Rendering of 800 Bell. Courtesy: Ziegler Cooper Architects.
Here’s a clever idea from developers: Rather than build expensive brand-new office towers in Downtown Houston, why not take our old, vacant, or no-longer-functional buildings and simply give them a facelift? This is exactly what Ziegler Cooper Architects is proposing for the 1962 Humble Oil building on the south side of Downtown, now occupied by ExxonMobil.
The building was once the tallest tower west of the Mississippi and is a great example of what might be termed climatic modernism: that is, architecture attempting to deal with Houston’s hot-humid climate through passive means. Its most characteristic feature --- a series of 7-foot-deep brise-soliel shades --- will be stripped off and the floor plates extended to add “new rentable area” and “lease-depths of 42 feet.” Instead of the passive shades that currently shield and cool the building from Houston’s sun, we’ll get a high-performance glazing system (as well as roughly 100,000 new square feet to be air conditioned).
One has to applaud the developers for not simply tearing down and starting over but instead recycling a building in fine structural shape. And yet in the process of giving it a facelift, does the building have to lose its most identifiable characteristic --- the very thing that made it a great example of a climate-responsive mid-century Modernism?
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Read Michelangelo Sabatino on the theme of heat and light in Houston's modern architecture.
