Pennzoil Place is a set of two 36-story towers in

Downtown Houston Downtown is the largest central business district in the city of Houston and the largest in the state of Texas, located near the geographic center of the metropolitan area at the confluence of Interstate 10, Interstate 45, and Interstate 69. The ...

United States The United States of America (U.S.A. or USA), commonly known as the United States (U.S. or US) or America, is a country Continental United States, primarily located in North America. It consists of 50 U.S. state, states, a Washington, D.C., ...

. designed by

Philip Johnson Philip Cortelyou Johnson (July 8, 1906 – January 25, 2005) was an American architect best known for his works of modern and postmodern architecture. Among his best-known designs are his modernist Glass House in New Canaan, Connecticut; the po ...

John Burgee __NOTOC__ John Burgee (born August 28, 1933) is an American architect noted for his contributions to Postmodern architecture. He was a partner of Philip Johnson from 1967 to 1991, creating together the partnership firm Johnson/Burgee Architect ...

Architects from a concept by Eli Attia, a staff architect with the firm. Completed in 1976, it is Houston's most award-winning skyscraper and is widely known for its innovative design.

History

In May 1976

Deutsche Bank Deutsche Bank AG (), sometimes referred to simply as Deutsche, is a German multinational investment bank and financial services company headquartered in Frankfurt, Germany, and dual-listed on the Frankfurt Stock Exchange and the New York St ...

and other partners in a West German investment group bought a 90 percent interest in the Pennzoil Place building for $100 million. As of 2002

Arthur Andersen Arthur Andersen was an American accounting firm based in Chicago that provided auditing, tax advising, consulting and other professional services to large corporations. By 2001, it had become one of the world's largest multinational corporat ...

was vacating about of space in Pennzoil Place.Bivins, Ralph.
Halliburton headquarters moving here / 5 Houston Center lease brings firm from Dallas
" ''

Houston Chronicle The ''Houston Chronicle'' is the largest daily newspaper in Houston, Texas, United States. , it is the third-largest newspaper by Sunday circulation in the United States, behind only ''The New York Times'' and the ''Los Angeles Times''. With i ...

''. Tuesday July 16, 2002. Business 1. Retrieved on January 23, 2010.

Development and style

Pennzoil Place, developed and managed by

Gerald D. Hines Gerald Douglas Hines (August 15, 1925August 23, 2020) was an American real estate developer based in Houston. He was the founder and chairman of Hines, a privately held real estate firm with its headquarters in that city. At the time of his d ...

Interests, consists of two

trapezoidal A quadrilateral with at least one pair of parallel sides is called a trapezoid () in American and Canadian English. In British and other forms of English, it is called a trapezium (). A trapezoid is necessarily a convex quadrilateral in Eucli ...

towers placed ten feet apart and sheathed in dark bronze glass and aluminum. The buildings are mirror images of each other. The entire street-level plaza joining the two structures is enclosed in a glass pyramid-shaped atrium. Deliberately designed as an

optical illusion Within visual perception, an optical illusion (also called a visual illusion) is an illusion caused by the visual system and characterized by a visual perception, percept that arguably appears to differ from reality. Illusions come in a wide v ...

, Pennzoil Place's appearance will vary depending on the different locations from where it is viewed. Pennzoil Place is considered significant in architectural circles for breaking the

modernist Modernism is both a philosophy, philosophical and arts movement that arose from broad transformations in Western world, Western society during the late 19th and early 20th centuries. The movement reflected a desire for the creation of new fo ...

glass box design made popular by followers of

Ludwig Mies van der Rohe Ludwig Mies van der Rohe ( ; ; born Maria Ludwig Michael Mies; March 27, 1886August 17, 1969) was a German-American architect. He was commonly referred to as Mies, his surname. Along with Alvar Aalto, Le Corbusier, Walter Gropius and Frank Lloy ...

and for introducing the era of

postmodernism Postmodernism is an intellectual stance or mode of discourseNuyen, A.T., 1992. The Role of Rhetorical Devices in Postmodernist Discourse. Philosophy & Rhetoric, pp.183–194. characterized by skepticism toward the " grand narratives" of modern ...

. The buildings combined contain of leasable space. The interior offices were designed by M. Arthur Gensler Jr. & Associates, the San Francisco-based interior architecture firm. Architect

was awarded the 1978 AIA Gold Medal and became the first

laureate In English, the word laureate has come to signify eminence or association with literary awards or military glory. It is also used for recipients of the Nobel Prize, the Gandhi Peace Award, the Student Peace Prize, and for former music direc ...

of the Pritzker Prize in Architecture in 1979 for his work on Pennzoil Place. Pennzoil Place was named "Building of the Decade" in 1975 by ''

The New York Times ''The New York Times'' (''the Times'', ''NYT'', or the Gray Lady) is a daily newspaper based in New York City with a worldwide readership reported in 2020 to comprise a declining 840,000 paid print subscribers, and a growing 6 million paid ...

'' architecture critic

Ada Louise Huxtable Ada Louise Huxtable (née Landman; March 14, 1921 – January 7, 2013) was an architecture critic and writer on architecture. Huxtable established architecture and urban design journalism in North America and raised the public's awareness of th ...

because of the dramatic

silhouette A silhouette ( , ) is the image of a person, animal, object or scene represented as a solid shape of a single colour, usually black, with its edges matching the outline of the subject. The interior of a silhouette is featureless, and the silhou ...

it added to the Houston skyline.

References

External links

Pennzoil Place at Google's 3D Warehouse
{{Houston skyscrapers Skyscraper office buildings in Houston Office buildings completed in 1975 Twin towers Shell plc buildings and structures Philip Johnson buildings Buildings and structures in Houston John Burgee buildings 1975 establishments in Texas

History

Development and style

See also

References

External links