Houston Lifestyles and Homes Magazine Jan 2010: News and Events Around Town

Houston Via Colori 2009 Brightens Houston Streets

Light rains postponed the start of Houston Via Colori 2009, presented by El Paso Corporation and Quantum Energy Partners. The fourth annual street painting festival was an amazing sight of art, entertainment and activities with hundreds of artists displaying artwork on the asphalt canvas of the streets of Allen Parkway and Bagby. The streets were transformed with artwork in many genres including landscapes, movie stars and wedding portraits. Festival goers also enjoyed two stages of bands, great food and a variety of activities for every age.

“Despite the weather and delays, Houston Via Colori 2009 was a huge success, proved by Sunday ’s large crowds witnessing creativity unfold on the streets of downtown,” said Renée S. Davis, executive director of The Center for Hearing and Speech. “The art was inspiring, music had people dancing in the streets, and thousands learned the value of The Center for Hearing and Speech to children with hearing impairments and the Houston community. ”

new standard with the fastest sellout in race history, but the pace at which registration was completed exceeded even our most optimistic projection, ” said Race Director Brant Kotch. “The Houston Marathon Committee and our dedicated team of more than 5,000 volunteers look forward to staging a great event for our largest field ever. ”

It took 12 weeks for the 2009 races, with 4,000 fewer registrations, to reach capacity.

“We had concerns the difficult economy might impact our numbers and offered our participants a no-fee-increase year to do our part in these tough times, ” said Steven Karpas, managing director. “Obviously, the phenomenal response and 60-hour sell out proved us wrong.”

There are still ways to enter the sold out races through the Run for a Reason charity programs.

The Chevron Houston Marathon, a Running USA founding member, is the nation’s premier winter marathon, annually attracting participants from all 50 U.S. states and more than 20 foreign countries. In 2009, more than 26,000 runners participated in four marathon weekend events (marathon, half marathon, 5K run and children ’s run). The Houston Marathon has been ranked among the top five marathons in the nation by Ultimate Guide to Marathons for fastest course, organization and crowd support.

More information is available at
www.chevronhoustonmarathon.com or 713-957-3453.

Alliance for Multicultural Community Services

and KaBoom Team to Build New Playground

Nearly 200 volunteers from Peace for the Children, Alliance for Multicultural Community Services, organizers from KaBOOM! and residents of the communities joined forces to build a new, safe playground in one day at Los Arcos Apartments in Houston. The new playground designs were based on drawings provided by children who attended a Design Day event in Houston.

The new playground provides a safe place for the hundreds of children per year who come to play. The playground build was one of more than 150 KaBOOM! lead across the country in 2009 in an effort to provide a great place to play within walking distance of every child in America.

Houston Grand Opera Wins Award

Houston Grand Opera received the 2009 Leading Lights Diversity Award in Arts and Culture from the National MultiCultural Institute for its Song of Houston series, the first time in NMCI ’s 26-year history that this national award has been presented to an opera company.

“It is a real honor to receive this award,” states HGO General Director and CEO Anthony Freud, “which acknowledges the efforts not only of Houston Grand Opera, but also of the hundreds of collaborators and thousands of people who have helped us begin a revolutionary re-definition of the relationship between an opera company and its city. ”

Created in 2007 under the auspices of the HGOco department, Song of Houston celebrates the stories of people who define the unique character of our city through an ongoing series of new works. These stories are told through collaborative community and educational projects that redefine the limits of the traditional arts and incorporate music-making, photography, creative writing and visual art.

Song of Houston’s first successes include the 2007 and 2008 presentations of The Refuge, a large-scale community opera that recounted stories from Houston's Mexican, Central American, Indian, Pakistani, Soviet-era Jewish, African and Vietnamese communities in an ambitious and historic new work.

For The Refuge, HGO co-collaborated with 58 local, national, and international organizations including National Geographic, Doctors Without Borders, Writers in the Schools, Inprint, Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, and others.

Following the immense success of The Refuge, subsequent projects included Now and Then (2009), a celebration of the blues in Houston, and The Neff Project (2008), a festival of the diverse stories and people of Neff Elementary School (where only 3 percent of students are Caucasian) and the Sharpstown community. Through these community collaborations and the amazing stories recounted in the Song of Houston projects, HGOco highlights the incredible cultural diversity of Houston and unites its residents in an unprecedented and unparalleled way.

The Leading Lights Diversity Awards celebrate exemplary leaders in the nonprofit sector whose demonstrated courage, innovation and commitment to diversity light a path to a more inclusive society.

Houston’s Discovery Green Achieves LEED

Gold Certification

Discovery Green has achieved LEED Gold Certification, making it the first completed LEED Gold project in downtown Houston. LEED Gold Certification —the second highest rating and still quite rare—places Discovery Green in a category with other environmentally responsible projects around the country. LEED certification is awarded solely by the U.S. Green Building Council to projects that adhere to universally accepted criteria such as energy efficiency, material conservation, water efficiency and indoor environmental quality.

The park project was initiated by Houston Mayor Bill White, who supported the development of the park through a public-private partnership between the city and the Discovery Green Conservancy.

The pursuit of LEED certification has been a priority since early in the design process, but the support of BP as Discovery Green ’s Sustainability Sponsor made LEED Gold certification possible.

Hargreaves Associates of San Francisco was the park’s prime landscape architects and planners, along with Houston landscape architect Lauren Griffith. PageSoutherlandPage of Houston designed the park ’s architecture and led the LEED certification process with the Discovery Green Conservancy. Miner Dederick Construction served as general contractor and was responsible for many of the LEED requirements.

The scope of the certification includes both the 12-acre park site and the three above-ground buildings: The Grove, the Alkek Building and The Lake House building. The key features recognized in the Gold certification include: converting 12 acres of land in a dense urban center well-served by mass transit into an active civic amenity by moving surface level asphalt parking space underground, thereby reducing the overall temperature. Furthermore, groundwater from the underground garage sent to the pond mitigates the effects of evaporation, eliminating the need for the city to remove groundwater from site; generating 8 percent of the park ’s total energy with 256 solar panels located on the roofs of the Alkek Building and The Lake House Building in order to heat water and to generate electricity on-site.