609 Main: A different skyscraper
Hines’ newest contribution to Houston’s skyline puts workers first
From John Mooz’s office, you can look out at the skyscrapers many cite as favorites in the downtown skyline. There are the twin trapezoids of Pennzoil Place, the postmodern spikiness of Bank of America Center — both Philip Johnson buildings.
You have to crane your neck, but you can even see the top of I.M. Pei’s 75-story JPMorgan Chase Tower, the tallest in Texas.
All those buildings (and more than a few others you can see from here) were developed by Hines, where Mooz is a senior managing director. But they come from a different time – the ’70s and early ’80s, when Houston was booming, oil-rich and risk-proud, and everyone said it was the city of the future.
These buildings stood out through the audacity of their architecture. They were stranger, taller, spikier. Ada Louise Huxtable, the New York Times critic, went so far as to call Pennzoil Place “a work of art” that possessed “a synthesis (of elements) passionately to be desired and rarely achieved.”
Those buildings still look the same. But Houston has changed around them. After Enron, “risk” no longer seems heroic. Gerald Hines, who founded the company in Houston in the late ’50s, doesn’t even live here anymore. People do still sometimes say Houston is the city of the future, but now they mean our diversity, not our architecture (with a few exceptions).
And maybe the most appropriate place to contemplate these changes is here in Mooz’s office, near the top of Hines’ newest contribution to Houston’s skyline: 609 Main at Texas. It’s one of the more ambitious skyscrapers developed downtown in years — developed during a bust, no less — and it says a lot about Houston now.
Even Pennzoil Place, Huxtable wrote, is “best seen … from the freeway.” And from the freeway, which is how most of us see our skyscrapers, 609 Main appears a handsome, shiny, elegant guy. Maybe my favorite view of it happens when I’m heading south from the Heights on Interstate 45, as the building emerges almost shyly between the new Market Square Tower and JPMorgan Chase.
The 48-story office tower, to be anchored by United Airlines, was designed by New Haven, Conn.-based architecture firm Pickard Chilton, which has been busy in Houston recently. It did the master planning and design for the enormous ExxonMobil campus near The Woodlands, as well as for a number of new skyscrapers in Uptown — Amegy Bank Headquarters and BHP Billiton Tower among them.
The last building Hines and Pickard Chilton worked on together downtown was BG Group Place, which opened in 2011, just two blocks away.
Hines bought the two properties at the same time, largely because they were both on the Main Street light rail line.
At first glance, from the outside, BG Group Place and 609 Main look startlingly similar, like siblings. Highly reflective glass-curtain walls, colored variably as the weather changes, cling like expensively tailored suits. The main differences seem to amount to details: On BG Group Place, there are vertical louvers that act as sun shades; on 609 Main, ornamental steel piping. Both towers cozy up to boxy parking garages.
Both are handsome, respectable, stylish — as Jon Pickard, the architect, says, “We wanted to make a building that’s beautiful and contributes to the dignity of the city.”
Philip Johnson might have said something similar in the ’70s. But, at that time, Houston’s dignity didn’t include access to public transit or engagement with the street. Streets were treated with dim embarrassment, like urinals. Buildings had to have them, but they weren’t something a developer would tout. The opposite, in fact: A ’70s-era promotional book about Pennzoil Place brags about the parking garage’s direct access from the freeways. Workers never had to interact with the street at all.
And it’s from the street that you start to see some of the gestures that set these buildings apart from their flashier predecessors. On the Main Street side, 609 Main puts on a show best seen from the sidewalk. A soaring triangular void with mirrored inlays — Mooz calls it the “crystalline atrium” — creates a dizzying experience for a pedestrian. You see yourself coming and going.
Eventually, there will be a restaurant here, which should make the reflections that much more chaotic, that much more interesting.
The Capitol Street side offers pedestrians no such thrills. But neither will they walk along a dead, blank wall: Besides the views into the lobby and the liveliness of being along another light rail line, David Buehrer, who developed Greenway Coffee and Tea, Blacksmith and Morningstar, will operate Prelude on the corner, what Mooz calls “more than a coffee shop. It’s a coffee experience.”
These buildings, Mooz says, can make you feel you’re in a real city.
If BG Group Place and 609 Main are like siblings, the younger one benefited from experience. Mooz is adamant that both Hines and Pickard Chilton learned a lot from BG Group Place. What’s new, he says, is an enhanced efficiency in the way 609 Main works and a — could it be the right word? — loving attention to the people who work there. The emphasis isn’t on what you see from the freeway; it’s on what’s inside.
There are grand gestures, like the lobby’s seriously elegant finishes. Philip Croker, who works with Mooz for Hines, traveled to a mountain in Italy to choose the marble of what he calls the “stone paintings” that hang between the elevator banks. And a single charcoal-black rectangular fountain, a ringer for the ones outside Rice’s Brochstein Pavilion, bubbles peacefully inside the lobby.
But, mainly, 609 Main concerns itself with the less glamorous details on the upper floors. It’s a building, Pickard says, that “can encourage people to live a full, happy and productive life.”
Productive is the operative word: The building’s beauty is all about tenants’ bottom lines, about getting more and better work out of their employees.
“As we’ve completed these corporate headquarters,” Pickard says, “we’ve found that delivering daylight, views of nature, luminous spaces and fresh air dramatically improves productivity. People have a tendency to sign up for fitness facilities, and morale goes up.”
Since BG Group Place, Hines and Pickard Chilton have learned tenants don’t necessarily need a conference room every day, so they put in a shared conference center that can be used as needed. They learned that workers don’t necessarily want pedestrians to be able to gawk at the sweating and crunching going on inside the fitness center, so that’s moved up to the second floor, where it’ll have a view of the street, but not be the view from the street.
“We focused on the things that touch you — light and air,” Mooz says.
They learned that one of workers’ most frequent complaints is about being too hot or too cold. So 609 Main is the first building in the city that will use an advanced underfloor air system: Air isn’t pumped down from exposed ducts, leaving half the office huddling in cardigans and the other rolling up their sleeves. Instead, it’s circulated down below, between the concrete slab and raised floor plates.
Mooz said that this technology requires additional investment up front, but it is repaid over the life of the building through energy efficiency and resale value. (This building is rated LEED Platinum, the highest level of environmental performance.) He’s convinced that underfloor air systems are the next big thing for high-end office buildings like this one.
The phrase “advanced underfloor air system” might not excite you, and it probably won’t compel a visit from architecture critics in New York. But it means that 609 Main is a different kind of skyscraper. It means we’re living in a different kind of city, that people want a different kind of city.
“Tenants vote with their occupancy,” Mooz says, and the building is filling up quickly — it’s already 60 percent leased.
“People used to build these things almost as ego statements,” Pickard says. “That’s gone. It’s about the workplace, now, and it’s about the ability to make a difference in productivity.”
Lending practices, as Gerald Hines has said, have changed, too. In the ’70s, it wasn’t just Houston’s oilmen taking big risks. “Buildings used to be financed with much higher levels of leverage and debt,” Mooz says.
609 Main was developed during a downturn, with more of the developer’s skin in the game. The goal wasn’t to wow New Yorkers. It was, as Mooz says, to develop a “best-of-class building that’s commercially viable.”
It’s not that Hines is less ambitious now. It’s just that that ambition has matured to “getting the inside right,” as Mooz says.
From the freeway, 609 Main might lack the immediate intrigue of Pennzoil Place or Bank of America Center or JPMorgan Chase Tower. But it does possess a quietude that grows on you. Maybe it’s a building that reads nonfiction and runs 5Ks. It doesn’t stay out all night at dive bars. It’s more reserved than that, more earnest, more good.
“Its brilliance,” Mooz says, “is its efficiency.”
Will Houstonians consider it a new favorite skyscraper? A few of us might. Most likely, they’ll be the people who get to work there.