Medical Buildings

Land Development
05/15/13 4:05pm

The Hospice Coming to Central Southwest

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Medical Buildings, Proposed Developments, Senior Living
20 Comments

This is the rendering for Harbor Hospice, what Three Square Design Group and Camden Construction are saying they hope will serve as a kind of template for similar facilities to be built in Texas and Louisiana. The whole 24,000-sq.-ft. thing will have room for 32 beds and a 5,000-sq.-ft. outpatient clinic; Real Estate Bisnow’s Catie Dixon reports that construction could begin as early as this summer. A site plan from Camden shows the hospice going up outside the Loop southeast of Sunnyside, across from the Houston Amateur Sports Park on Mowery Rd. That’s west of Hwy. 288, between Airport Blvd. and W. Orem.

Rendering: Camden Construction

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Apartments
02/15/13 4:08pm

A Museum District Construction Tour

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Commercial Real Estate, Construction Materials, Land Development, Medical Buildings, Mixed Use, Museum District, New Construction, Office Buildings, Photography, Proposed Developments, Renovations, Retail, Senior Living, Streets
11 Comments

Ah, Friday: Why not take a stroll down Binz St. in the Museum District and have a look at what’s going on? Let’s head east from here: the corner of La Branch and Binz, near the Children’s Museum.

Our guide, Swamplot reader David Hollas, provides the photos and the observations:

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Interiors
01/31/13 10:30am

Texas Children’s Preparing To Open in Kirby and West Alabama Shopping Center

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Medical Buildings, Mixed Use, Renovations, Shopping Centers, Signage, Upper Kirby
4 Comments

One-stop shopping: you can see the signage and new (and presumably sterile) cabinetry through the second-floor windows of The Centre at River Oaks (in Upper Kirby, in fact), where a 25,000-sq.-ft. branch of Texas Children’s Hospital and Pediatric Associates is expected to open in March; the makeover of the shopping center at West Alabama and Kirby began last summer; Ainbinder announced that Ulta Beauty would be operating out of the first floor of the bankrupt Borders; Texas Children’s will sit atop both Ulta Beauty and Brio Tuscan Grille.

Photo: Swamplot inbox

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Medical Buildings
07/06/12 1:35pm

M.D. Anderson’s New Little Corner Building

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Proposed Developments, Texas Medical Center
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UT’s M.D. Anderson Cancer Center plans to build this 8-ish story pavilion, called The Pavilion, in front of the Alkek hospital at the corner of Bertner and Bates streets in the Med Center — replacing the pavilion-like rotunda that stands there now. The new building will house the center’s interventional radiology department (on its third floor) as well as 11 new operating rooms. The 185,000-sq.-ft. structure, designed by Dallas’s HKS, includes 2 partial-height floors for maintenance above the operating rooms plus a mechanical floor at the top. Construction is expected to cost $102 million, and be complete by the end of 2015. An accompanying $96 million renovation of the adjacent Alkek hospital will extend into 2019.

Rendering: HKS, via M.D. Anderson

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Institutional Buildings
04/23/12 11:31am

A Prairie Style Psychiatric Clinic on the South Post Oak Prairie

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Medical Buildings, Openings and Closings, Willowbend
7 Comments

The brand-new home of the Menninger Clinic — tucked behind the Fiesta on South Main south of the Loop, just east of South Post Oak Rd. — has only 15 more beds than the facility it’s been leasing from Metro National at the corner of Gessner and Kempwood in West Houston for the last 9 years. Plans from 5 years ago to build a significantly larger facility closer to the Texas Medical Center with enough space for 24 additional psychiatric patients were scaled back — and the project delayed — because of fundraising difficulties. But among other improvements, the new place should feel a whole lot more open. At 50 acres, the new $65 million campus is 36 acres larger than the current one, and features 650 trees. The buildings, designed by Kirksey Architecture and just completed by Tellepsen Builders, mimic a Frank Lloyd Wright-flavored Prairie style, but apparently without any of those annoying low ceilings.

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Demolitions
01/06/12 4:50pm

M.D. Anderson Med Center Tower Collapse Will Be Streamed Live This Weekend

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Medical Buildings, Office Buildings, Texas Medical Center
6 Comments

There are no good accessible viewing areas for this weekend’s scheduled implosion of the Houston Main Building at 1100 Holcombe, the folks at M.D. Anderson insist. (That space they’re squeezing media reps into to watch the big bang? Too small.) But why get up so early on a Sunday morning just to catch a few lungfuls of white powder anyway? Instead, you can watch the festive destruction of the iconic former Prudential Building live on the web from this link. The dynamite is scheduled to go off January 8th at 7:52 am (unless, of course, one of those Life Flight helicopters is coming in). And there’ll be higher-res video available later.

Photo: Candace Garcia

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Medical Buildings
01/04/12 12:34pm

The Signs Around the Parc Binz Site

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Mixed Use, Museum Park, Neighborhood Disputes, Office Buildings, Proposed Developments
22 Comments

Walking by the vacant site on the corner of Binz and Chenevert on the way to Hermann Park, reader David Hollas notes that the large sign advertising a 75,000-sq.-ft. medical-offices-and-retail development planned for the site has been taken down. Meanwhile, the surrounding neighborhood has been peppered with Ashby-Highrise-style signs protesting Balcor Commercial’s planned 6-story Parc Binz building and parking garage at 1800 Binz St— and “hi-rise buildings” in general. Opposition to the development got some media attention last year, but Hollas has seen sign changes on the property before: “About 2 years ago, the signs offered the sale of townhomes that were to be built imminently, but never materialized. After a period of inactivity and weed growth, the city came and decked out the site with code violation placards. Eventually the site was mowed and trash removed, and the city signs and townhome signs disappeared.”

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Demolitions
11/28/11 10:03pm

M.D. Anderson: Prudential Building Demo Site Will Sit Vacant for Years

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Historic Preservation, Houston Architects, Houston History, Medical Buildings, Office Buildings, Proposed Developments, Texas Medical Center
9 Comments

An M.D. Anderson Cancer Center official tells the HBJ‘s Jennifer Dawson that the UT institution will likely wait 3 to 10 years before putting any new structure on the site of the former Prudential Tower it’s been working diligently all year to knock down. Workers were moved out of the 18-story structure — renamed the Houston Main Building — last year. The hulking remains of the iconic 1952 Kenneth Franzheim building at 1100 Holcombe Blvd. will come down in a cloud of dust after several rounds of dynamite blasts on January 8th.

M.D. Anderson senior VP Dan Fontaine says the Med Center institution doesn’t even have a design yet for the 2 new structures — likely for outpatient care — that will eventually be built in that location. Until the institution finds a better use for it, the demo site will be turned into a “park-like setting.”

Photo: Karen Lantz

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Demolitions
11/15/11 10:18am

Med Center Prudential Tower Skeleton Will Survive Through End of Year

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Historic Preservation, Houston Architects, Houston History, Medical Buildings, Office Buildings, Texas Medical Center, Uncategorized
7 Comments

The folks charged with blowing up old buildings at UT’s M.D. Anderson Cancer Center have set a January 8th date for the big dynamite surgical event meant to knock down what’s left of the institution’s Houston Main Building. The hulking 18-story tower at 1100 Holcombe Blvd. was built in 1952 for Prudential Life Insurance as part of Houston’s first-ever suburban office campus, designed by architect Kenneth Franzheim. The Med Center institution bought the building in 1975, but began the long demo process early this year.

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Adaptive Reuse
10/06/11 2:59pm

Retired Tomball Supermarket Launching Second Career as VA Clinic

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Katy, Leasing, Medical Buildings, Openings and Closings, Tomball
3 Comments

Independent grocery store Klein’s Super Market closed down in April, after doing business in Tomball for 89 years — almost half of them at the corner of West Main St. and Buvinghausen. Next up for the 31,628-sq.-ft. vacant space at 1200 West Main: New life as a “community-based outpatient clinic” for the Michael E. DeBakey VA Medical Center. The Veterans Administration has signed a 20-year lease for the property, Congressman Michael McCaul announced today. Renovations are expected to be completed next summer; the clinic should open to patients next fall. Also announced: a similar clinic at 750 Westgreen Blvd. in Katy, in an existing medical building.

Photo: Jesse Smith

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Medical Buildings
10/05/11 3:29pm

Legacy Montrose Clinic Open for Business

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Montrose, New Construction, Openings and Closings
9 Comments

Legacy Community Health Services’ Montrose Clinic building opened last month at 1415 California St., consolidating in its new site the operations of 3 previous locations. The 40,000-sq.-ft. facility provides primary health care services, as well as a dental clinic, pediatric care, optometrists, adult behavior health services, HIV and AIDS treatment facilities, a gym, and — yes — a ground-floor Walgreens pharmacy, all under one flat roof.

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Demolitions
09/20/11 9:15am

M.D. Anderson Tower Will Go Out with a Bang

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Historic Preservation, Houston Architects, Houston History, Medical Buildings, Office Buildings, Texas Medical Center
12 Comments

The facilities steering committee at UT’s M.D. Anderson Cancer Center has decided to demolish what’s left of the institution’s Houston Main Building at 1100 Holcombe Blvd. with several blasts of dynamite — before the end of the year. The announcement in an online employee-only newsletter cited safety concerns for the decision: “Manual demolition with jackhammers and blow torches would expose our employees, our patients, the public and dozens of construction workers to noise, dust and vibration for months. Implosion reduces that exposure to a matter of minutes.”

The 18-story Med Center structure was known as the Prudential Building before M.D. Anderson purchased it from the insurance company in 1975. It was vacated last year, and demo work on the building began this past April. The newsletter announcement also recaps the institution’s explanation for knocking down the structure, which was designed by Houston architect Kenneth Franzheim in 1952 as part of Houston’s first suburban office park:

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Institutional Buildings
07/11/11 4:44pm

M.D. Anderson’s Big Step Over the Bayou

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Medical Buildings, New Construction, Office Buildings, Texas Medical Center
4 Comments

Here’s the M.D. Anderson Cancer Center’s massive new 1MC (for “Mid Campus Building 1”) at 7007 Bertner Ave., just a short hop into the medical frontier south of Brays Bayou. 25 stories, 1.4 million sq. ft., $350 million. All to consolidate various leasing tenants from 8 sites around the Med Center, plus get some space for future expansion. Swamplot reader Stephen J. Alexander hopped from parking garage to parking garage to capture these views:

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Demolitions
01/20/11 10:58am

Where M.D. Anderson Will Put the UAE President’s New Building

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Medical Buildings, Proposed Developments, Texas Medical Center
7 Comments

One of the things UT’s M.D. Anderson Cancer Center will be doing with that $150 million gift the president of the United Arab Emirates is handing over: Constructing a new 600,000 sq.-ft. therapy building, named after the donor’s dad: the Zayed bin Sultan al Nahyan Building for Personalized Cancer Care at MD Anderson. But where in the Med Center will they fit it? It won’t be replacing M.D. Anderson’s Houston Main Building, the former Prudential Life Insurance Tower already being hacked away at, and which the medical institution reportedly plans to demolish within weeks — a new treatment facility of some sort has been planned for that site for almost 9 years. The new building funded by the Khalifa bin Zayed Al Nahyan Charity Foundation will land instead on a different demo site: the southeast corner of Moursund St. and M.D. Anderson Blvd., a 5-acre lot which until last year was the home of the UT Health Science Center’s Mental Science Institute. M.D. Anderson bought the 2-story concrete-and-brick building at 1300 Moursund from its sister institution, then had it torn down over the summer, identifying the land at the time only as a location for “future expansion.”

A couple more photos of that site, from last year’s demo:

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Critters
11/22/10 3:05pm

Biosafety Level 4, Galveston

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Galveston, Hazards, Medical Buildings, Quicklink
13 Comments

BIOSAFETY LEVEL 4, GALVESTON How’s tricks inside the air-tight $174 million Galveston National Laboratory on the UTMB campus, where space-suited investigators get to hang out with anthrax, avian influenza, bubonic plague, Ebola, typhus, West Nile, SARS, drug-resistant tuberculosis, Rift Valley fever and other bad boys? “There’s negative pressure and high air flow. It’s all built to keep stuff inside of the envelope. Animals are housed in containment devices and any individual that comes in must be decontaminated,” director of “high containment facilities” Thomas G. Ksiazek explains to reporter Amanda Casanova: “Construction on the 186,267-square-foot building started in 2005 and scientists moved in earlier this year. In the last few months, there has been only one report of possible exposure to a level 4 agent. In August, an employee stuck herself with a needle of a Central European Tick[-borne] virus while dosing mice, according to a medical branch incident report. The incident was reported to the Centers for Disease Control, and the employee was treated and monitored for three weeks but did not get sick.” [Galveston County Daily News] Photo: Nick Saum [license]

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