07/30/08 5:38pm

Chick Chung in North Houston

Probably the best introduction to the particular and engaging humor of the Houston Chicks’ relentlessly cheery stuck-in-Houston-for-the-summer tourist travelogues is the soon-to-be-classic entry entitled “Houston: Day Seven” from last month, which begins with this striking line:

Today, we went to Rice Village…We stayed for 10 minutes…and left

and ends, 10 photographs later, in a Galleria parking lot — after a brief repose with an egg-salad sandwich.

The brilliance of the Chicks’ photo essays is difficult to communicate in an excerpt. If you’re looking for a quick take, try The Houston Chicks Have Won!, which recounts a popular Houston archetype in only two frames.

But there’s so much more:

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07/23/08 12:35pm

Diagrams of Proposed Snow Mountain Indoor Ski Resort, Houston

It’s difficult to imagine anything more perfect for 21st-century coastal Texas than this: A 2.7-million-sq.-ft. self-contained year-round indoor ski resort on a 21-acre site . . . on the “outskirts” of Houston.

Some details on this proposed development are available on the website of S333, an architecture firm based in the Netherlands. The firm’s London office has worked hard to pack hotels, indoor water parks, “extensive recreation areas,” a parking garage, retail space, timeshare apartments, and five separate ski slopes into what appears in the company’s drawings to be an 18-story terrace-roofed megastructure.

Inside the building, the different ski slopes and play areas are arranged side by side to form a continuous landscape of snow surfaces. New advances in scenography, acoustics and building technologies will be employed to create the ultimate feeling of ‘still being outside’ on a mountain.

The external shape and form of the building continues the landscape theme that is established in the building’s interior. The rising geometry of the ski slopes is extended as a series of stepped terraces. These terraces accommodate on one side private apartments and gardens, and on the other more public amenities such as restaurant, pavillions, gardens, terraces and a central water park of pools and weirs. The water cascades down the roof and links with the water feature at the centre of the leisure complex. This iconic landscape will attract attention to the site, brand the location and help establish a dramatic back-drop to the lake and water-side retail facilities.

More details and drawings below:

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07/16/08 10:41am

Man in Billboard over 59, Downtown Houston

And now you know the kind of thing that gets left out of the evening news: Fox 26 TV reporter Isiah Carey spots a man “just hanging out” inside a billboard over 59 near the George R. Brown downtown, grabs a camera, and . . . reports it in his blog a week later.

What’s that say on the billboard?

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07/10/08 4:05pm

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The two “Marking Our City” billboards near Grace Community Church‘s north and south I-45 locations depict a plain white cross, an American flag, and the words “150 FT CROSS COMING SOON.” But they probably show only the top portion of the structures the church is planning — and the 150-ft. label may be selling the project short. The Chronicle‘s Lisa Gray says

. . . the pastor hopes both structures will be 200 feet tall, roughly the height of a 20-story building. The Federal Aviation Administration, he said, may limit the south campus’s cross to 150 feet because it’s near Ellington Field.

Five-and-a-half minutes into the Grace Community Church video above, Grace senior pastor Steve Riggle walks viewers through a drawing of a more elaborate structure. Riggle asks

What if there was one of these at every entrance to the city? And it was there for the prayer movement in the city, not just a church. You talk about marking our city for God.

After the jump: More crosses on the side of the highway!

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07/07/08 11:33am

Interior of Mockup of Orion Crew Exploration Vehicle, Johnson Space Center, Houston

CNET’s Daniel Terdiman takes a tour of the Johnson Space Center and comes back with some photos of equipment and facilities being developed for Constellation, the back-to-the-moon project scheduled to begin launching in 2013. (The Space Shuttle program will be phased out by 2010.)

For those of us interested in the latest in Houston interiors technology, Terdiman includes photos of a mockup of the Orion Crew Exploration Vehicle, meant to take the next generation of astronauts to the moon and beyond. Is that a strip of velcro on the wall on the right? Cool!

Doesn’t look so exciting to you? Hey, they’ve got 5 years to work on it!

After the jump: The Orion capsule mockup from the outside, plus the new 12-wheeler parked outside!

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05/05/08 12:29pm

Tien Tao Temple, or Chong Hua Sheng Mu Holy Palace, Ashford Point, Houston

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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05/01/08 7:54pm

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The location: the Kroger on West Gray, next to the River Oaks Shopping Center. The time: yesterday afternoon. The song: Eric Prydz’s “Call on Me.” The performers: SexyATTACK, along with a cast of butter- and egg-loving walk-ons.

You’d think this sort of grocery celebration would have gone over better at the Disco Kroger on Montrose, but that effort got shut down. No problems outside the Menil, though.

04/25/08 11:47am

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Are you an architectural renderer struggling to bring life to yet another vast Houston shopping-center parking lot in the drawings developers have commissioned you to create? This video should bring you inspiration! Go ahead and draw in that parade — that street festival — that touching moment of parking-lot excitement. You won’t be faking anything!

Today’s baton-twirling parking-lot-parade marshal was photographed by Jason of the Around Town Houston blog — as he waited in the drive-thru at Burger King on Westheimer, just east of Highway 6, just around the corner from the West Oaks Mall.

Practice makes perfect!

03/10/08 9:28am

New Hermann Park Train

The Hermann Park kiddie trains are running again! But blogger Lou Minatti considers the replacement C.P. Huntington too “plasticy”:

A news photographer was there and we chatted for a bit. According to his sources, the old train was replaced due to three reasons: The old 50’s-era train had no dead man’s switch, it wasn’t wheelchair-accessible, and our collective asses are bigger than they were in the 1950s. Hence the need for the much wider train.

Photo: Lou Minatti

01/24/08 7:39pm

Stalls at the Houston Livestock Show and Rodeo

For four years, the fate of the Astrodome has been chained to the proposals of a single company. Those proposals at first went in all sorts of different directions but lately have seemed to be going nowhere. And now, finally, the stewards of the Astrodome’s future have declared that Astrodome Redevelopment’s exclusive right to redevelop the Houston landmark will be coming to an end.

That’s great news, because all that exclusivity and secrecy and incompetence has overshadowed one of the best ideas ever suggested for reusing the Dome — which today can finally be revealed: Let’s turn the Astrodome into . . . horse stables!

Astroturf and tiered stadium seats would give way to more than 1,000 horse stalls and an arena with a capacity of at least 6,000. The vast open area where former Astros stars Jimmy Wynn and Jeff Bagwell hit towering drives would be turned into a three-story exhibition and stalling space, Shafer said.

Isn’t doing time as a livestock storage center the hallmark of a historically significant building? And it will make the next renovation so much more dramatic: “Can you believe it? Before they restored it, they used this thing for horse stables!”

After the jump, some reasons why this plan might have legs.

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01/21/08 10:21am

Implosion of the Montagu Hotel, Downtown Houston

Updated with more videos below.

If you didn’t hear about the implosion of that 11-story building Downtown last weekend until after it happened, you weren’t the only one. It’s just that battle-scarred Cherry Demolition was a little gun-shy about publicizing another hotel demo in advance. Fewer spectators means less chance a blurry video or two will turn the company from rubble removers to crime-scene investigators.

Fortunately for readers, nobody informed Swamplot about the media blackout. After the jump, reports, photos, and videos of Sunday’s big bang!

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01/17/08 8:34am

The Former Hotel Montagu, Downtown Houston

Update: Photos and videos of the implosion are here.

Another Houston hotel implosion? So soon?

This one will be downtown, and everyone’s hoping it doesn’t make national news. But that doesn’t mean this weekend’s big bang won’t be another early-morning citywide block party. And so much to talk about since the last one!

Cherry Demolition crews have been chipping away at buildings on the block bounded by Main, Fannin, Rusk, and Walker since October, to make room for a 46-story pipe wrench. And everything is set for Dykon’s implosion of the 11-story Montagu Hotel (originally the Hotel Cotton, built in 1913) at the corner of Main and Rusk at 7 a.m. on Sunday, January 20th.

Streets will be shut down at least a block in each direction. But with the Crowne Plaza final-mystery-guest hullabaloo fresh in everyone’s memory, maybe this time there won’t be so much jockeying for the same “best” camera and video angles. Everyone spread out in a big circle, and send us your unique photos and videos. First person to spot anything fishy on the scene wins a special report on Inside Edition!

Photo of Hotel Montagu: Jeremey Barrett