Tall Tower for Texas

By Wolf Von Eckardt

At last, a skyscraper that again scrapes the sky

The International Style, which dominated the architecture of the past generation, gave us bland high-rise boxes, not skyscrapers. The tallest buildings seldom give us a lift. As Chicago Architect Harry Weese observed, these minimal sculptures of maximum size "neglected the ground, the sky and, most of all, the user."

Now a new $350 million to $400 million Texas-size office tower in the best premodern skyscraper tradition is proposed for Houston. It does not challenge the record height of Chicago's 1,450-ft. Sears Tower. But even as a scale model, it appears taller and prouder. Like the Chicago Tribune Tower and New York City's Chrysler Building, both more than a half-century old, it seems rooted in the ground and soars to heaven in a powerful rhythm, an evocative symbol of growth and success.

Including its 130-ft. pinnacle, the steel, granite and glass building will be 1,360 ft. high, rising far above the dense forest of downtown Houston's corporate towers. Its 82 stories will contain 2 million sq. ft. of rentable space. The developers, Southwest Bancshares Inc. and Century Development Corp., picked as their architect Helmut Jahn, 42, president of Chicago's Murphy/Jahn.

Born in Nuremberg, Jahn studied architecture in Munich and came to this country in 1966 to do postgraduate work at the Illinois Institute of Technology, the citadel of Mies van der Rohe's bare and square architectural puritanism. Jahn joined the firm of C.F. Murphy in 1967 and became its chief designer in 1973. The firm changed its name to Murphy/Jahn eight years later.

While the C.F. Murphy firm designed many noted buildings over the past 45 years, the first prominent building to show Jahn's personal imprint is Chicago's recently completed Xerox Center. It is straight Mies with one sweeping, un-Miesly rounded corner. Jahn's later design for Chicago's One South Wacker office building demonstrates a less graceful bent toward changed public taste.

More decisive for Jahn's development was a commission to design an addition to the Chicago Board of Trade Building, a 1930 premodern skyscraper by one of the pioneering firms of that style, Holabird & Root. "We were forced to study this old building carefully," says Jahn. "Holabird & Root opened our eyes. We saw that applying historic ornaments like gaudy wallpaper does nothing to relate a building to its older neighbors. History itself must be the generator of new forms."

The competition for the Houston tower proved to be Jahn's opportunity to test this insight. The president of Century Development, Richard Everett, who is also an architect, laid down precise criteria: a building that would give Houston's skyline an identity and its downtown center a focal point. Says Everett: "We wanted a landmark, and we wanted a building that would be open to people and give them a civic space with a lot of public art."

Bit Jahn's winning landmark tapers to a large pinnacle topped by a spire. The corners surge to the top in five stepped leaps. The pinnacle will contain an observation deck and a rooftop restaurant. The building, turned 45DEG on its square site, has four lOO-ft.-high corner entrances that lead to a ten-story shopping and festival arcade.

With Jahn's classy design comes innovative engineering. The principal structural engineer for the project is LeMessurier Associates of Cambridge, Mass. For the Houston tower, William J. LeMessurier, 56, will use for the first time a system called "the Ultimate Structure," which he developed over the past 15 years. It consists of eight concrete columns connected by four vertical steel trusses that span the building like bridges, carrying the gravity load and providing rigid bracing to resist hurricanes. With this system, no other inside supports are needed.

When Jahn's building is completed in 1986, it will top a number of widely acclaimed modern buildings in Houston. Among them: Skidmore, Owings & Merrill's Allied Bank Plaza and Tenneco Building, Philip Johnson and John Burgee's Pennzoil Place, and I.M. Pei's Texas Commerce Tower. But Jahn's is not the first building to break the modern mold of all these glassy buildings.

The mold was shattered four years ago when New York's Johnson/Burgee released the drawings for Manhattan's AT&T Building. Critics tossed their choicest epithets at the design for the 37-story building with its beautifully detailed pink granite fac,ade and broken-pediment top. Architects were almost unanimously indignant but then, in considerable numbers, stole to their drawing boards to try their hands at heresy. Now almost complete, the AT&T structure has turned out to be an exceptionally handsome skyscraper. Before Jahn's Houston building, Johnson and Burgee were the only modern architects who succeeded in letting "history be the generator of new design." Others who tried lost themselves in contrived new architectural forms and ornaments that are not historic but bizarre. Examples are the two other entries in the Houston competition. Skidmore, Owings & Merrill submitted a colorful tower, enlivened by ludicrously small windows and frothy art deco topping. Kohn, Pedersen & Fox produced what looks like an enormous lighthouse, adorned with Aztec motifs and surrounded by four playful pavilions. Drawing boards everywhere are suddenly full of such psychedelic fantasies.

Jahn's building, with the assistance of a proposed 18.2-mile metropolitan transit system, may begin to turn Houston's center into a real city that does not die at 5 p.m. The Bancshares-Century tower with its shopping and festivities, supplemented by other attractions, might give people a reason to come downtown, where the action is supposed to be.

--By Wolf Von Eckardt

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