Proposed Developments

Demolitions
04/27/11 11:56am

Houston YMCA Might Just Flip the Old Masterson YWCA — After It Finishes Tearing Down the Building

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Development Strategies, Houston Architects, Institutional Buildings, Memorial Heights, Proposed Developments
7 Comments

The YMCA of Greater Houston is considering several options for the 1.3-acre piece of land off Waugh Dr. that until last week held the vacant Masterson Branch of the YWCA, according to a communications document forwarded to Swamplot. Among the possibilities for the property at 3615 Willia St., which sits on a bluff above Spotts Park and overlooks White Oak Bayou: building a new YMCA facility, collaborating with the city and area nonprofits to develop “recreational opportunities” on the site, partnering with a developer on an unspecified project, or selling it outright. If the organization is considering selling the property, why did it decide to tear down the 1982 building, designed by Houston’s Taft Architects?

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Apartments
04/25/11 5:57pm

The Apartments Taking the Place of the Houston Ballet on West Gray

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North Montrose, Proposed Developments
15 Comments

The apartment complex the Richdale Group is planning to put in place of the just-vacated Houston Ballet building at 1916 West Gray will indeed have retail space on the ground floor — if you count the facility’s leasing office, that is. Also right in front on the first floor: 2 apartments and 4 head-in parking spaces, for potential tenants only. The parking garage will go in back, accessed from Bell St. A plan for the development, labeled the Graybelle subdivision, was submitted as part of a variance request for this Thursday’s planning commission meeting. The developers are requesting a 15-ft. setback along West Gray in place of the usual 25 ft. requirement. The lot is directly west of Randall Davis’s gargoyle-festooned Metropolis condo building.

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Houston History
04/22/11 5:25pm

Houston’s Space Shuttle Tribute — in Pieces

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Johnson Space Center, Proposed Developments, Quicklink
8 Comments

HOUSTON’S SPACE SHUTTLE TRIBUTE — IN PIECES Sure, Houston won’t be the rest home of choice for any of the space shuttles that retired intact, but what about the ones that blew up? Mayor Parker says she now supports a plan being promoted by several family members of Columbia and Challenger astronauts to store recovered remnants of the exploded Columbia orbiter in a large warehouse connected to Space Center Houston. More than 80,000 separate pieces of debris recovered from the 2003 disaster are currently stored in a 16th floor office in the Vehicle Assembly Building of Florida’s Kennedy Space Center. Parker tells the Chronicle‘s Mike Morris she thinks an exhibit of burnt and broken shuttle parts here could “create a fitting memorial to those astronauts. Not a tourist attraction, but to really recognize the commitment that Houston and Houstonians have made and the sacrifices they’ve made for space. That is an opportunity.” [Houston Politics; previously on Swamplot] Photo of Columbia debris: CollectSpace

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Apartments
04/21/11 12:41pm

Apartment Building Replacing Tavern on Gray Won’t Have Any Retail, But Really Wants To Hug the Street Anyway

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Development Regulations, North Montrose, Proposed Developments
74 Comments

Houston’s own Hanover Company wants to build this 5-story apartment complex on the current site of the Tavern on Gray, just east of the shopping district that extends along West Gray to Shepherd. And it’s hoping to get a variance from the planning commission that would allow the buildings to have smaller setbacks than current regulations allow: 15 ft. along Waugh (where 25 would otherwise be required) and just 5 ft. along West Gray (otherwise they’d need 15). Sure, the Hanover West Gray project would have 2 floors of parking (one of them underground) underneath 4 residential floors — but the extremely persuasive variance request kinda makes it hard not to wish the place had conditions that were less — you know, tough and urban:

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Comments
04/20/11 4:42pm

Comment of the Day: ExxonMobil Office Park Construction Report

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Landscape, New Construction, Office Buildings, Proposed Developments, Quicklink, Spring, Springwoods Village
3 Comments

COMMENT OF THE DAY: EXXONMOBIL OFFICE PARK CONSTRUCTION REPORT “On [my way] in to work this morning, driving south on 45 and going over the Rayford/Sawdust bridge, I could clearly see a crane poking out above the trees in the Exxon campus area.” [Jessie M, commenting on Aerial Views of ExxonMobil’s New Sprawling, Top Secret Houston Headquarters]

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Art
04/20/11 2:37pm

A Look at the Blaffer Art Museum’s Glass Future

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Museums, Proposed Developments, Renovations, University of Houston
4 Comments

Included in the upgrades to the University of Houston’s Blaffer Art Museum, scheduled to be complete by the start of next year: an actual bathroom for visitors. Plus: a better elevator. If you’d rather take the stairs, you’ll have this new proboscis to pass through, on the building’s north face, wrapped in vertical bands of clear and textured channel glass. That sorta-Cullen Sculpture Garden-looking slanted wall-column thing supporting it, which architect Dan Wood of New York’s WORKac calls the “wallumn,” should help block the view of the loading dock. And it’ll frame a brand new entrance on that side, facing the unnamed street and parking lot in front of it that parallels Elgin. The $2 million renovation (Blaffer spokesperson Jeffrey Bowen says $1.75 million worth of pledges have already been raised) won’t increase the amount of gallery space, but it should make the institution more visible on campus and allow for more activity in the back courtyard it shares with the rest of the university’s fine-arts building:

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Demolitions
04/19/11 12:19pm

Force Quit, Restart? Apple Scrapes New Retail Building on Site of Planned Highland Village Store

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Highland Village, Proposed Developments, Retail
25 Comments

Maybe that spec retail block at the Highland Village Shopping Center wasn’t good enough for Apple, after all. A couple of readers have written in to report that the never-been-occupied eastern portion of the relatively recent building at 4012-4018 Westheimer — where Houston’s first-ever mall-free Apple Store is supposed to go — has been torn down completely. The foundation and portions of the parking lot have been jack-hammered, writes one reader: “It’s like someone took a big pair of scissors and cut it off, through the beams, etc. The rest of the structure that houses Sprinkles, Paper Source, and what will be Restoration Hardware is still there. But the end where the Apple Store is/was going to be is gone.”

A permit for the “partial” demo of the building at 4012 Westheimer appeared on Swamplot’s Daily Demolition Report back on Valentine’s Day. An Apple retail fan site notes that according to its sources the Highland Village store when it opens “will bear some resemblance to the Scottsdale Quarter store.” Which looks like this:

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Galleria
04/18/11 8:06am

The Tallest Drive-Thru Bank on Post Oak

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Mixed Use, Office Buildings, Office Space, Proposed Developments, Redevelopment
1 Comment

Moving into the site of the 7-story Compass Bank building demolished a year and a half ago at 2200 Post Oak Blvd., a block north of the Galleria: the bank’s new corporate parent, BBVA Compass. The subsidiary of Spanish banking giant BBVA will be leasing at least 6 floors of a new 20-story tower being developed on that location by the Redstone Companies and Stream Realty Partners. Not officially announced but still apparently planned for the northern portion of the same 6-and-a-half-acre parcel (the grassy area in the foreground of the rendering above, along Guilford Ct.): a second office building, hotel, and more structured parking. Redstone and Stream Realty had previously been marketing the mixed-use property as The Perennial.

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Demolitions
04/15/11 8:55am

Aerial Views of ExxonMobil’s New Sprawling, Top Secret Houston Headquarters

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Development Strategies, Landscape, New Construction, Office Buildings, Office Space, Proposed Developments, Spring, Springwoods Village, Trees
39 Comments

What’s been going on deep in this pine forest north of Houston, behind the fencing and security guards, where all those trucks have been driving in and out for months? A whole lot of logging at least, it looks like. While ExxonMobil continues to tell its employees that no decisions have yet been made about whether to consolidate approximately 17,000 of them from Houston and Virginia into a new 3 million sq. ft. office campus just south of The Woodlands, contractors working for the company have been stripping what looks like thousands of trees from its 359-acre property and preparing the site for construction of as many as 2 dozen office buildings, 4 enormous parking garages, and several other structures. These aerial photos of the site sent to Swamplot are dated March 12th.

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Demolitions
04/14/11 2:44pm

Clearing Out the Feagan Oaks from Magnolia Grove

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Magnolia Grove, New Construction: Residential, Proposed Developments, Townhomes, Trees
22 Comments

These are probably the last images you’ll see of two large oak trees on the 4200 block of Feagan, says the reader who snapped pix this morning of the clearance event that’s been going on there for the last few days. There’ll be no designing around them, apparently: A worker on the property “said he hated to do it but both remaining oaks were coming down.” Coming in, gathers the reader: maybe 28 new townhomes between Dickson and Feagan St., just west of Jackson Hill. “Numerous smaller oaks, pecans, hackberries that are now crunched on the ground” were hacked away earlier.

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Attractions
04/12/11 2:36pm

No Shuttle Parking: Space Center Houston’s Innovative Garage Design Loses Out

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Johnson Space Center, Proposed Developments, Uncategorized
33 Comments

Note: Story updated below.

How is it possible? Houston’s innovative proposal to park a used space shuttle in the middle of a large triangular garage stuck onto the side of that space-themed amusement center near the JSC (shown above, all decked out) lost out to far less compelling plans put forward by museums in Florida, New York, and California. NASA administrator Charles Bolden announced earlier today that the 3 remaining unparked and unexploded shuttles will be moved next year to permanent homes in the Intrepid Sea, Air and Space Museum in New York City, the Kennedy Space Center in Florida, and the California Science Center in L.A.’s Exposition Park. What sort of dull designs did these institutions put together?

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Comments
03/30/11 9:50pm

Comment of the Day: This Land Is Their Land

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Development Strategies, Environmental, Office Buildings, Proposed Developments, Quicklink
5 Comments

COMMENT OF THE DAY: THIS LAND IS THEIR LAND “Heard about it. Shouldn’t matter who the purchaser is, in fact, after reading your comments, it is probably more fair all around if they do not disclose who they are. Posters on this site are quite amazing. I am astonished daily in what they seem to feel they are entitled to when it comes to property owned by others. And how much Swamplot originators do to creatively stir the pot.” [LudiKris, commenting on How Does a Public Notice About ExxonMobil’s Giant New Corporate Campus Stay Under the Radar?]

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Apartments
03/29/11 4:26pm

Hanover at Rice Village: What’s Going Up Over Bolsover

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Mixed Use, Proposed Developments, Rice Village, Streets
22 Comments

In 2007, Houston’s city council sold a block of Bolsover St. in the Rice Village to the developers of Randall Davis’s Sonoma project so that it could be used as a private drive and restaurant plaza linking two phases of the development. Davis and Lamesa Properties did manage to demolish the neighboring buildings, but Sonoma was never built. Now, the Hanover Company is saying it’s ready to build portions of a 6-story mixed-use building directly on top of part of that street. Plans for the new project, called Hanover at Rice Village, show a large plaza with restaurant seating on the eastern portion of what used to be Bolsover, facing Morningside. But the west half of the block is slated for retail space, apartments, and a private courtyard for residents:

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Development Strategies
03/29/11 12:51pm

How Does a Public Notice About ExxonMobil’s Giant New Corporate Campus Stay Under the Radar?

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Office Buildings, Office Space, Proposed Developments, Spring, Springwoods Village
43 Comments

A show of hands, please: How many of you knew about the public notice posted by the Army Corps of Engineers this January asking for comments on environmental issues related to the new 389-acre office campus that ExxonMobil plans to build for its employees north of Houston, just south of Spring Creek? If you heard about the permit application before the February 17th commenting deadline, please let us know — just add a comment to this story.

Why is Swamplot asking?

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Art
03/25/11 12:56pm

Rice U Ready To Build Giant Ceremonial Mound in Center of Campus

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Proposed Developments, Rice University
25 Comments

A multimillion-dollar gift from eclipse chaser and Rice University trustee Suzanne Deal Booth will be used to build a monumental sod-covered pyramid that will serve as the focus of the campus’s long central axis. Construction is scheduled to start early next month on the $6 million mound, which will contain a room inside with bench seating, as well as a second level above. At the top of the flat-topped pyramid, a 72-ft.-square pavilion with a square hole cut into the top will frame views of the sky.

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