L.A.’s sly Center for Land Use Interpretation began its residency in Houston by hauling an old trailer, dubbed the organization’s “field station,” to an old junkyard on the banks of the Houston Ship Channel. And now, a year later — the oil-industry spying mission almost complete — CLUI guru Matthew Coolidge and his henchpeople are capping their Houston romp with another demonstration of the delights of enclosed living.
That’s a Brucker Survival Capsule, painted bright red and decorated with a typically deadpan CLUI inscription, being installed outside the University of Houston’s Blaffer Art Gallery, where CLUI’s exhibit on the landscape practices of the Texas oil industry opens — tonight. If planting an offshore-oil-rig emergency escape vehicle on the front lawn of a university art gallery strikes you as slightly absurd, you’re only beginning to appreciate CLUI’s rare and dry sense of landscape humor.
Changes are coming to that stair-stepped, slit-windowed office building on the south side of the Gulf Freeway just south of Lockwood and Elgin, recently vacated by Sterling Bank. It will soon have a whole lot more glass — and become Planned Parenthood’s local administrative headquarters:
Peter Durkin, president of Planned Parenthood of Houston and Southeast Texas, said the new building will be big: six stories and 75,000 square feet. He described the claim that the building will be the largest center of late-term abortions in the Western Hemisphere as “nonsense.”
Only one of the six floors will be for clinical space, he said. Most of the building, he said, will be used for administration and family planning.
Renovations on the former Sterling Bank building on the Gulf Freeway near the University of Houston will begin in November, and Planned Parenthood likely will relocate in early 2010.
A “conceptual drawing” of the renovated building . . . after the jump:
The University of Houston is buying an island on Second Life! It’ll be used for the school’s Department of Health and Human Performance and the Texas Obesity Research Center.
Plans call for an interactive campus where students and professors adopt avatars to walk (or fly) around campus or teleport to any number of thousands of other islands.
Virtual doesn’t come cheap. UH paid $1,700 for the island and pays Linden Research another $300 a month in rent.
Not cheap?? You try renting an entire campus for $300 a month. You could hardly get a dorm room for that. But the best thing about UH’s new space is clearly its high quality design.
A virtual architect designed and built the campus as a very, very loose replica of the real thing “with better architecture,†says Associate Professor Brian McFarlin.
After the jump: More views of the beautiful UH-Virtual!
UH students: Beware of “secluded spots” on campus!
Just a few days ago, University of Houston officials called in Pearland beekeeper Mike Knuckey to remove a giant colony of 100,000 bees from behind a 40-foot-high section of wall in the engineering college’s Building 1. The wall had been dripping with honey.
But now the bees are coming back . . . to an undisclosed location on campus! From a UH press release:
UH plans to build a new nest for the bees in a wooden, isolated area of campus. The bees should be in their new home on Friday, Nov. 16.
A report from the Houston Chronicle is a little more ominous:
While moving the hive was a bit of a headache, university officials ended up with a sweet surprise: five gallons of fresh honey.
“We’re gonna think of something clever to do with it here on campus,” Alexander said.
Uh . . . with the honey? Or with the hive?
- A Bee Story: UH Finds Gentle, Humane Solution to Sticky Problem [UH Today]
- Beehive removed from building at University of Houston [Houston Chronicle]
