Map of HCC/Ensember area [Courtesy Morris Architects]
Cite Editor, Raj Mankad, and Editorial Chair, Christof Speiler, spoke on KPFT 90.1 FM radio’s Connect The Dots with host Robert Muhammad on Wednesday, December 9, 2009. They were on during the final fifteen minutes of the show to discuss the new issue of Cite (number 80) and an article about the future of Midtown and Houston’s other “inner loop neighborhoods”.
The full audio of the Cite magazine segment can be downloaded and listened to below in mp3 format:
Click to Listen to Cite on Connect the Dots
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Originally published in Fall 2007, Cite 72 is now available free online in pdf format. Click on the titles below to download.
Letter from the Guest Editor
By 2035, the Houston Area will grow by 3.5 million people. That’s the forecast from the Houston-Galveston Area Council (HGAC), and while there may be argument about the numbers, there’s no doubt the region continues to become more populous. The big question is how Houston will grow. There are fundamentally two choices: Extend outward or densify inward. The former has been the pattern for 150 years, but it comes with high costs. Low-density housing takes up vast tracts of land, requires significant new infrastructure, and forces residents to drive more and more just to meet everyday needs. The HGAC extrapolates current trends and redicts the loss of virtually all open space in Harris County, including wildlife habitats in the Katy Prairie, an increase in driving from 26 miles a day to 30 per person, doubled commute times, and 32,000 lane miles of new road and highways to accommodate that scenario.
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Mount a map of Harris County on the wall. Throw a dart at it. Photograph the little map quadrant where the dart lands — not with the idea of necessarily taking pretty pictures but to document what the area looks like. That was Paul Hester’s assignment to his Rice University photography students last Spring.
The students posted their photographs to Flickr and I selected out a few with special permission. Click the map links for their other photographs.
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A home on Cavalcade that backs up to an apartment building in disrepair, September 2009 [All photos April Lind]
Coming from a lower-middle class family in a small town in the Texas Hill Country, I was awed by the sheer opulence of everyone and everything around when I came to the “big city” to study at Rice University. Despite news reports and rumors of there being another, grittier side to Houston, the only one I experienced was where everyone had more than enough to get by—until the summer of 2009.
I worked for Avenue Community Development Corporation, a local non-profit that focused on bringing more affordable housing to the Washington Ave and Near Northside areas of the city. Far from the manicured and quaint ranch style homes of the West University area where my apartment is, much of the Near Northside looked like the photograph my grandmother once showed me of the Depression-era Austin she grew up in.
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International Coffee Building design by Lake/Flato Architects and BNIM [Renderings and historic photos courtesy Buffalo Bayou Partnership, current photos by Jesse Hager]
At the time of the completion of the International Coffee Building in 1910, Commerce and Main Street were bustling with the activities that the street names imply. The International Coffee Building served as a roasting and distribution point for one of the key industries of the era. Since then, rail supplanted shipping and Houston, with the aid of the automobile, moved rapidly out from its historic center at Allen’s Landing. The downtown has shifted its energies away from the water. Buildings now are designed for firms that track materials digitally or sell digital commodities. What was once a vibrant center of city life has been literally overshadowed and left for appropriation by vagrants or artists.
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This project was Lysle Oliveros’s 2009 Masters Thesis project. The concept originated as a point of humor during a dinner party. “I asked my neighbor if he recently mulched the yard (due to a pungent odor), and he replied that the smell was from a local landfill established previous to the housing development.”
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Map showing Houston Pavilions in its context [Background map from houstondowntown.com. Photo below from Main street courtesy of Houston Pavilions.]
In Cite 77, Max Page reviews the new Houston Pavilions in an article entitled “Downtown’s Downtown: Houston Pavilions and an Urban Dilemma.” Click here to download a pdf copy. Below Christof Spieler responds.
Max Page looks at the design decisions that turned the Houston Pavilions into something akin to an urban mall. Those decisions might be the project’s undoing. But the Pavilions suffers from another problem as well, and one that is a familiar problem in Downtown Houston: connectivity.
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The city released an implementation report for the urban corridor planning initiative, which aims to “create a high quality urban environment in areas along METRO’s light rail corridors.” It is the product of two and a half years of meetings, consultations, and public input. Many an expert has participated including David Crossley who posted an analysis on the new Houston Tomorrow website. I consider myself a lay person and reading the report was my first exposure to the whole concept, and my initial response was visceral.
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A parking lot to the southwest of Market Square [Photo by Christof Spieler]
Chronicle columnist (and former Cite editor) Lisa Gray recently reported on the plans to rebuild Market Square Park with a dog run, a food stand, and maybe a farmers’ market. This builds on a report done by the non-profit Project for Public Spaces, which in 2005 named Market Square to its list of the 16 squares worldwide most in need of improvement. Will the new plan succeed?
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Brochstein Pavilion [Photo by Stephen Fox]
The Susan and Raymond Brochstein Pavilion is an architectural masterpiece. It is a masterpiece even though it is “only” a coffeehouse and, in terms of its architecture, “beinahe nichts” or “almost nothing,” as the great, twentieth-century, German-American architect Ludwig Mies van der Rohe described his modern skin-and-bones buildings.
What makes this simple, one-story building so extraordinary?
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