HOUSTON: WHY THEY HAVE A BETTER SKYLINE

Anyone visiting Houston for the first time might conclude that the city has outlawed the rectangle. Scattered across the horizon in every direction are trapezoids, triangles, parabolas, ziggurats, and other gravity-defying shapes, to the point that the biggest challenge facing Houston architects in the future may be building something straightforward and restrained. Houston identifies with its skyline the way other cities identify with their football teams and universities. Houston is Pennzoil Place, One Shell Plaza, the Tenneco Building, and First International Plaza, a city of speculators and developers and incalculable corporate wealth, large chunks of which are being poured directly into concrete and glass towers. “After all,” says one Houston architect, “with a landscape like ours, why would you want to look down?”

Houston doesn’t think of itself simply as a “can do” city, but as a city that can do any damned thing it pleases whenever it wants. There is no zoning, few restrictions on the annexation of small neighboring communities, and little of the planned growth that older cities take for granted. Houston’s downtown and loop areas have grown at almost equal rates, so that one has to think twice about where the center of the city is. Yet whenever you ask the natives how well this combination of speed and permissiveness is working, chances are they’ll say, very well, thank you.

“We don’t have a good taste committee looking over our shoulder all the time,” says Eugene Aubry, design director for S.I. Morris Associates, a leading Houston architectural firm, and a frequent associate of Philip Johnson. “The responsibility for good design falls where it should, on the architect, and when the architectural community is very sophisticated, as it is here, the results speak for themselves.”

They do indeed. Architecturally, Houston is on the cutting edge, several years ahead of Los Angeles, probably several decades ahead of Dallas, which it used to envy. Besides a laissez-faire attitude, Houston has an unusual combination of sophisticated corporate clients, including most of the major oil and petrochemical companies, and imaginative developers like John Hansen, Kenneth Schnitzer, and, most influential of all, Gerald Hines.

Hines started out in the Fifties building warehouses that were slightly ahead of the competition, moved on to shopping centers and small office buildings, again slightly belter than the competition, and then, in the mid-Sixties, hit the big time with the Galleria, a combination office/hotel/retail complex that has been a prototype for developments in other cities, and One Shell Plaza, designed by Skidmore Owings & Merrill. Each project was a success and collectively they gave Hines enough momentum to take on even more ambitious projects like Pennzoil Place, designed by Johnson/Burgee. His twin trapezoid towers showed other architects how to break out of the box (first you slice it in two, then you knock off a few corners), and also proved that it was possible to combine blazing geometry with sound economics.

Pennzoil was 100 percent leased before it was 40 percent complete, a fact that even the most doltish developer couldn’t ignore. Moreover, all the design flourishes that critics had first labeled trendy and impractical turned out to have an enormous impact on the balance sheet. Top floor offices, tucked underneath the 45-degree slope of the roof, were snapped up immediately. So were those on the lower floors, traditionally the hardest to lease, because they were situated next to the atrium and galleria. Rents rose from $7.50 to $10 per square foot during the initial leasing period, and are still going up with no slackening of demand.

“After Pennzoil,” says architect Charles Tapley, “good design was no longer a question in Houston. It was an imperative. Developers who wanted to compete at the top of the market had to do good buildings because client expectations had risen so high.”

Even a quick inventory of new Houston buildings shows this to be the case. U.S. Home, Post Oak Central One and Two, Allied Chemical, 3D International Tower, are all superior architectural achievements with no shortage of tenants. The combined pressure of corporate expectations and competition has meant that the developer who wants to throw up schlock, and plenty do, is more likely to find himself operating in the suburbs than the inner city.

Critics of Houston point out, however, that so much attention has been paid to the skyline that the rest of the city has been neglected. The key question for Houston in the Eighties, they insist, is whether it can combine quality of life with quality of design. The rush hour traffic jams on the freeways have become the stuff of legend, and many basic services, such as sewer and water, have not been improved since the 1940’s, when they were simply thrown together on the characteristically Housto-nian premise that they could always be improved later. Now developers must get sewer permits before they can get building permits, and whole sections of the city are red-tagged, or closed to further development, until services are improved.

Downtown, the hub of the architecturalexcitement, is still largely a desert forpedestrians. Sidewalks are part of the streetsystem, green space is meager, and despitethe generous setbacks of some of the newskyscrapers, the space between the towersremains a cold, lifeless canyon. In response,the city has initiated a $40-million project torehabilitate Buffalo Bayou, which flowsthrough the center of the city, and studies areunderway for a pedestrian mall, modeledafter Nicollet Mall in Minneapolis. So, afterthree decades of unrestrained growth,Houston may at last be paying some attention to the human dimension. But the gapbetween street and skyline is still large, a factthat a city like Dallas, in the midst of adowntown renaissance of its own, will haveto ponder.