| The Skyline District encompasses most
of downtown’s enormous growth during the oil boom from the late
1960s to the early 1980s, before it came all crashing down. After a
decade of one of the highest downtown vacancy rates in the country,
construction picked up in this area once again in the late 1990s
with energy trading companies, such as
Enron and
El Paso
Energy. The district is full of art and architecture, mostly of
the post-modern variety, with a few historical sites thrown in.
The major attraction in the Skyline District is architecture,
lots of modern architecture. The architectural firm of Skidmore,
Owings & Merrill (SOM) designed four of the skyscrapers on
Louisiana Street - you can trace the firm’s drift from the
international-style
El Paso Energy
Building and
One Shell
Plaza to the post-modern
Wells Fargo
Plaza and
1100
Louisiana. The team of Philip Johnson and John Burgee was
responsible for two of the buildings on Louisiana, the off-set twin
towers of
Pennzoil
Place and the soaring, neo-Gothic
Bank of America
Center. Houston’s tallest building, the sleek but plain
JPMorgan Chase
Tower, is IM Pei’s only contribution to the downtown area.
Other notable buildings are the optical illusions of Morris*Aubry
Architects,
Continental
Center I and
First City
Tower; two post-modern creations of M. Nasr,
Wedge
International Tower and the Mayan-inspired
Heritage
Plaza; the infamous
Enron
Building and the glass tubes of Cesar Pelli's
1500
Louisiana (built as Enron II); and the international
style-turned-post-modern
CenterPoint
Energy Plaza.
Connecting most of these buildings is an underground,
air-conditioned labyrinth – the
Downtown Tunnel
System. Dallas considers their Downtown Tunnel System a source
of civic shame; Houston touts theirs as a tourist attraction. Not
only do the tunnels siphon-off sidewalk traffic, they are
mind-numbing and easily produce insanity as you search in vain for
the nearest exit with no inkling of where it will actually disgorge
you. If you attempt to cross downtown through the system, and
actually do emerge from the labyrinth, you’ve managed to cross the
entirety of Downtown Houston in a self-contained,
climate-controlled, safe and comfortable environment – the wet
dream of urban planners from the 1960s and 70s. Unless you’re up
for the challenge, stay above ground.
The most dominant buildings in Houston, prior to 1961, were the
cupola-topped
Niels Esperson
Building and the 430-foot
Gulf
Building. The
Gulf
Building, the tallest building in Houston for 34 years,
contained an observation deck. The observation deck was replaced
with a deck on the international-style
Exxon
Building, erected in 1963. But when
One Shell
Plaza surpassed
Exxon’s
height in 1971, the deck was closed. Downtown was without a
high-altitude viewing area until the early 1980s, with the openings
of the sky lobbies in the city’s two newest and tallest buildings –
Wells Fargo
Plaza and the
JPMorgan Chase
Tower. |
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