Discovered in the aftermath of Hurricane Ike: David Adickes’s giant Beatles sculpture on Summer St. is now one member short. That’s 7,000 pounds of McCartney-ish concrete rubble under that black tarp.
Think this is some kind of hoax? Further photographic evidence of Paul’s fall . . . below:
Having once graced a hotel owned by a legendary real-estate swindler, David Adickes’s telephone sculpture has quite the Houston pedigree:
Adickes first placed it on a friend’s property off SH 4 and FM 1960 before leasing to J.R. McConnell, former owner of the Grand Hotel, now called The Derek, on the corner of Westheimer Road and the West Loop.
“I said that I am going to make you a deal you cannot resist,†recalled Adickes of their arrangement. McConnell leased it for a penny a day and gave the artist $36.50. “He actually paid 10 years in advance,†Adickes said, laughing at the memory.
“Big Alex†was forced to move from that location, though, when The Grand Hotel became the Derek. It lived on Adickes’ personal lot on the corner of I-45 and Quitman Street for about six months. During that time, Adickes was forced into a back and forth battle with someone who felt the face on the phone needed its mustache painted black.
Robert Kimberly finds Big Alex in its new home at the corner of Mason and Hyde Park in Montrose, on top of Pictures Plus Prints and Framing. (Yeah, you read it here first.)
Photo: Robert Kimberly
Maybe the East Downtown Management District should just Give Up on those other names.
Nancy Sarnoff reports that construction is about to begin on a new gated 52-townhouse development on South MacGregor, east of 288. The developer, Joseph Casimir of Cypresswood Capital, reports on the project’s website that the development
bears three distinctive yet integrated architectural flavors: Florentine, Venetian, and Romanesque, affording you a lifestyle of unparalleled comfort and understated sophistication.
The townhouse development is called The Modigliani, after an Italian artist who spent most of his adult life in Paris, and who died of TB at the age of 35, aggravated by persistent alcoholism and drug abuse.
The 4.3-acre site at 3028 S. MacGregor Way is next door to the University of Texas Harris County Psychiatric Center and across the street from Brays Bayou. Casimir bought it in 2006 for $4.6 million, then demolished the 1936 Wright Morrow estate on the property. The previous owner, the UT Health Science Center at Houston, had intended to build a mental health outpatient facility on the site, but put it up for sale after encountering vocal opposition from neighborhood residents and State Rep. Al Edwards.
Below: Elevations and a site plan!
A reader sends photos of some recent construction on the garage podium beneath the Cosmopolitan tower and asks:
What are those three giant urinals affixed to the east exterior wall of Randall Davis’ latest glass-clad erection, the one on Post Oak where James Coney Island used to be? . . .
Where is the Colossal Statue of Constantine when you need him? (Well, he’s in Rome, but that’s no help to Post Oak Boulevard!)
Sure, there’s the vaguely Roman theming going on with the marketing for Davis’s next tower across the street, the Titan. But these new constructions might be something much more contemporary . . . think Marcel Duchamp by way of Claes Oldenburg: The big fountains!
Below: the Colossal Head of Constantine . . . and the Colossal Heads of the Cosmopolitan, on display!
You may have seen a few old small, blurry model photos of the Asia Society headquarters Yoshio Taniguchi has been designing. But more detailed plans and views of the building planned for Caroline and Southmore in the Museum District haven’t exactly been in wide circulation. Maybe that’s because the architect is apparently not done tinkering:
Even though the noted Japanese architect has spent the past four years developing his design for the new Asia Society Texas Center headquarters, he recently scoured a table-top model of the building like it was the first time he had ever laid eyes on it.
“Each time I meet with my client, I feel like I’m under pressure,” he said, while examining the model of the $50 million Asia House in a nondescript office near the Galleria. “I have to make it better. I can’t make a mistake.”
On this recent morning, Taniguchi was concerned about the height of a stone fence that will jut out from one corner of the building. He wants it tall enough to define the space but not so imposing that it blocks out the surrounding neighborhood.
Since January, Taniguchi and his team have suggested 85 small changes to the building before construction officially gets under way after today’s groundbreaking ceremony.
After the jump: More building details! Plus . . . an old small, blurry model photo!
Round about the end of April, artist Gloria Becker lopped $53,000 off the asking price of her art-and-animal-filled home at 7309 Greenbriar (near Main) featured here a month ago. It’s now listed for $795K.
Have any of you seen this place?
We get some strange tips . . .
Look for a giant telephone to be delivered to the corner of Mason and Hyde Park, probably tomorrow.
Photo of David Adickes sculpture by Jonathan Percy
Tonight’s art opening at the new Box 13 ArtSpace will serve as a grand opening for the new East End art venue as well.
The space is a 2-story former furniture store on the corner of Harrisburg and Cesar Chavez (or — as the organization’s website uh, “artfully”(?) calls the street — “Cesar Chivas”). It features 13 studio spaces for artists in residence, three interior galleries, a storefront-window display space, and an “outdoor performance exhibition space,” known more conventionally as a parking lot.
The artist-run nonprofit intends to acquire a second building, at 6701 Capitol (directly behind the 6700 Harrisburg building), within a few months. “The Capitol building lends itself toward sculptors and installation artists,” declares the website.
After the jump: A quick tour of the new facilities!
A reader reports that artist Gloria Becker is selling her home at 7309 Greenbriar, just south of the Med Center. That’s the big brick house with the the 8-foot-tall topiary bears out front. Plus . . .
She has a wildcat in her dining room, deer on her sofa, fish in her bathroom, squirrels in her entryway, a caribou at the top of her stairwell and a prairie dog in her den.
From the foyer, where a stuffed bear in a sundress and rhinestone-studded sunglasses stands at the foot of the stairs covered in imitation tiger fur, to the farthest corner of the second-floor spare room, which is adorned with a giant cloth cow in a sun hat, a wreath of monkeys and a Virgin Mary hubcap, the house is a cacophony of contented clutter.
“Empty spaces make me nervous,” [Becker] Rasmussen says.
Becker, who makes a living selling her incredibly detailed Santa Claus sculptures and handcrafted sock monkeys, calls herself an “an upscale, sophisticated recycler.”
Her Braeswood home has 3 or 4 bedrooms, 3 full and 2 half baths, and sits on a 12,563-sq.-ft. lot near the corner of S. Main. Asking price: $848,000.
After the jump: Some interior pics from the listing, plus: Where did all the sock monkeys go?
Uh-oh. That trailer — behind the pole barn — on a former scrap yard — next to the Houston Biodiesel plant — on Buffalo Bayou — may look innocuous. But it’s the new temporary Houston outpost of Los Angeles’s Center for Land Use Interpretation. The CLUI is taking up a year-long residency at the Cynthia Woods Mitchell Center for the Arts at UH — but this is where our L.A. visitors will be camping out.
What does the CLUI do? Some sample CLUI projects:
In this exhibit, farm animals show us their point of view through wireless video cameras installed temporarily on their head and necks by virtuoso animal and plant videographer Sam Easterson. Easterson’s technology enables a cow, a pig, a goat, a chicken, a sheep, and a horse to guide us around their world; what they look at, what catches their attention, how they move through space, and how they relate to one another, on the farm.
You get the idea. CLUI’s front man is artist Matthew Coolidge, whose act often incorporates academic-sounding narrations of landscape slide shows.
Here’s video of part of a Coolidge performance at the Aurora Picture Show late last year:
A reader who doesn’t sound too happy about the situation sends word that David Adickes has sold his artist-studio building at 2500 Summer St.:
Artists who lease space there have been told they need to leave in less than 6 months. Deborah Colton Gallery resides on his 3rd floor.
Yes, that’s David Adickes, sculptor of large presidential heads.
[youtube:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zdPOOkjNzzw 400 330]
What the house sounds like.
Here’s one advantage if you’re one of the not-so-large number of retail centers in Houston that doesn’t have a parking lot in front: If business ain’t so hot, you can always sell the highly visible adspace on your facade!
A reader sends in this photo of an ad for Red Bull’s Art of Can competition on the streetfront of a retail center on Elgin, across from the Calais apartments in Midtown. The Maple Leaf Pub is two doors down.
Is this the future of retail real estate? Sure, we’ve all seen ads painted onto the sides of old buildings and the giant window stickers on David’s Bridal storefronts, but doesn’t this go a bit . . . beyond that? Think of the possibilities: Stores . . . with ads covering their entire fronts, advertising . . . other stores. Or anything.
Forget billboards, graffiti, and wheatpaste posters. When this new market really kicks in, we’ll see Houston for its revenue-generating possibilities: We’ve got acres and acres of exploitable advertising space.
Tyvek Housewrap was only the beginning.
What comes after Tuscan-themed shopping centers? Billboard-themed shopping centers!
After the jump: a second photo, so you can get your Red Bull straight.
A reader sent in a larger version of the above photo to the Brazosport News. It shows the first giant presidential heads in place at Pearland’s new Presidential Park. Eventually, the remaining 37-member contingent of very-white sculpted U.S. presidents will join them, and the surrounding swampland will be transformed into a lovely green space, separated from a new shopping, retail, office, and hotel development by . . . a watergate! For now, though, the scene sure does look like only a few presidential giants have managed to keep their heads out of the mud.
The winners of an online vote to select which five of sculptor David Adickes‘s giant busts should be the first to move to the park were Washington, Franklin Roosevelt, Lincoln, Jefferson, and Kennedy — even though more recent Oval Office residents had far better ballot position. But democracy has its limits: Richard Browne, developer of the adjacent Waterlights District, decided to include the statue of former president George H.W. Bush in the first group anyway. All six made their head-turning trip down 288 from Adickes’s First Ward studio on Presidents’ Day.
Missed your chance to participate in the online presidential headcount? A separate ballot asks you to select which chain restaurants you want to appear in the Waterlights District, though its unclear if polling has already been closed.
Read on for a sketch of the Waterlights District, and another view of ex-presidents keeping their noses clean. Plus: a dated image of President John F. Kennedy, cut out of our version of the photo above . . . because he was too far to the right.
