Transco Tower
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Williams Tower (Transco Tower)
1983, Johnson/Burgee Architects and Morris Aubry Architects. 2800 Post Oak Blvd.
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(Photograph by Gerald Moorhead ) -
(Carol M. Highsmith Archive, Prints and Photographs Division, Library of Congress) -
Water Wall (Carol M. Highsmith Archive, Prints and Photographs Division, Library of Congress)
The Transco Tower, built by Gerald D. Hines Interests and named for its chief tenant, a natural gas pipeline transmission company now called Williams Company, is—at sixty-four stories and 901 feet—the third-tallest skyscraper in Houston. Taking advantage of its isolated setting, Johnson and Burgee shaped it as a Postmodern meditation on the stepped skyscrapers of the late 1920s and early 1930s. By focusing on profile and proportion, and by deftly combining silver reflective glass and a darker reflective glass that reads as intensified shadow, they expressed spatially the ambition, and contradiction, of postmodern American suburbanism of the 1980s: a desire for the image of metropolitan style that took shape through practices associated with suburban alternatives to the city. Adjoining the tower/garage complex is the sixty-four-foot-high Water Wall of 1984 by Johnson/Burgee and Richard Fitzgerald and Associates with Zion and Breen Associates of New York City as landscape architects.
Writing Credits
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Data
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Location: Houston, TexasRegional Overviews:Architect:Types:Styles:Materials:
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Citation
Gerald Moorhead et al., "Williams Tower (Transco Tower)", [Houston, Texas], SAH Archipedia, eds. Gabrielle Esperdy and Karen Kingsley, Charlottesville: UVaP, 2012—, http://sah-archipedia.org/buildings/TX-01-HN89.
Print Source
Buildings of Texas: Central, South, and Gulf Coast, Gerald Moorhead and contributors. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2013, 358-359.
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