Post your RL city building development here!

[068664663 2]

Hey everyone! Welcome to this thread, which is dedicated to RL (real-life) building development in a city of your choice! Also, any BATers who would be willing to recreate some of the buildings in this thread will be encouraged greatly. Others may comment on other buildings and explain why each building looks unique to them. I look foward to other's buildings to start appearing in this thread!

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Anyway, on with the show:

The picture above  is Circa Phase 1 & 2, currently under construction in Markham, a suburb of Toronto, Canada.

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The picture below is a rendering of Parkside Village, currently under development in Mississauga, Canada's sixth largest city, and just east of Toronto.

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The picture below is a artist's rendering of Hullmark Centre, in North York, a subdivision of Toronto.

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That's all for today. Keep posting!

[seemurray2 21]

Okay, here's the new arena that will be opening next month in Tulsa.  It was designed by Cesar Pelli, most famous for designing the Petronas Twin Towers.

It is called the BOK Center (Bank of Oklahoma):

[CarmineHilton 6]

OMG! That BOX Center is just looking fabulous =O

Which we had some arena's like that going up in Belgium... TOO bad!

Anyway, hope someone will BAT it some day =) *cough* Ill Tonkso *cough*

[rainyday 2]

Here is a plan for a new transit hub and shopping centre/hotel/residential devolpment in my home city of Galway, Ireland. Its called Ceannt Station. (Pronounced Kyant Station) I will also include a pdf for the whole development  here is a beforeand after

and here is the url for the presentation http://www.cie.ie/projects/open_days_boards.pdf. It loks really cool

[068664663 2]

seemurray2: I just love the BOK centre! Looks very modern and I think it would look fabulous in many of our SC4 cities! 

rainyday: A very colourful yet urban development area. I love the arched roof of the station! I look foward for the pdf!

Keep posting your RL city building development!  

[masochist 111]

The BOK Center actually looks like a subdued Frank Ghery work. Looks amazing, though, sleek and modern...I bet it really stands out!

[rainyday 2]

you have to copy and paste

the link for the pdf file

[Jasoncw 11,840]

In Detroit:

The hotel tower for Greektown Casino.

Renovation of the Book-Cadillac Hotel.

And then there's these two smaller projects, a new bus terminal, and a new public dock.

[confused04 14]

Minneapolis just finished a ton (as in blocks and blocks and blocks) of condo/lofts/apartments that would take forever to post.... I'll highlight the big projects in town.

2007 to 201x is the era of stadiums for the city. In 2007, the new Twins Stadium broke ground and it will be a new transportation hub for two light rail lines and a commuter rail line. This stadium will seat just above 40,000 and is nestled JUST outside the CBD in the Northloop neighborhood in the Warehouse district. Its one of the physically smallest stadiums due to its relatively small site. In fact much of the plaza for the stadium is built over 394.

This is the view of the skyline

What it will look like when its done.

The University of Minnesota also started a new stadium for its football team seating I believe 60,000 and is expandable to 80,000. Its pretty neat and I've seen this with my own eyes (I've seen the new Twins one as well. Its pretty impressive.

There's also a highschool stadium of decent size but its boring so meh....

Finally, the Vikings are trying to do away with "that Dome"... a.k.a. the Metrodome. Which I admit is bare, simplistic, and aesthetically... uh... meh...

There are no OFFICIAL plans for building the stadium, but that's not stopping the Vikings for releasing renderings and soliciting developers. Right now there are three big questions.

1. Will it revive Downtown east (if the Metrodome has anything to say, the answers a definitive "no"). Other attractions like the Guthrie have revitalized other parts of the cities in just 4 years. We know have the Mills District which was otherwise dead just four years ago. Now thousands of units have been built there.

2. Will it have a retractable roof? I don't get why this is such a big deal, but it is. They argue that they need it for "other uses" but the Metrodome is the only stadium to hold the Superbowl, NCAA Final Four  tournament, World Series and the All-Star Game. Not bad for having a FIXED roof. This is of huge contention as it changes the price tag and pushes it over a billion. Personally, I don't think the Vikings deserve it and ... COME ON! We live in Minnesota! How many football games are gonna have an open roof! If you count preseason, maybe 6 to 8 out of 20 + playoffs. Doesn't seem worth 1 BILLION dollars. I think people can suck up having a roof for those other 8 games. Additionally, people would just moan about the heat in August anyway.

3. How the heck are they gonna come up with 900 million to 1.2 BILLION dollars after the city has raised gas tax for transportation, sales taxes twice for transportation and the Twins Stadium, and suffered a catastrophic bridge collapse just blocks away from the Metrodome. Oh, and additionally the NFL said "we broke". They've stated that the fund in which they support new stadiums ran dry. I guess thats what happens when 10 cities build new stadiums in less than a decade... I'm not willing to pay another silly tax especially if its for a dang ROOF :@

Enough about my rants... here is the Viking Cathedr--- err... the Viking Stadium (this would be built on top of the old stadium site). Supposedly this stadium will use some elements ( one wall and a foundation) of the old stadium for this one reducing it just 900 million dollars...

The Inside.  Good skyline view, that I approve of...

Supposedly Ziggy Wolf wants to redevelop Downtown East, but at the very least he's putting his money where his mouth is and has gobbled up land around the Star Tribune headquarters for development. So far this development is approximately $350 million dollars in new retail, office and residential units. If plans live up to their hype, this would include 4,500 residential units, 1.7 million square feet of office space and a renovated light rail stop (despite only being 4 years old right now). If this project were to miraculously succeed, it would help increase the downtown population by 7500 to 10000 (Minneapolis already has a very sizeable downtown pop).

Its a HUGE improvement on whats there now and it would extend the skyline further east. Right now most of this land is unused or underutilized. Estimates originally had the stadium at 600 million and the development at 350 million. But, costs are expected to be 1 billion dollars for this stadium making this pie in the sky a staggering 1.35 billion dollars. By the way, ignore the stadium in the previous pic, that was never intended to be a legitimate design, just filler.

Okay... non-stadium stuff...

Rumors of a supertall (which this week got a lot of traction when a grocery store announced they were moving downtown in a mixed use projects on one of the sites in question). No renderings yet...

The Ivy

This is actually already done, but it just opened this year.

There's a bunch of other ones which can be found at www.minnescraper.com

Thats if you really wanna look at it. Most of it is pretty generic "infill". There is "The Nicollet which is undergoing a redesign as well. The subprime mortgage crisis has eaten away at development but there are new hotels being consider and as I've mentioned in the Supertalls-Take 2 thread, there are rumors of a supertall. It sounds like they have already designed the building if Lund's (the grocery story) signed a 36 month lease. I'll keep you guys on top of that when the announcement comes.

EDIT: Surprise! Apparently you CAN build another stadium

The University of Minnesota is looking to build a new baseball stadium. It was just announced today in the Minneapolis-St. Paul Business Journal. This one is far far far far cheaper at just $10 to $15 million and should not rely on public funds. Its a meager 3,000 seater so whatever. I was never planning on going to a baseball game...

2000 also saw the opening of our new hockey arena in St. Paul. w00t

Additionally, new information is coming out of the possible supertall...Plans include...

A Mariott Hotel

25-30 floors of Apartments (the city has a very high demand for rental properties)

Offices (downtown Minneapolis is looking to add 1 million square feet)

high density housing

and a possible planetarium that was supposed to be built on top of the new library but that has hit financial snags and the developer said... gimme gimme...

This could possibly lead to a supertall tower. No renderings yet but the buzz keeps growing .

[seemurray2 21]

All those stadiums are really impressive!

[Odainsaker 2,134]

Eeep, beware of stadiums as millionaire sports teams are never satisfied and will always need ever newer and upgraded taxpayer-supplied pleasue domes.  Like endlessly expanding convention centers, these are recognized as an easy way to milk the public financing trough, with the hostage threat that if the public doesn't provide, the teams will leave the city and take the economy with them.  It has not been shown that the economy generated locally by sports teams would be significantly any better than taking all the billions of monies used to subsidize them and instead mailing cash to residents as tax rebates.  Or better yet, reinvest it in struggling schools and needed transportation infrustructure.

Forgive me for the numerous images, but here are the projects I find interesting going up around San Antonio, Texas.  This is a sunbelt suburban city, and the real growth is still out in the sprawling outer suburbs and the ring cities, but I think these below are still positive steps forward.

The first is actually essentially competely, having opened just a couple months ago, though final interior outfitting is still going in some areas.  The Grand Hyatt San Antonio, offshooting from our recently vastly expanded convention center, is the greatest addition to our little skyline in years.  Fortunately, sunny San Antonio is already Texas's tourist mecca, and it can desperately justify the need for more hotel rooms and convention spaces.

Ooo, awwww.  Though still very conservative, this is the most cubistly modern addition to our skyline since the Tower of the Americas in the 1960s.  This is a historic city whose previous poverty didn't allow it join powerhouses Dallas and Houston in the glassy boxes of the 1980s.

However, this area of downtown, planned in the 1960s as a World Fair park with landmark institutions amidst vast lawns and connecting onto highways, is still scaled too large, which any pedestrian walking in the open south Texas sun will ascetically understand.  There is still uncertainty as to what to do with the area, with some calling to eject the institutional and museum uses and redevelop the area as a mixed-use urban neighborhood, while others suggest converting it into a fully green city park.

As mentioned earlier, downtown hotel suite space in a tourist city is still eagerly sought, and a variety of project underway throughout the city, both downtown and in the suburban resort fringes.  Most exciting one to me, however, is the recently begun project to reinhabit downtown's old four-story Neisner Department Store into a 117-room TownePlace Suites, which will hopefully be finished in late summer 2009.

Forgive the quality of the scanned newspaper image, but then this 1948 Art Deco gem by local favorite archtiect Atlee B Ayres has been boarded up and empty since 1991.  17 years in disuse...I guess the ugly newsprint fits.

To make it work Marriott will add 2 more stories and carve out a light courtyard in the interior.  Purists would probably like to preserve the current configuration and interiors as restored retail, but downtown retail still remains in the doldrums following decades of retail flight to the suburbs, and even the unimaginably vast Art Deco Joske's Department Store (today Rivercenter) next to the Alamo has its upper floors still mostly empty.  There is simply too much underused and excess commercial space.  For eventual guests, this building is in a cool area, along busy Houston Street and in walking distance of the major downtown sights.

Speaking of Joske's and Rivercenter, a project was launched two years ago to slowly restore a section of its original red-brick Victorian-era facade, which was simply covered up as the store expanded over time and the facade upgraded with stylish Art Deco cladding.  In it's heyday, the Joske's Department Store billed itself as "the biggest store in the biggest state."  With the nationwide collapse of downtown retailing amidst the rise of the suburban mall, the building refurbished as a wing of Rivercenter Mall still is not fully occupied.

Yes, lots of old Americana buildings in these pictures, which is part of what gives San Antonio's small downtown area its historic charm.  Speaking of historic charm, the highlight project of our current mayor has been the reoganization of our old Main Plaza, first laid out by Spanish colonists in the 1700s and today providing the civic open space and civic heart fronting our San Fernando Cathedal, Bexar County Courthouse, and City Hall.  It had been allowed to devolve into a "glorified traffic circle," and the redevelopment plan calling for the removal of several surrounding streets was highly controversial, as is the current cost overrun of $17 million from an initial planned $10 million.  However, it is already now locally acclaimed as a great success, with final completion aimed for the Thanksgiving holiday tourist season.

Here, we see construction continuing before at the Bexar County Courthouse, where the plaza project has been intermingled with another project to refit and reservice parts of the building structure:

Okay, I confess, I just like the composition of historic buildings.  Houston this is not as this scene is too quaint.  It will be better when the plaza is fully compete, as we can see in the finished central expanse before the San Fernando Cathedral:

I must admit I dislike the cage-like booths, but this is still infinitely better than the tangled mega-intersection and lonely traffic island that used to be here:

Great city shots like this can be found a Flickr from brilliant photographer "paul is just dandy."  For you architectural history buffs, this cathedral claims itself as the city's oldest structure as well as the oldest cathedral in the U.S. still performing services, primarily because several walls in its sanctuary date to its original parish church building in 1738.  What would the Spanish missionaries think of it new nightlighting during the Plaza's rededication a few months ago?  That lighting scheme was popularized earlier this spring in during "Illuminaria:  Arts Night in San Antonio," a newly inaugurated event where numerous downtown streets and plazas were opened for local art activities and live shows, and the downtown building facades were are colorized in bewildering patterns and light spectacles.  Another great success of current Mayor Phil Hardberger.

In the last image to the right of the cathedral is the City Hall building.  However, look at the vista down the road between them.  The new construction you see is a downtown condominum project called "The Vistana."  Numerous condominum towers are underway, both downtown and in the suburbs, with the tallest being the Vidorra twin towers out in the inner surburbs to the east.  The Vidorra is too much of a suburban condominum tower for my tastes, and many of the typical-suburban buildings are bland and uninteresting, though any success we get in slowly bring resident back into downtown is still a plus.  However, the Vistana is much closer to downtown and in many ways more interesting:

Hmmm, does this look suspiciously like it has borrowed another older San Antonio skyscraper?  It may be low-rise steel and glass rather than high-rise gothic terra-cotta, but it also screams Tower Life Building.  I won't fault them too much for pastiche post-modern borrowing of historic styles, as it is amazing San Antonio is building anything like this at all!  I can at least appreciate that they are trying to fill out the street edge of their block, though I can't say I care for where they put the garage entry, as it undermines what they are trying to urbanistically do.

For us BATters out there, some pics to inspire us on our models:

Now that I am on the topic of urbanism, here is a project that has grown from the workings of an urban planning professor and his students to a real master plan:  River North.  The section of downtown immediately north of the CBD core, spanning from the new Central Library and Municipal Auditorium to the San Antonio Museum of Art has always been underdeveloped.  Tthe Museum of Art, itself smartly reinhabitating the renovated historic industrial buildings of the old Lone Star Brewery, doesn't even seem part of the downtown area.  The River North Master Plan currently in development hopes grow this area following the principles of dense inner city New Urbanism, expanding downtown with a swath of mixed-use and residential urban neighborhoods.  Should it be fully implemented, this highly ambitious master plan, intended to create the guidelines for the city and developers to follow rather than actually build buildings, will radically change both the scope and character of downtown San Antonio.

You can browse the current conceptualization of River North here:

http://downtownsanantonio.org/pdf/0714-Chapter_2.1-low%20res.pdf

Be warned, this a 40-page heavy PDF file.  I'll just post some highlights:

This little model shows the current existing structures while viewing south towards the CBD:

This little model shows how new construction might appear, with new buildings represented in brown:

Yes, this is ambitious for a relatively poor city, and as a long-term planning scheme, it is not going to fully happen anytime soon.  Something that would have added to its genesis was the proposed light rail line that would have stretched from downtown, through River North, and further north along the vast Brackenridge Park and beyond to the airport.  That initial light-rail proposal was defeated by city voters concerned over its hefty price tag.  Still, the vision remains.

That last picture shows the idealized redeveloped approach to San Antonio's stately Municipal Auditorium, another 1920's Ayre's masterpiece.  Unfortunately, the Municipal Auditorium has always suffered from being simply too large a venue for most performing organizations, and it too is now the centerpiece of plans to reconfigure to auditorium to allow multiple smaller venues with greater flexibility and finally create a Performing Arts Center encompassing several other nearby buildings.  Also in the works is a connection and boat landing from the auditorium to an extended Riverwalk.  Financing for these plans were miraculously approved by a few months ago by voters, who after a nail-biting campaign voted overwhelmingly to maintain several expiring visitor and venue taxes in order to fund new improvements and expansions to many of the city's popular tourist and recreational civic attractions.  Another win for Mayor Hardberger.

Concurrent with the creation of a Performing Arts Center around the Municipal Auditorium are the continuing restoration of the 1940s era Alameda Theater and its museum complex, a historic landmark once showcasing Latin cinema.  The exterior has been restored, but the modernization of its viewing hall and the restoration of interior decorations, some of which involved black-light glowing chemical murals whose techniques have long been lost, take time.

Worryingly is the experince of the downtown Aztec Theater, whose exuberant Meso-American Art Deco interior, one of the great opulent interiors of American cinema, was loving restored and reopened a few years ago.  However, the economics did not play out for the new Aztec on the River and it soon closed.  Reconfiguation is again at work, slated to be completed 2009, which will reopen the stylish movie house as live music venue in the manner of the Grand Ol' Opry, whose original developers believe can be successfully redone here given San Antonio's and nearby Austin's strong live music scene.  I wish them luck, as the Aztec Theater is a sight to behold.

Here is the old Aztec Building with its empty offices:

And here is a taste of the marvel of its interior:

And the sexy rear-side boat landing along the river, though the trees in this shot kinda hides the giant fantasy Meso-American statue head greeting visitors:

This is getting long, but one more project must be mentioned, and it is probably the most significant of the bunch.  Tying all of downtown San Antonio together is the exotic miracle of the Riverwalk, where the San Antonio River was turned into looping linear park and pedestrian retail district.  What was merely a drainage and flood control WPA project is likely the single greatest economic generator of downtown and the definer of the city's urban character.  The lush Riverwalk is the second most visited tourist attraction in Texas, surpassed only by the famous Alamo, and making San Antonio the "Venice of Texas."

It's so charming, and the boat ride is a tourist requirement.  Too bad pedalos and private boats are no longer allowed...too many safety concerns for the city.  Unfortunately, this scene of Hanging Gardens beauty is limited to the downtown core, and much of the real WPA and U.S. Army Corps of Engineers work done on the San Antonio river in 1948 involved redirecting and rechanneling some 31 miles of river to alleviate flooding.  From a limited engineering standpoint, that work succeed efficiently.  The river was straightened, banks lined with concrete rubble to make smooth channels, and water efficiently diverted.  However, today's outlook sees that narrow engineering view as shortsighted, as altering the river flows outside downtown caused unwanted erosion, wiped out aquatic life, left several river sections dry, decimated surrounding vegetation, and rendered much of the river economically useless.  The Army Corp of Engineers agrees its changes decades ago had been mistakes, and the long evolving San Antonio River Improvement Project seeks to undo those mistakes by restoring the natural meandering flow of the river and restoring landcape and riverbed features.

In this south river view, we can see that is pretty, but unapproachable.  At this point, it is a slowly becoming a concrete drainage channel, and not too far from here are locks and dams need just to sustain the flow within the city:

There are two components to this project, the Museum Reach and Mission Reach.  Museum Reach, which will extend the current Riverwalk 4 miles north, is the more deliberately urban of the plans, bringing the pathways and barges northward through to concurrent River North project to reach the Municipal Auditorium, the San Antonio Museum of Art, and Brackenridge Park with its Witte Museum and San Antonio Zoo.  Work is already underway reconfiguring that portion river.  Should River North succeed in its New Urbanism density planning, it would seem as if the orginal Riverwalk itself had been fully extended.

Mission Reach, extending 9 miles south of the downtown core, is more naturalistic or parklike.  The aim is to connect through a re-landscaped linear river park the river's long chain of five historic Spanish Colonial missions, sisters to the Alamo and equally beautiful, such as Mission San Jose.  Much of the previous straightening of the river will be undone, the ugly concrete rubble lining will be removed, diverted flows restored to dried river branches, the riverbed retextured to encourage restored aquatic river life and ultimately sustain fish, and tree landscaping replanted.

This project is no small feat, and when completed will add 13 miles of landscaped riverfront to the existing Riverwalk, creating the longest linear city park in the United States, and rectifying enviromental damage done to large stretches of the river.  It is also currently slated to cost som $217 million, whose financing was pooled together from a variety of civic, public, and private organizations.  While some portions are already underway, the Army Corps of Engineers work, targetted along the southern Mission Reach stretch, has been continuously delayed by Washington, D.C., politics.  Congress has approved the necessary work by the corps, but approving and allocating funding are not the same thing, and the corps of engineers has been unable to proceed with its directed work without the proper funds.  City, County, and State leaders feared that their portions of the project would be endanged, as their already amassed funding contributions for their portions of the work could be seen as proof Federal funds were not needed, leaving them holding the full price tag for which none of them have budgeted.  Congress has a quirky habit of passing unfunded mandates.  In exasperation, Texas Senator Kay Bailey Hutchinson, with the support of both sides of the Texas congressional delegation, assigned the funding through the use of a budget earmark, a maneuver which slips in pet projects and funding to bills without the usual hearings and debate.  This earmark became embroiled in the past weeks with the U.S. presidential campaign as both candidates, particularly Senator John McCain, denounced congressional earmarks, citing river beautification in San Antonio as an example of pork-barrel spending.  City leaders were horrified to see the project splashed across national headlines in that manner.  However, the earmark has survived and its parent budget bill approved and signed into law.  Work will proceed.

Of course, one lesson is that everything is not a rosy in San Antonio as these pictures and projects might suggest.  Light rail within San Antonio is dead for a good while as voters have already directed that planned funding for the next decade be dedicated to bus rapid transit.  Commuter rail between San Antonio and Austin will always remain at a standstill until the billion dollars in start-up financing needed can be found and an accomodation with Union Pacific, who owns the current existing rails upon which a start-up passenger system would need to share, can be reached.  AT&T's new board leaders recently announced that they will move its corporate heaquarters from San Antonio to Dallas, much to the surprise and chagrin of our not only our community leaders, but even AT&T executives who already have established homes in the area.  The Spurs again want over a hundred million dollars more in wishlists for their already brand-new arena.  The Toyota Tundra Plant, the new impetus of manufacturing for a city that never had a manufacturing base, announced that due to the decline of truck sales stemming form the hike in gas prices, it will suspend production of its gas-guzzling pickup trucks until current inventories are reduced.  I would suggest it retool for hybrids, as high gas prices are likely to become a permanent feature of life.  A couple airlines serving here have been bankrupted by fuel costs, though at least the number of airport travellers to our tourist/service sector city continues to rise, necessitating an underway airport terminal expansion.  No one has yet put together a comprehensive regional water plan for a rapidly growing region with only one potable water source and already suffering 10 years of effective drought.

More interestingly, new high wealth residential development in the outer suburb rings has caught local attention, as that encroaching development and its environmental degradation threatens to engulf the Army's nighttime medical training ground at Camp Bullis.  The light pollution of new homes and forced migration of protected endangered species onto the expansive training grounds has led the Army to warn that the camp may soon be unable to fulfill its mission, leading to its closure and relocation.  That is an economic hit no one wants, and the suburban development is figuratively, if not literally, under fire from all sides.  The lesson here for our mayor and council leaders is that reactive policies are too already late...they need to instead become proactive.

Ah, the life of a city.  Hope this was informative and entertaining.

Yeehaw, ya'll come down to visit now, ya hear!

[Simtastico 0]

The BOK center is an truly impressive building! What kind of arena will it be? When looking at it from the outside it looks difficult with the seating, it just doesn't look... round! Masterpiece!

[+Guest]

Originally posted by: seemurray2 Okay, here's the new arena that will be opening next month in Tulsa.  It was designed by Cesar Pelli, most famous for designing the Petronas Twin Towers.

It is called the BOK Center (Bank of Oklahoma):

quote>

 

That really is an awesome building, I drove by it a couple weeks ago.  From the BOK Center website:

"The BOK Center is Tulsa’s state-of-the-art sports and entertainment venue. The 18,041-seat venue will be home to the National Champion’s Af2 Tulsa Talons and the CHL Tulsa Oilers. The BOK Center was designed to host major concerts, family shows, ice shows and other world-class entertainment."

The tall squarish building in the background is the BOK Tower, and it looks so much like the destroyed twin WTC towers because it was built by the same design team, in the same style. Many refer to it as a clone of those towers. Tallest building in most of the pains, too.

Tulsa is a very beautiful city, and has a lot of interesting architecture given its location. The Tulsa Zoo is also pretty stellar, and it would be worth having some pictures of that, if someone comes across any.

[confused04 14]

Someone did a much better job than I did summing up all the development in the Twin Cities. St. Paul has tried to get in the game, but I haven't heard much subsequent news on two of the developments, but hey, we can dream.

There are three rumors of a super tall, and buzz is that an announcement will come shortly from industry insiders, but shortly has surely been dragging on.

[Micah 16]

There are three rumors of a super tall, and buzz is that an announcement will come shortly from industry insiders, but shortly has surely been dragging on. quote>

Not to kill your dream entirely, but the thoughts of a super tall are out of the question at the moment. They'll never, yes, never be able to obtain financing for the project under the current markets. A major sector of large projects across America that are not already almost complete have literally frozen since they can't recieve financing from banks.

[confused04 14]

Originally posted by: Micah

There are three rumors of a super tall, and buzz is that an announcement will come shortly from industry insiders, but shortly has surely been dragging on. quote>

Not to kill your dream entirely, but the thoughts of a super tall are out of the question at the moment. They'll never, yes, never be able to obtain financing for the project under the current markets. A major sector of large projects across America that are not already almost complete have literally frozen since they can't recieve financing from banks.quote>

Thats not entirely true. That only applies to speculative projects to which none of the three possible supertalls are. All are requiring an anchor tenet which would shore up a minimum amount of capital. And despite this bear market, its very clear that Minneapolis is still booming, especially in the office space market. These rumors are very cautious and were actually in play prior to the bombing of the markets. And the primary anchor would most likely be Target (other other companies such as Best Buy are possible) which has done remarkably well in the discount retailer industry. As people tighten their purse strings, Target and Wal-Mart do relatively well during this economic climate.

Additionally, Minneapolis' housing market was amongst the least damaged during the bubble burst as it was nowhere near over inflated like Las Vegas, L.A. Miami or most of the coastal and southern cities. We have plenty of banks willing to invest locally. Even though our economy hasn't posted huge gains, its been a more slow, yet consistent march. So far the industry insiders have yet to indicate a pause in looking for architect firms (Pichard Chilton was selected for one of the projects). Market conditions haven't slowed tall towers across the country all that much. OKC recently announced a 925 foot tower and SF, Denver, and Cleveland are all in the midst of building new tallest towers (I'm ignoring Chicago and NYC as economic "irregularities"). As long as you have a primary financial backer, you can build anything you want. If Target, Best Buy, or United Health decide to move downtown, they are gonna require a consolidated office space that Minneapolis currently can't provide. Target already has an office park in Brooklyn Park, 33 South Sixth and Target Plaza. (Millions of unconsolidated square footage). Many of the speculative projects have died (some are actually under investigation). BUT, given enough capital, market conditions can be ignored. Additionally, Minneapolis has increased its image across the country (opened up Five Star Hotels, thousands of rooms of luxury hotels and positive results of the RNC). We have already seen possible development impact which is nice.

[Odainsaker 2,134]

Some less sexy San Antonio development, but still interesting nonetheless if you like city stories.

MICROSOFT DATA CENTER

Microsoft last month opened the first of two $550 million, 477,000 sq. ft. advanced data centers in Westover Hills.  This is essentially specially environmentally-controlled warehouses holding half-a-billion dollars of computer equipment in the form of tens of thousands of mega virtual-cloud servers for managing Microsoft's online web wervices, and while the number of employees are few, the potential tax revenue is huge.  Following in Microsoft's wake is a growing cluster of similar data centers already under construction or being planned by a variety of other companies, driven here by extremely low Texas electrical energy and water costs, the availability of vast tracts of affordable land, the climate and geology which are not prone to operating disruptions from environmental effects, Austin-San Antonio's growing tech corridor, and San Antonio's telecommunications infrastructure from its relationship with AT&T.  Lowe's, Frost, Valero, Power Loft, Christus Health, Stream Realty, Wachovia, American Funds' Capital Group, have similar data centers, and National Security Agency is building a monster data center at the former Sony microchip plant.




RACKSPACE MALL RENEWAL

Following along the same lines, locally grown business web hosting provider Rackspace Managed Hosting is now relocating its operations to the Windcrest area and its former Windsor Park Mall, a 30-year-old megamall (once the city's 3rd largest) which closed in 2005 and whose vast 1.05 million sq. ft. of floor area and sea of parking on 68 acres are now seen as a great non-traditional corporate campus opportunity.  Gutting and remodelling of the abandoned mall interior is already underway, and it is hoped this $100 million relocation and the 5,000 jobs Rackspace wishes add into the building help revive the local Windcrest city economy, whose fortunes succumbed will the death of the old giant mall.  For four years, the vast abandoned interiors looked eeriely like something out of "Night of the Comet" or some other end-of-the-world sci-fi zombie flick.  Unfortunately, I doubt anything significant can be done to the heavy and monolithic 1970's mall exterior, but the aim is to increase natural interior lighting and soften the cavernous acoustics.

How would you begin reinhabiting a monstrosity like this?




Rackspace is being lauded across the state for its vision in recovering a depressed area with the creative re-use of a dead megamall rather than building a new flashy campus on fresh undeveloped land in the far suburbs.  With the recycled mall project going forward, 300 acres of the surrounding galvanized community is being replanned along New Urbanist lines by Andres Duany of DPZ for an eventual $225 million redevelopment called Windcrest Village:



http://www.incidentlight.com/architecture/Windcrest.html
http://www.whatsnextforwindsorpark.com/index.html



I do not know if all their ideas will work given the realities of neighborhood, but in the above image, the transition from the scaleless highway roadside-rash development is done with typical parking lots and strip buildings (is that a Whataburger?) abutting directly against and growing into a denser New Urbanist pedestrian main street.  The transition blocks would thus have a highway frontage on one side and a pedestrian street frontage on the other.  I wish them luck.

FEDERAL MONEY TROUGH

While Microsoft's investment is huge by San Antonio private business standards, it is overshadowed by Federal government investments, among which was announcement of construction on a $900 million Airmen Training Complex at Lackland Air Force Base.  Those who have enlisted with the U.S. Air Force have probably been through Lackland, as it is the service's only center for enlistee basic training and sometimes nicknamed the "Gateway to the Air Force."  The $900 million will be used to replace the old 1960s residences and dining halls with a new dormitory complex whose construction is slated to be complete in late 2014.  But even that pales in comparison to the $1.8 billion of contruction going on at the local Fort Sam Houston and its medical wing and combat medine training facilities as part of national base closure and realignment planning, and the $3 billion overall being pegged by the Pentagon for projects within San Antonio.  To our far west, San Antonio's biosciences and healthcare scene and their emergent Texas Research Park is one of 6 candidates for the Department of Homeland Security's $500 million National Bio and Agro-Defense Facility, whose construction is planned to begin in 2010 once a site is finally selected.


RAILROADING AND NAFTA

For railroad fanatics, Union Pacific is slowly completing its $90 million, 300-acre, San Antonio Intermodal Terminal as a replacement to two older city intermodals.  This state-of-the-art rail port with the fancy name is really just a train marshalling yard with elaborate loading/unloading operations for truck containers to prepare and facilitate shipping eastward to Houston and northward to the U.S. Midwest.  However, its location in southwest Bexas county put its within convenient reach of both the Toyota manufacturing plant and Port San Antonio, an international air freight port and aerospace business/industrial park reorganized from the former Kelly Air Force Base and its sprawling Air Logistics Center.  While these terminal facilities are generally ugly expanses of utilitarian spawl, all of this forms the first major metropolitan southern hub of the central U.S. I-35 corridor and the center of the greater NAFTA corridor between Mexico and Canada.  For all its nationally spotlighted faults and criticisms, the North American Free Trade Agreement has been a development boon to San Antonio, to which any driver sandwiched between tractor trailers on I-35 can attest.


LIGHT RAIL TAKE THREE

Transit issues are always fun, and while the Texas Department of Transportation with ruthless determination tries to convert local existing highways into toll roads as revenue capturing schemes, light rail has once again resurfaced.  Light rail schemes for San Antonio were defeated in 1993 and 2000, primarily due to the frightening costs, debate on another quarter-cent sales tax required for funding, and community sense that they would only benefit select elite northern neighborhoods and speculated development.  The ideal civic line had a been one running from downtown north though the River North urban redevelopment, the museum district, Brackenridge Park, Trinity Univeristy, Alamo Quarry, Alamo Heights, and finally the airport.  This would hit many key sites and dense areas, but opened the door for class warfare between wealthy and non-wealthy neighborhoods.  Long term financing was instead redirected towards bus rapid transit, and light rail was believed to be dead for the foreseable future.  However, consumer gas costs have quadrupled since then, and the city's continued affordability in the face of national economic slowdown and migration has made Bexar County and San Antonio a focus of burgeoning growth.  Last month, Union Pacific revealed that several rock quarries within the city will in coming years relocate their exhausted middle suburb operations to new quarry sites, removing UP's last industrial customer on tracks reaching from downtown northwest to the under construction suburban retail center called The Rim.  Once lampooned in the 1993 light rail bid as the Fiesta Texas Route because it would have ended at the seasonal amusement park, this soon-to-be disused right-of-way offers a potential discount bargain for the creation of an initial light rail line, which with adjustments potentially could connect downtown to the sprawling 900 acre South Texas Medical Center, USAA headquarters campus, and the University of Texas San Antonio main campus.  Untold tens of thousands of medical, research, and academic jobs and $535 million in underway capital projects are at the Medical Center alone, while USAA's 286 acre Home Office Campus 4-story main McDermott Building alone boasts 4,492,000 sq. ft. of office space for 14,000 San Antonio employees, putting it between the Sears Tower and the Pentagon in terms of floor area.  Other rail spurs are being examined that could extend this line from south downtown back northeast into the military minicity of Fort Sam Houston.  These are worthy nodes surrounded by areas of high potential growth, our best chance yet at a publically passable starter line off of which a full system can be later built.  However, the line definitely will need some adjustment to fully reach several of the key points, though even the VIA transit authority is examining changing its parallel planned bus rapid transit route in deference for a light rail route.  Meanwhile, the land being opened up from the relocation of the quarries, offers a potential boon for developers.

You can see the proposed line in red here:
http://img242.imageshack.us/img242/2586/lrlpt0.png

The new light rail suggestion has swiftly gotten mixed up into the local politics of city office term limits, as San Antonio voters previously had some years ago established a two 2-year term (4 total years) limit for mayor and city council positions, the most restrictive for large cities in the nation, and that restriction is now being seen as an impediment to long-term legacy project planning and oversight such as involved in light rail development.  As an example, our Main Plaza renewal project is nearing completion, but while questions have arisen regarding overbudget and design decisions, few on the current council was a part of the decision making body when the project started a few years, and almost none of them have the legacy memory to understand how decisions brought us from point A through point B to point Z.  By the time our novice city leaders gain some council project experience, they are replaced with a fresh cadre of clueless novices.  The upcoming November elections will offer the ballot question of expanding term limits to four 2-year terms (8 total years), excluding current council and mayor, and this question may be seen as a referendum on potential of the newly revived light rail idea.  What may help is the announcement last week of the Standard & Poor's Rating Service's general obligation bond rating of AAA for San Antonio, S&P's highest rating, which makes bonds, interest rates, and investments in San Antonio more attractive.  Formerly impoverished San Antonio together with Phoenix are the only two cities with over a million in population to currently hold this rank, as many other cites are being downgraded as the economic crisis worsens.  Unlike much of the country, Texas is still foreseeing economic growth, and we got lucky electing progressive Mayor Hardberger and his City Manager pick of Sheryl Sculley, who also previously oversaw Phoenix's city management.  Here is a nice flattering article on her promoting San Antonio's core strengths.  Palin who?

Of course, the big dream is to parallel I-35 with a commuter rail line from San Antonio to Austin, which would connect through New Braunfels and San Marcos and actually reach past Austin to Georgetown and Round Rock.  While this would finally connect one of fastest growing corridors in the U.S., truth be told, the distances and cost are still overwhelming.  The surprise is that Union Pacific rail lines already exist connecting Port San Antonio to Round Rock, and while these lucrative freight right-of-ways would have to be acquired back from UP for conversion to passenger service, there is great savings to be realized from not having to create new right-of-ways in a developing urban corridor, and acquiring these existing lines potentially brings the mega-billion dollar outlandish cost into the realm of single-digit billion dollar manageability.  After a notorious spate of local rail accidents, Union Pacific would also like to move its operations to an outer east bypass around San Antonio's urbanized area, but they would also like deal sweeteners to offset the added fuel and time costs, and they have uncertainties with how any new eastern bypass route could be affected by the duplicated efforts of the pharaonic and politically convoluted Trans-Texas Corridor project, which surprisingly is being setup in a manner divorced from the parallel planning of any urban areas it is bypassing.  This sort of in-the-air planning dependent on others' in-the-air planning dependent on secretive state megalomanical planning tells us to expect a longer wait for Austin-San Antonio commuter rail, but the negotiations continue.  In the meantime, Austin has already begun its own system, and Amtrak has conceeded it would be willing to share passenger service lines with existing freight.


PARKS, GARDENS, AND ROCK QUARRIES

Well, I did mention relocating exhausted quarries, and San Antonio has proven itself quite capable of making great use of rock quarries...the rollercoasters of Six Flags Fiesta Texas zip past and through the sheer cliff faces of another abandoned rock quarry.  However, a true sight to see is are the Japanese Tea Gardens, a lush enclave of lily ponds and picturesque stone arch bridges carved in 1917 into the broad shaft of the old Alamo Portland and Roman Cement Company and somehow successfuly combining Texas stone rustic with Asian landscape gardening.  Rather than duplicating Japanese wooden structures, ours is an interpretation of a Texas-styled Sunken Gardens rock pagoda, while looming above is the picturesque stone chimney of the 1880s quarry kilns.  Long neglected, this had been San Antonio's most sought-after and enlightened restoration project in recent years, and after structural repairs to the cracked lining of the basins finished earlier this year and the donation of new plants, the green tea koi and lily pond and waterfalls have begun flowing again.



Ooo, aww, my favorite of the bunch:



Hopefully, they will keep it maintained this time, though I admit I kinda miss the Brackenridge Park Skyride, an overhead cable sky train of Swiss-made passenger gondolas left over from the World's Fair days.  Along the same lines, Voelcker Park, a 311-acre former northside dairy farm (Voelcker Farm), has been acquired by the city to become a new $33 millionurban preserve of restored Texas savanah, trails, and protected woods of 300-year-old heritage oak trees, and it is hoped that the adjoining Salado creek can be reworked into another 13-mile linear park.  Parts of the major thoroughfare of Wurzbach Parkway bisecting the site will have to be buried below a land bridge to facilitate animal crossings and pull the park back together.  Fortunately, the city was able to acquire this site before the sea of surrounding growing residential and strip mall developments devoured it, and you can see its ongoing master planning at http://voelckerparksa.com/.



I just wish they were also able to grab the site of the Woods of Alon Development, which would have increased the parksize by another 50%, but suburban developers are in a frenzy to grab choice parcels.  Initial public opening of the east parcel is scheduled for January 2009, while construction will continue throughout till the end of the 2009.  

Another closed shallow quarry was redeveloped into a gold course and popular suburban retail center known as Quarry Market, with the vast reinhabited shed of the cement plant and its iconic smokestacks as the centerpiece.  As the retail center has proven successful, expanded phases to include a surrounding dense mixed-use residential development known as Quarry Village are under construction.

The construction area in the center of the following image is the area of Quarry Village, with the smokestacks of Quarry Market below.  This image is old, as the buildings are now mostly up, however, but this aerial gives are great view of the topography of the sunken quarry:




The theme is still too starkly uniform as a nice suburban strip for my taste, but at least they are trying.  Whole developments that try to look pastiche European centers always look like unreal Disney theme parks to me.  You can see a design flyer for Quarry Village here:
http://www.reatarealestate.com/properties_PDF/QuarryVillageFlyer.pdf

At least it is not as blatantly derivative as Rialto Village, another suburban retail center going up near The Rim:
http://www.reatarealestate.com/properties_PDF/rialtovillage.pdf


Disney where?


BEER FEST

Re-use and re-inhabitation of old elephantine industrial structures is the popular mode of development, and one being watched is the 22 acre mixed-use urban village and retail-tainment center under construction on the grounds of the old landmark Pearl Brewery.

From this:


To this:


Construction, development, and the luring of tenants into the industrial-loft styled center of culinary art schools and haute cuisine restaurants continues:


Its success is being used as a model to redevelop the similarly closed 1933 Lone Star Brewery, which some southside residents and visitors may remember for its giant Aquacade public pool and the completely kitschy but entertaining Buckhorn Saloon and Museum.  The ambitious vision is for a 23 acre, $200-250 million redevelopment of 1,000 residential units, 100,000 sq. ft. of retail space, and 500,000 sq. ft. of office space:
http://www.mysanantonio.com/news/local_news/Lone_Star_Brewery_to_get_new_life_.html



For the history buffs, the historic 1884 Lone Star Brewery, which was replaced by the 1933 southside plant, was successfully converted into the picturesque San Antonio Museum of Art and laid the city's groundwork for recycling old industrial breweries.  Today, its crenellated towers and ultramodern skybridges boast, among other things, the largest museum of Asian art in the southern United States.  Connecting to this nodal point is one of the goals of the Museum Reach extension of the Riverwalk and the development of River North, as well as many of the defeated downtown light-rail schemes.


THE WESTERN ART MUSEUM

Speaking of museums, under reconstruction after exterior restoration is the the old San Antonio Library, a 1930's art deco Carnegie library on the Riverwalk downtown near La Villita.  This building later would house the wonderous Hertzberg Circus Museum, whose prized collection had to be closed and removed to the Witte Museum due to the deteriorating condition of the old building.



With the completion of renovations, pavilion expansions, and a Riverwalk sculpture garden by the summer of 2009, this building will reopen as the Dolph and Janey Briscoe Museum of Western Art.  You can read its story here:  http://www.actforsanantonio.com/press_002.htm







Oooo, awww, so serene.

As was this:


Emulating European fashion, our first "Luminaria:  Arts Night in San Antonio" was a glowing success last March, so much so that instead of the anticipated 20,000 festival attendees, an estimated 100,000 showed up for the party!  For the day, much of downtown was devoted to displays and performances of the local art scene, and several pedestrian streets and plazas became outdoor light shows, live performance extravaganzas, and fireworks.  Classical, flamenco, firedancing, Tejano, choirboys, alternative rock...all at once within dizzying reach of each other and set to bizarre outdoor light displays.





The highlight was Bill FitzGibbons's wonderous LED lighting of various landmarks and streetscapes, which really should be kept as permanent setups.  Also great was the San Antonio Symphony's performance in Alamo plaza surrounded up-close-and-personal by the crowds.  Mayor Hardberger's genius will now become an annual Fiesta season inaugural event, with the next greatly expanded San Antonio Luminaria set for March 14, 2009.  Plan your visits accordingly.

Okay, this has gotten lengthy enough and is far more than anybody really wanted to know, so let's all now go play virtual mayor with SimCity.  Hmmm, has anyone ever tried BATting and modding a Swiss gondola skyride?
 

[josefmayor 8]

Element Tower (Apartments/Condos)

SkyPoint (Condos)

Ybor City IKEA (Florida's LARGEST Ikea)

Channelside

Ybor City

Publix Hyde Park

Floridan Redevelopment

(Before)

(In Process)

[aiumkastarkius 0]

Wow! Never new San Antonio was so amazingly beautiful.

[Odainsaker 2,134]

Hehe, of course, it's more amazing beautiful with selective showing...we have lots of bland suburbs, destitute barrios, and ugly utilitarian stuff in between.

However, as a beautiful city is always more enjoyable:



The Lady of Justice Fountain has been restored this past December to the Bexar County Courthouse.  The courthouse used to have an eastside courtyard boasting this cast iron J.L. Mott fountain bought in 1896, which thrity years later in 1927 was removed to a pumping station park blocks away when the courtyard was filled with expanded offices.  Vandals toppled the unused fountain in 1997, shattering the top statue and damaging the basins.  With the $2.6 million restoration of the courthouse by the Hidalgo Foundation, the fountain was restored and given a new position in front of the courthouse with a new statue created by local sculptor Gilbert Barrer.  In a gesture towards greater resource management, the fountain water is recycled air conditioning condensation from the huge courthouse complex.


MUSICAL CHAIR STATUES

In relocating the fountain and reorganizing the entry plaza, it was necessary to move the courthouse's previous entry path statue, San Antonio de Padua, which had been donated to the city by the Order of the Alhambra knights in 1955.  The namesake patron saint upon whose feast day the city of San Antonio was founded would have to make way for the naked Lady Justice and her pagan clamshell fountain by finding temporary refuge in a parking garage, but then the white marble statue never seemed to quite match the red brick Romanesque courthhouse.



Lest this be seen as a slight to our city's namesake saint, know that his statue is actually being finally relocated to a supremely prominent position at the center of the newly remodelled Main Plaza before the white San Fernando Cathedral.  Definitely a much stronger relationship and more architecturally complementary, though it means yet more work to yet again modify the plaza and move around some trees.  Actually, the whole Main Plaza project, whose concept I have always supported, has gotten dragged into yet more design controversy, as the loose gravel and paving patterns have been found to be non-compliant with the Americans With Diasabilites Act.  Somebody had no foresight, leaving those in wheelchairs, walkers, and high heels stranded in the center of quicksand gravel with a minefield of randomly spouting hidden water jets.  An examination of the debacle and redesign of the paving is underway.  Hopefully, they will also ditch the clashingly ugly metallic cage booths.

This was the primary adopted plan, which involved a number of street closures, repavings, and and relandscaping:



To the top of the image are the Cathedral and City Hall, while on the left is the county courthouse and along the bottom are several historic hotels.  While this is not the Zocalo, it is a better space than the traffic circle that was there, and future visions call for a park cascade stairstepping down to the Riverwalk.


DOWNTOWN LIVING

A previous project I showed a couple blocks from Main Plaza was the Vistana apartments.  It is now complete and residents are moving in, and while the stylized modern Art Deco is too flat and plastic for my tastes, it actually came out better than I might have thought.  Certainly much more than the east side Vidorra condominium tower, which was also just recently completed and is accepting tenants.  Too bad they are out of my price range.



Meanwhile, downtown infill continues, with the sliver-like Marriot Courtyard now topped-out and undergoing cladding and interior construction.  The worldwide economic downturn has cut into the local tourist market much as it has everywhere else, but local hospitality industry number crunchers say the numbers for SA still look comparatively good, with this year's spike in unoccupied rooms coming primarily from the addition of last summer's newly opened Grand Hyatt at the convention center, whose sudden 1000-room market glut was always expected to have to be grown into.



Periodically, the nearby developer of the Post-Modern Italian mixed-use Piazza San Lorenzo with its Spanish Steps to the Riverwalk pops up to say the project is still on and that they are just lining up funding or tenant commitments, and indeed, they announced the same again a month or so ago, but after four years, I won't believe it till I see at least a building skeleton being erected.  Still, the location is a choice one, and the development would flank the river on Houston Street opposite the Post-Modern Mediterranean Hotel Valencia.


RIVERWALK EXPANSION URBAN SEGMENT

Aside from Main Plaza, the the next big city project has been the Riverwalk expansion, with the Urban Segment of the Museum Reach leg set for completion in mid-May of this year.  Contractors throughout the River North and Pearl Brewery areas are racing to get the massive waterworks project finished.  This northern urban stretch of manicured canals is being financed by the city and county for $80 million using visitor/venue taxes, while the more southerly Mission Reach stretch to restore devasted rural river channels will be an Army Corps of Engineers project financed partly by $10 million in Federal earmarks passed last year in the rancorous election-year Congress and signed by President Bush.

Notable is the near completion of the San Antonio Museum of Art's $5 million boat landing and riverside display plaza and terraces, which will finally connect via the river the rather distant museum complex to the greater activities of downtown.



Among the new Riverwalk extension features are numerous new and rediesigned bridges, of which an interesting one is the new SAMA footbridge, which connects the art museum's complex to parkland it owns on the opposite riverbank.  Originally, the SAMA building was 2-towered 19th-Century brewery, with a narrow metal bridge between the towers to transfer beer barrels.  That bridge was disassembled and sat idle for decades, but has been refashioned into what will become another picturesque footbridge.



Like other pedestrian amusements dotting along the original Riverwalk, the nearby Camden Street Bridge will be a whimsical grotto currently being crafted by artist Carlos Cortes with numerous grotesques and other sculptural delights.  Local artist Bill FritzGibbons showed that even the spaces under banal concrete overpasses can be made exciting with his lightscapes, and among other fanciful art installations that will line the new river channel and its many underbridges will be this bizarre giant fish display underneath the I-35 highway bridge by Philadelpia artist Daniel Lipski:



Currently, the 7-8 foot transparent colored fish are being crafted in his studio, and they are designed to light from within at night, making for a wonderous night school display for the surrouding River North neighborhood as it developes and fills in.  In time, the river improvement project will be further extended north into Brackenridge Park, the city's largest and primary urban park, such that tour boats and pedestrian paths will reach the old Witte Museum, zoo, sunken gardens, botanical gardens, and municipal golf course.  Funding still needs to begin for that now designed Park Segment, while shemes to parallel the new river extentions with mass transit connecting downtown northward through River North and Trinity University to the airport are still in the air.


BRT OR LRT

Urban infilling would be more intelligible with a rational mass transit system, and while light rail is remain far off, the VIA Metropolitan Transit Authority has been examing a Bus Rapid Transit system to connect downtown up along the busy Fredericksburg Road to the inner suburb University Medical Center complex.  The Medical Center is already on its own billion dollar expansion program, and with the jobs it already provides and traffic it creates, numerous competing and overlapping plans are being studied on how to access it with mass transit.  VIA's concern is that bus rapid transit will not make sense if there is a parallel light rail line, and light rail will go nowhere if certain connections and commitments cannot be made, and those commitments cannot be made without a certainty of whether we will develop BRT or LRT, so everyone is still waiting in limbo to see what everyone else does.



At any rate, the west downtown BRT station is envisioned to be placed around the old historic 1908 International and Great Northern Railroad Depot, whose charmingly picturesque dome and cupola main hall has already been grandly restored and remodelled for the nonprofit San Antonio City Employees Credit Union main office.  It is now Generations Federal Credit Union.  This was once called the "Taj Mahal" of rail stations in the South...the tracks are still in use, and the former I&GN/MoPac Depot is often targetted as a striking potential transit node.  The other charmingly historic San Antonio depot, the Southern Pacific's old westside Sunset Station, itself another noteworthy 1903 beauty for railfans, has already been restored and redeveloped into a fashionable Alamodome-area entertainment venue and historic district with new hotels and condos sprouting up.

A popular aim of the BRT and LRT schemes is to reach the new far northwest suburban development known as the "The Rim."  This is the hot area of suburban and strip mall development, with sprawling apartment developments being proposed and a number of big box megastips already completed.  Some of it tries a hint of the New Urbanist approach, but much of it has the sense of "nice" megasprawl with traditional style dressing.  I doubt the sidewalks will ever be full as the renders might lull us into believing, and even the completed Quarry Market development feels more like a sprawling apartment complex with an "urban hip" veneer.

The Village at the Rim:



La Joya:



At the south of the city is the Verano neighbhood, which is in planning as the site for a new Texas A&M San Antonio campus and is seen as another potential terminus for light rail in a massive New Urbanist district.



We'll see...I don't believe the other pretty images of open air fruit markets one bit, and am rightfully suspicious of the small town look found in an all-in-one development package.  However, it is possible to form a dense mised-use community with a sizeable university campus at its center, and SA definitely needs an expanded higher education establishment, so I wish them well.


THE PLAYGROUNDS OF THE ELITE

Meanwhile, back in ring city, the new Tesoro World Headquarters for Fortune 150 oil refiner and marketer Tesoro Corporation has also topped out and been clad and the campus should be completed this summer.  The old office complex at Concord Plaza being leased by Tesoro has been bought by and will become the new corporate head office for Whataburger, who will be relocating from Corpus Christi.





An even bigger project has been underway further out in the northside Cibolo Canyons, where the vast JW Marriott San Antonio Hill Country Resort & Spa is currently under construction.  Some $500 million in facilities construction will add a 1000-room resort and $13 million water park, while the gem will be two PGA Tournament Players Club gold courses.  The $50 million courses, together with the adjacent AT&T Oak Course and the AT&T Canyon courses have turned Cibolo Canyons and its expensive ranches and homesteads into a moonscape of relandscaping.  The new PGA home is set to be completed in February 2010, and at a total cost of $600 million, it is any golfer's wildest dreams coming true.






THE SURGE TO THE SPLURGE

The real money, however, is being poured in through Federal government projects, primarily military projects related to changes created by the Base Closure and Realignment Commission.  It was initially thought that the BRAC closure of Kelly AFB was a mortal economic blow, but instead, that site has been developed into a private air business port, and the Pentagon is now reconcentrating resources on Fort Sam Houston and related installations.  Roughly $3 billion is being expended on over 180 new construction projects thoughout the city,  primarily centering of the fort's medical services and medical training establishment at the newly combined San Antonio Military Medical Center.





With that much money made available, a preservation boom at Fort Sam Houston is also underway to refurbish and reinhabit disused historic fort buildings as administrative space.  Their are over 800 listed historic structures at Fort Sam, more than other U.S. military installation, and many of them are known only by non-descript numbers, such as the former recuperation hospital of Bldg. 2000:



$3 billion in construction is real stimulus, giving bouyance through massive public projects to a local construction industry that is not feeling the severe effects of the national economic downturn, despite real slowdowns in the local residential, comercial, and especially the speculative markets.  Surprisingly, these allocations were in the works years before "stimulus" became today's popular political catchword, and timed unbelievably fortuitously given that the current Obama stimulus has yet to work its way through the system.  Perhaps even more surprising, Texas in the past election years had lost national political influence, for Tom Delay-led state redistricting efforts saw the fall of established Democratic representatives, leaving the state with only junior Democratic members and no significant seniority-allocated committee chairs in the now Democratic-controlled Congress.  Republican Senator Kay Bailey Hutchinson is currently likely Texas's only real Capitol Hill heavyweight, and she is aiming to move from the U.S. Sentate to become Texas Governor.

Of course, not all has been rosy here.  The airport revealed a month or so ago that its $525 million 2013 expansion would have to be scaled back, as the record-breaking airline market had dramatically changed and projections were that two planned new terminals would now not be needed till 2014.  A $134 million second terminal replacement already underway will continue for its planned opening in 2010, while a $123 million new third terminal, which was to start construction next year, will be put on hold until passenger volume recovers.  A fourth terminal had still been in planning and will remain so for much longer in the new schedule.

The stimulus spending of the new Obama administration has every municiaplity scrambing, and I must admit, SA is no exception.  Projects are either being manufactured to push for funds, or more typically, projects whose funding would have come from other less timely revenue sources (civic venue improvements) or were on later planning schedules (highway interchange projects) are being raced to the forefront of the stimulus line as vital shovel-ready projects.  A surpise was unveiled when the Texas I-35 corridor and its dream of commuter rail was pegged as one of the ten major investment targets for the Obama administration's national hgih speed rail program.  We'll see what comes of all this, but I must admit, given that SA seems safely set through the next two years with its own projects already and the bottom has never been forecasted to drop out of the local markets here, the broader stimulus might be better sent to other cities where it is more critically needed.  Incidently, San Antonio-headquartered Frost National Bank, the largest Texas-based bank, did not participate in the national bank bailout and instead announced several weeks ago profitable shareholder dividends.

However, some real Obama Stimulus has been coming our way too.  Yesterday, the General Services Administration, which oversees federal buildings, revealed that it would use some of its $5.5 billion allocation of stimulus money to modernize our downtown U.S. Courthouse and Post Office building.  $61.3 million will be assigned to remake the historic building into a "green" LEED building, with much of the work going primarily into upgrading HVAC and other internal systems, though there has been some mention of new light wells or even solar panels. More interesting from an urbanistic standpoint is that bureaucratic occupancy changes will allow for the reopening of the building's grand front entrance facing the Alamo.  That entrance had long been closed, forcing visitors to enter unceremoniously from a minor side entrance, undermining the civic pedestrian flow of the plaza and primary facade street.



It's a handsome 1935 building in Federal beaux-arts style and stands in prominent position on Alamo Plaza.  To the right of the above image you can see the preserved barracks wall of the Alamo grounds, while on the left is the Alamo Cenotaph.  A greater city plan is to actually turn Alamo Plaza into a real plaza, removing the roadways similar to the Main Plaza renewal and unifying the paving and landscaping.  More extreme groups want transform the urban plaza area away from a tourist strolling site and back into a national battlefield grave site, demolishing some of the surrounding commercial buildings and recreating the old outer walls and other structures of the Alamo fort.  That's a bit too farfetched for me, and the "recreations" would likely never be authentic.  More messily, many of the surrounding buildings are themselves also historic 19th-Century buildings that have been carefully preserved over the years and are now all part of the vibrant fabric of downtown.

Hope this was interesting!
 

[Martin892 4]

Nice thread btw.

IJburg (en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ijburg) is the most recent city expasion of my hometown Amsterdam. Its built completely on artificial islands near the eastern IJ bank ("eiland" means island); construction started in 2001 and will be completed in 2012.

To protect green zones around Amsterdam the only option to the city planners was to create new islands to build on and by that maintaining city growth. Officially IJburg is a vinex-locatie (en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vinex) (specific 1990+ dutch city expansions), but IJburg has a much more urbanized layout than most of the other vinex-locations in the Netherlands. By now, around 15.000 people already live there, and when completed IJburg will have 45.000 residents and will provide 12.000 jobs to the city. The islands Steigereiland and Haveneiland are already finished by now.

The area has 2 main entrances: the Enneus Heerma bridge (photo) in the north, connecting IJburg with the A10 highway and the S114 city road to the dowtown area, used by the IJtram connecting IJburg with the Amsterdam tram system; and the Nescio bridge in the south (find those bridges on the map).

Mixed usage of buildings is the main formula for the new neighbourhood. Instead of malls and office buildings, companies and retail shops will be spread over the area, and social housing is found in the same condo buildings as expensive apartments, to avoid impoverishment etc.. Over 20 architects designed all the buildings and housing projects, so there will be a variety of modern architecture when finished.

Future Haveneiland aerial view; the central axis is the IJburglaan (IJburg lane) where most shops etc. are located:

(future) architecture:

[068664663 2]

Whew! Wow, these all look amazing!

[hikariyuugi 0]

This is the concept drawing of the New Transbay Terminal and it's accompanying  new towers in San Francisco, California. It will connect multiple bay area transit agencies to the California High Speed Rail. 

The center building aims to be the tallest building in the city.

 

 

here is a ground view of the terminal. I can't wait for the bullet train! XD

I just wanted to add another pic. Also None of this is under construction yet but it has been approved by the city.

[buildsolid 4]

I hope they build some of the developments proposed here. Here are some of Perth's proposed developments:

1: Northbridge development

Here is what they are building at the moment, it is the BHP Billiton:

And finally this is what they proposed for the foreshore, but this got rejected:

And instead we got this, it isn't the right one, and we have a hill next to the CBD on the right which has a better view than our ferris wheel:

[068664663 2]

Hikariyuugi: I've heard of the Transbay Terminal before, but don't you think that the tower is just a bit too tall? Just saying.

[Martin892 4]

Great stuff. Didn't know Perth was so largely expanding

[068664663 2]

If you looked at the first picture of my first post in this thread, you would see that it was under construction in Markham, Ontario, just northeast of the City of Toronto. Markham is my hometown, and recently, it started on an ambitious project that would include over 365 hectares of mixed-use high-density space. It is developing pedesttrian-oriented buildings and is linking the area with GO Transit, the regional train service, and VIVA, the region's BRT (bus rapid transit).

This 365 hectare area is called Markham Centre, and will be home to more than 15,000 residents and 10,000 jobs when it is completed. Buildings will range from 3 to 40 stories, with plans for a luxury hotel overlooking the river valley that snakes through the site.

I have included some PDFs from the Town of Markham that will further explain.

http://www.markham.ca/markham/aspc/markhamcentre/PDF/MC_DevStatus_2009.pdf - The Status of Development

http://www.markham.ca/markham/aspc/markhamcentre/PDF/Newsletters/mcnews_09winter.pdf?action=showRelease&searchText=false&showText=all&actionFor=600992 - The official Markham Centre Newsletter

http://www.markham.ca/markham/aspc/markhamcentre/PDF/mc_presentation_081124.pdf?action=showRelease&searchText=false&showText=all&actionFor=600992 - General outlines

http://www.markham.ca/markham/aspc/markhamcentre/PDF/mcroadprogram.pdf - Roads and infrastructure

For more information you can visit this website:

http://www.markham.ca/markham/aspc/markhamcentre/AboutMarkham_Site/home.asp

[internet_exploder 2]

Wow, seems like Markham Centre will be developed fast. Like the pdf by the way. 

[068664663 2]

I dug up another PDF about Markham's Langstaff Gateway, which is also reconized in Ontario's Places To Grow plan. Here it is:

http://www.markham.ca/markham/ccbs/indexfile/Agendas/2009/Development%20Services/pl090519/Langstaff%20Master%20Plan.pdf

[Odainsaker 2,134]

Wow, I love the techno-organic New Transbay Terminal.  My own city is likely too conservative to embark on something as outlandishly cool for its mass transit.  Indeed, San Antonio's VIA Metropolitan Transit Authority last month, while planning debates between light rail and bus rapid transit were still in air, surprised everyone with a move to study resurrecting a streetcar system, which San Antonio has not had since the end of the 1800's!  It is argued that whereas light rail and its new right-of-ways are at the moment simply too expensive, and bus rabid transit stigmatized by the word "bus" of the sense of impermanence, a streetcar system's rails and overhead wires can be easily inserted into existing streets and the streetcars can safely operate amidst downtown automobile traffic.  While it doesn't have the modern slickness of light rail or its scope and speeds, a streetcar system offers a nostalgically marketable image for a tourist city beholden to its downtown historic American charms.  However, though I suspect this scheme will play too much to a niche outlook limited to downtown rather than a extendable metropolitan transit plan, it will be interesting to see what if anything comes off it.

Earlier in this thread, I wrote much about the San Antonio River Improvement Project.  With great fanfare, the first portion of that great project, the Urban Segment of the Museum Reach, had its grand opening this past weekend on May 30.  This is the most extensive work done on the river since the original Riverwalk conceived by architect Robert Hugman was started as a WPA project throughout the 1940s, and the $74.4 million upgrade extends the Riverwalk 1.33 miles north from downtown to the San Antonio Museum of Art and Pearl Brewery redevelopment.  Residents in the past few days have turned in droves to falling in love with their new urban renewal feature, and after so much description on my part, it's only fair I show the end results.


The start of the new extension is the Lexington Avenue Bridge near the red brick San Antonio First Baptist Church, whose vast historic complex can be seen on the right in this great image by jfortega on Flickr.  On the left is the low-rise River Veranda of the El Tropicano hotel building, which gives a great sense of the kind of urban development that can occur further up the river in the River North area.  In the middle is a narrow obstruction created by the preserved portion of the 1920s Hugman Dam.  While the stonework and lighting is in place, it will take years for the plantings to properly grow in.  jfortega has vast comprehensive photostream at http://www.flickr.com/photos/14257221@N03/



The starting point is also where the Municipal Auditorium's $122 million conversion into the centerpiece of a Performing Arts Center is taking place, and where a new auditorium boat landing is being design for the building's currently uninteresting rear facade.  LMN Architects of Seattle was selected last month to redesign the interiors into a high-tech theater, for which a raising of the shallow dome is already expected in order to improve the acoustics.  Nearby, the old San Antonio Fire Headquarters, seen on the far right in a historic building of matching architectural style, will likely become offices and restaurants serving the auditorium and the surrounding arts district.  Construction is planned to start in 2011 and the new state-of-the-art Municipal Auditorium should open in 2013.



A picturesque feeding spring from Jason Rodriquez on Flickr.  Beyond the auditorium the area changes dramatically in character away from the dense urbanism of downtown.  Much of the north area of downtown had become a forgotten backyard of small empty industries, overgrown brush, and even Winnebago trailer homes.  The new community-crafted River North project hopes to bring new denser development to the area, serviced by mass transit and growing off the amenity spine of the revamped river.  Already, property values have doubled in the area in the past decade, and developers are looking at partially-abandoned apartment projects and new hotels for the area.  As the plants grow in, so will the residents.  Jason Rodriquez has more awesome images available on a Flickr photostream at http://www.flickr.com/photos/jason-rodriguez/



First and foremost, this is still a controlled river with lined channels and embankment retaining walls.  It is now also a quiet place to stroll, bustling only now with crowds admiring the novelty of a new downtown linear park away from the tourist hustle of the original Riverwalk.  lannadelarosa offers a wonderful Flickr photostream with more great images at http://www.flickr.com/photos/lannadelarosa/



Despite the greenery, this is still a city, complete with street bridges and overpasses.  There undersides have been transformed in to avante-garde zen art with scupture and light displays, such as this by artist Stuart Allen, as well as tourist boat landings and shaded sitting areas.  Some of the older bridges closer to downtown have comfortable stonework on their street deck balustrades, while other bridges will recieve new artist-designed balustrades later this summer.



By far the coolest public engineering features are the new locks, needed to accomodate river boats to the 9-foot change in the river's level.  Nothing quite like them have been seen in central Texas, requiring their own public viewing pavilion, and believe it or not, there were crowded long lines to ride the free ticket boats through the locks.



Heehaw, ride 'em, cowboy!



The clearing of the river brush and weeds revealed a long lost site, the Veterans of Foreign Wars Post 60, housed in a beautiful Atlee B. Ayers-designed Old Petty mansion of wrap-around verandas and white corinthian columns.  VFW Post 76 is claimed the oldest VFW post in Texas, and has seen its visitor rate to its museum and bar dramatically increase now that it can actually be seen.



Further up the river, the Sonic Passage boat landing offers a shady rest area with a series of selected sounds played as a crafted ethereal sonic sculpture.  I guess "music" is passé nowadays.



Speaking of art, the midway point and most prestigious destination is the San Antonio Museum of Art, which had long stood isolated from and unconnected to the cultural activities of downtown.  This great image by lannadelarosa on Flickr shows the SAMA building in the back with its two towers connected by a modern black-glass skywalk.  Originally, the building was the old Lone Star Brewery, and a metal bridge for rolling beer barrels connected the tower.  That long disassembled metal bridge has been reused to make the new Roy Smith Street Pedestrian Bridge, a narrow footbridge which now makes a great contrasted pairing with the black-glass skywalk that had earlier replaced it.



The museum raised donations to create its own boat landing and rearside entrance on what had once been a forgotten side of the complex.  SAMA too has not had this much visitor activity in years, and a new main entrance plaza for the front of the museum is in the works to replace the empty approachway and parking lot in conjunction with the River North master plan.



It will be even more picturesque once the flowering plants mature.  FlickrClubSA.com has a fascinating Flickr photostream at http://www.flickr.com/photos/www_317537_com/



SAMA also created a narrow rear patio between the boat landing pavilion and the historic ancilliary museum buildings.  It is intended that outdoor art and sculpture will be displayed in this new public space, open to new outdoor visitor classrooms.



Beyond the museum is the massive I-35 highway bridge, and many had doubts about how this unremarkably utilitarian piece of transportation engineering would fit into the new riverscape.  Philadelphia artist Donald Lipski gave us F.I.S.H., a hanging school of giant glass fish to amuse and inspire parkgoers.


I had my doubts, but it is proving to be the most peculiarly idiosyncratic point along the whole stretch of river.



At night the glass fish a lit from within, and they along with the passage and boat landing lights further reflect in the calm waters.  Badtz Maru has a Flickr photostream with more great images at http://www.flickr.com/photos/badtz_maru/



Somehow, the ugly utilitarian highway bridge has the most serene rest area and picturesque window view of the whole project!  It remains to be seen how long until vandals try to knock out the fish, but the San Antonio River Foundation already maintains a repair budget just in case.



After the I-35 fish comes a tight tangle of street bridges, and nestled in the middle is The Grotto sculpted by Carlos Cortés.  It's a whimsical wonderland of grotesques, stalactites, monster mouth stairways, and phallic symbols to bemuse visitors, and has become another popular stop in what otherwise would be a concrete jungle.  Perhaps in time it will be expanded to both sides to create a serious of cavernous mouths between the bridges.



The end point of the currently opened stretch is the Pearl Brewery, a huge industrial site under reconstruction into a new mixed-use residential and commerical entertainment venue.  Right now I think there is a weekly open air farmer's market, health food store, and culinary schools already setup, and plans include an outdoor river theater.  The river project ends here with a turning basin for the boats and a series of rocky rapids, which will become the bubbly backdrop to the planned river stage.  Initial construction to continue the river improvements past the brewery are being aimed for this summer, with full construction of the planned Park Segment of the Museum Reach slated for next year.  That portion of the project will improve paths for an additional 2 miles as the river passes through the vast Brackenridge Park, which includes golf courses, botanical gardens, and the city zoo, and which will terminate at the campus of the University of the Incarnate Word.  With that area already landscaped, the $12 million Park Segment is anticipated to be the easiest and swiftest potion of the entire network of river projects.

The same, however, cannot be said for the southern portion of the San Antonio River Improvement Project, known at the Mission Reach and intended to extend a linear park down the to the San Antonio Missions National Historical Park and its treasured collection of 17th-century Spanish missions, which are sisters to the famous Alamo.  9 miles of ecological restoration is an entirely new venture by the Federal Army Corps of Engineers, whose experience is more in flood control rather than in undoing past control efforts.  The first 1 mile, $14 million test run of the project to restore the embankments and river bottom and reseed fauna and aquatic life after decades of badly engineered manmade changes is already underway, and the novelty of the task forced the Army Corps of Engineers to admit that it had underestimated the scope and costs of the effort, and estimated costs for the remaining segment of the project have already jumped in the past few weeks by 80% to over $286 million.  The city has been horrified, as securing meager Federal funding for the corps has already been a bewildering process of Washington Congressional footdragging, election-year Presidential posturing, and Stimulus/Porkulus namecalling, all of which has dragged out the funding process for a decade already.  There is no way the city and county want to revisit that entangling circus for a $120 million increase, and in frustration the county commissioners have today removed the apologetic Army Corps of Engineers and its Federal handlers from the spearhead role of the project and placed the local San Antonio River Authority in charge.  The county has also pledge to cover the unanticipated new costs using money from its $500 million, 10-year flood control budget.  Incidently, while the former Federal project is ballooning in setback costs, the newly opening Museum Reach segment, which was managed and funded by the city, has come in on time and $2 million under budget.



Castles, bridges, trucks, beer, and fishes.  Mesmerizing at it is, it is not yet truly competed, with some anticipating at least a decade before the full fruits of San Antonio's river transformation and follow-up development can be tasted.  There is talk that San Antonio is at a critical juncture, where growth forces and optimistic outlook are in the right place to make the city the next Portland or Denver or *gasp!* even Seattle.  There has definitely been a change of attitudes within the city, which had long struggled as an impoverished provincial backwater, but which now realizes just how much opportunity and positioning it has going for it, and which is enjoying a boom made more dramatic by the sudden spiraling crash of many other American cities.  The original Riverwalk, a former draingage ditch that is now arguably the second most visited Texas attraction after the Alamo, radically changed the city and its character forever, and the new river projects promise to do the same.  However, the grand opening also sadly heralded the retirement of popular Mayor Phil Hardberger, whose term of strong leadership ended that same weekend, and whose legacy of transformational projects in the city will be hard to match for some time.  Our new youthful Mayor Julian Castro has promised to continue the transformation with a focus on the Performing Arts District, River North, and the underway University of Texas southside campus, but he will inherit a drastically tighter budget due to the ongoing recession.  There have been rumors that the 75-year-old Hardberger, with his vast experience in local and state government. and even in Washington administrations, could be tapped as a potential Democratic candidate for Texas Governor, with polling showing a definite advantage over aloof incumbent Gov. Rick Perry.  Hardberger, however, has expressed an interest instead on focusing on the next great urban transformation of San Antonio, the long-studied revitalization of the grounds of HemisFair Park and the area of the Tower of the Americas into a true urban park gathering space.  I wish him well.


Okay, one last bit of babbling...


Last weekend, the state of Texas moved to accept the transfer of 3,000 acres of city protected land to add to the Government Canyon State Natural Area, bringing Texas's newest 4-year-old state park to 11,000 acres.  In the map you can see the location of the park in the city's exurbs, as well the red-outlined land holdings to be added.  The city created a fund to purchases the Hill Country acreage over the critical Edwards Aquifer Recharge Zone in response to rapidly encroaching suburban development, which can be seen starting the encircle the area.  However, the city does not have the funds or expertise to operate a natural preserve, and the transfer to state control will allow the state's already in place forestry and wildlife experts to manage the trails and habitats.  This will likely be the last major epxansion of the protected state park, as developers are tripping over themselves in the race to grab choice sites in the hottest growing hilly sector of the city.  Incidently, while the leftmost map has the line of the San Antonio River and dowtown covered by roadmap markers, just to the left you can see the parallel green line of Leon Creek, which is also becoming a linear park, and which some would like to connect to the San Antonio River system and the Voelker Park/Salado Creek linear park to make a fully connected web of parks and trails completely encircling in the city core.  That's years of work away, but it's already on the progressive table.



Getch yer horses, and be sure to check out mlhradio's Flickr photostream at http://www.flickr.com/photos/matthigh/


Gosh, I hope this was interesting...I think we've learned more than we ever wanted to about SA projects for awhile, hehehe, but we can now knowledgably recreate our own Riverwalk linear park systems in SimCity!