Institutional Buildings

Institutional Buildings
02/08/10 10:04am

Taniguchi’s Asia Society Texas Center Gets Into the Ground

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Museum District, Museums, New Construction
2 Comments

A reader sends in photos from the mudfest last week on the large block at Southmore and Caroline in the Museum District, where construction has at last begun on the new Texas Center headquarters building for the Asia Society. An elaborate groundbreaking ceremony for the 2-story, 38,000-sq.-ft. building featuring dancers, drummers, and noted local restaurateur Yao Ming took place more than 20 months ago. Meanwhile, architect Yoshio Taniguchi continued tinkering with the design, and the organization continued its fundraising efforts.

More muddy views of what’s going on, plus a look at the latest model:

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Downtown
02/05/10 10:50am

Inside the Harris County Jail

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Institutional Buildings, Interiors
10 Comments

The Chronicle’s Chris Moran finds inmates on the move at 1200 Baker St.:

They were working, waiting in line for the dentist, moving to other floors to appointments (medical, dietician, counseling, therapy) getting processed for release or shuffling off to a court appearance. In fact, my guess is I saw fewer inmates inside cells than on the move.

As a result, it seemed as though nearly as many uniformed detention officers, sheriff’s deputies and mental health and medical professionals were moving and monitoring as well.

The concrete halls amplify and echo sound, so any time someone raised his voice it startled me a bit. And the rattling of leg irons always sounded as if it were coming from just a few feet behind me even if the inmates were far away.

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Commercial Real Estate
01/21/10 12:44pm

Yet Another Protest of Houston’s New Planned Parenthood Headquarters

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Construction Problems, Institutional Buildings, Medical Buildings, Neighborhood Disputes, Renovations, University of Houston
36 Comments

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:

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Art
01/18/10 2:54pm

Comment of the Day: This Time, Some Real Groundbreaking at Taniguchi’s Asia Society HQ

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Comments, Institutional Buildings, Museum District, New Construction, Quicklink
No Comments

COMMENT OF THE DAY: THIS TIME, SOME REAL GROUNDBREAKING AT TANIGUCHI’S ASIA SOCIETY HQ “Construction has begun! It’s been a while in the making but it appears that progress is now rapidly occurring. I first noticed activity on the site about a week ago and as of this morning there were at least two construction trailers and several earth-movers on the site. Much of the two plots have already been cleared.” [Ned Dodington, commenting on More Images of the Asia Society Headquarters Design]

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Downtown
11/10/09 2:38pm

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

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Financing, Institutional Buildings, New Construction, Theater District
4 Comments

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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Green Design and Development
11/09/09 5:06pm

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

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Houston Architects, Institutional Buildings, New Construction, Oak Forest
8 Comments

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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Apartments
10/02/09 5:08pm

Chipperfield Sculpts the New Menil: Goodbye, Richmont Square

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Art, Institutional Buildings, Menil Collection, Museums, Proposed Developments, Redevelopment
13 Comments

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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Art
09/17/09 4:54pm

Comment of the Day: Where’s Our Taniguchi?

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Comments, Institutional Buildings, Museum District, Museums, New Constructions, Quicklink
2 Comments

COMMENT OF THE DAY: WHERE’S OUR TANIGUCHI? “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]

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Adaptive Reuse
08/13/09 1:51pm

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

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Historic Preservation, Institutional Buildings, Malls, Sugar Land, Telfair, The Woodlands
4 Comments

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

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Downtown
08/04/09 9:09am

Peeking into the New Houston Ballet Center for Dance Downtown

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Houston Architects, Institutional Buildings, New Construction, Theater District
4 Comments

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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Institutional Buildings
07/29/09 4:39pm

New Physics Building at Rice: Fifties Courtyard Block

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New Construction, Rice University
13 Comments

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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Downtown
07/24/09 11:43am

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

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Houston Architects, Institutional Buildings, New Construction, Proposed Developments, Theater District
3 Comments

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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Houston Architects
07/10/09 1:19pm

Main Street Theater Reaches the Renovation Stage

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Institutional Buildings, Leasing, Proposed Developments, Rice Viillage
2 Comments

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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Demolitions
06/10/09 12:15pm

Transubstantiation for Augustine on Graustark

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Institutional Buildings, Montrose, University of St. Thomas
No Comments

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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