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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MOCAH students make art. Photo by Reginald Adams
During the summer of 1999, when my wife, Rhonda Radford-Adams, and I stepped out on a limb and decided to both quit our jobs to begin on an incredible journey now known as the Museum of Cultural Arts Houston (MOCAH), we had no idea what impact our work would have on Houston. What we did know for sure was that we were committed to the idea of bringing public art and creative learning and life experiences to inner-city youth and communities. Through a myriad of public/private partnerships and collaborations involving development authorities, schools, community organizations, and major corporations, MOCAH has been enabled to fulfill its mission of using art and creativity as tools for social and community development.
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