Houston Center Renovation: Big Plans For A Big Campus

Having overhauled portions of Allen Center, one of downtown Houston’s mega-developments of the oil boom era, Brookfield Properties is readying to tackle another iconic property’s reboot: Houston Center.

In February, renovating and repositioning the formidable four-building mixed use complex kicks off to create a more connected, engaging and people-oriented environment.

The five-acre campus east of Main Street is just steps away from an area that has surged with private, public and partnered development since Houston Center’s initial office tower – Houston Center Two – rose nearly a half-century ago. It’s still notable for its futurist-meets-brutalist design executed in anodized bronze.

Houston Center’s four buildings – built in 1974, 1978 and two in 1983 – encompass 4.2 million square feet of office space, plus 200,000 square feet of retail space on two levels. It is downtown’s largest asset in terms of square footage, project materials note.

The property is known for its rather foreboding presence, with two of its towers executed in dark metal and tinted windows, plus sky bridges connecting them and elevated lobbies isolated from the streets, as is the enclosed shopping mall.

That vertical disconnect was by design, a response to an era in which downtowns were dying and buildings bunkered their streetscape access, Houston architectural guides note.

Flash forward to Brookfield’s upcoming reboot of the iconic property. As with the Allen Center project, the redevelopment addresses changing tenant expectations and also respond to a need to improve the street level presence and circulation; embrace more open areas inside and out; provide more natural light; offer a greater variety of amenities; and create new venues for collaboration outside tradition office space, says Travis Overall, Brookfield’s executive vice president and head of the Texas region, in a statement response to questions. He declined to provide the project’s estimated budget.

The plans, announced earlier this month, call for an inviting, lively and walkable street level full of retail, restaurants and greenspaces. Tenant-minded improvements, meanwhile, include adding conference venues and lobby-based coworking spaces in the towers. And the sterile sky bridges are getting an update.

To tie it all together, a new central plaza at street level adds a water wall, entertainment spaces and a monumental spiraling staircase leading to the landscaped terraces above.

And the dark tinted towers? They’ll lighten up. The renovations replace the three lower floors of their anodized bronze with a façade of clear glass. This modern skin “changes the pedestrian’s perception of the complex,” says Gensler Houston’s Dean Strombom, partner, also in an emailed response. And while the interior public spaces at the concourse level will retain their form, their forms will be painted white.

For Tenants. Visitors. Neighbors.

“Now is the time for Houston Center to alter its presence in the neighborhood,” Overall says.

The area he means has changed significantly since the days when surface parking lots dominated what was a rather lifeless section of downtown.

Time passing and continued growth of the city, however, has brought the area more development and livelier uses. In addition to recent office towers, examples include the George R. Brown Convention Center and its addition; Toyota Center’s sports and entertainment venue; Discovery Green Park and its continuous programming; Kinder High School for the Visual and Performing Arts; a plethora of high-rise apartments and condos; and hotels, with more units to come, according to Downtown Management District sources.

So there’s life. A vibe. People.

“Houston Center is committed to being a key contributor to the ongoing resurgence of the area,” Overall says.

The success of Discovery Green, for example, has been a real game-changer, he notes. As a steps-away neighbor, Houston Center wants to complement that park by offering multiple greenspaces on a smaller scale.

“We knew when we acquired the Houston Center (in 2017) that we would need to make significant improvements to the project to be able to attract and retain the best tenants in the market” while also appealing to visitors and neighbors, he says.

Bob Eury, Downtown Management District president, considers Houston Center’s renovation another example of the downtown’s redevelopment momentum: “It feels like it all happened in the last decade, but it took a lot of things coming together.”

As downtown has produced new office towers and significant projects – many of them east of Main Street – it “put the pressure market-wise on a huge set of existing Class A properties downtown to refresh and reset,” he observes.

Houston Center’s pending transformation is an example of that. It comes on the heels of Brookfield’s redevelopment at Allen Center, where the first phase ran $48.5 million on that three-tower campus of 3.2 million square feet of office space.

With more to come. “We have further plans for Allen Center and other buildings in our portfolio,” Overall says. The company has a long history of investing in downtown Houston, such as Total Plaza, 1600 Smith and Heritage Plaza as well as Allen Center.

City of the Future: Then and Now

As planned in 1970, the original Houston Center development was pitched as a “City of Future” occupying 33 contiguous city blocks on the undeveloped side of downtown’s Main Street that had been assembled for that purpose by Texas Eastern, a natural gas pipeline company.

At the time affecting 75 acres and estimated at $2 billion, Houston Center was to have been the largest development ever planned for downtown, Houston guides indicate.

Urban planner William Pereira’s master plan for the mega-site was essentially a second downtown, with office buildings, hotels, apartments, stores and about 40,000 parking spaces, all in an enclosed, limited-access environment accessed several levels above the street and connected by sky bridges. A tramway would have linked the components, and while it never materialized, X-shaped trusses are still visible from the street today that indicate where the tram would have passed.

“The idea of this separate system seems so contradictory to what we know now,” Eury says.

And yet, many of the mixed uses in the plan early on have come to be in the area, he observes, though in a different configuration and as determined by market forces.

This post first appeared on Forbes.com. To see the original, click here.