Building on the past
What the Sunset Coffee Building can teach us about Houston history
H OUSTON can seem like a city without a history, burying the past to climb higher on the horizon. Most of its earliest buildings are gone, lost to flood and fire, to bigger ambitions and higher uses. But an effort to remake a landmark at the city’s birthplace marks a change in that pattern.
Since its construction in 1910, the International Coffee Co. Building has looked over the city’s most historic site: the confluence of Buffalo and White Oak bayous north of downtown where, in 1836, the Allen family founded Houston and established its most important port for the next 75 years.
Called the most significant aspect of an extensive bayou revitalization plan, the renamed Sunset Coffee Building is the result of a complex and necessarily heavy-handed renovation led by one of Texas’ most celebrated architectural firms, Lake|Flato, teamed with BNIM Architects.
The renovated building is not remarkable as a singular work of architecture. Rather, its rebirth is significant because it is part of a major shift for the city. From turning our backs on to embracing the bayous, from purging to preserving complex histories. The new building is an invitation to think about the currents of our history and a breakwater for future development.
Buffalo Bayou Partnership acquired the then-abandoned building and property in 2003 in what’s been described as a defensive move.
“We felt whoever bought it would probably tear it down and build a high-
“People who haven’t been there before are always struck with the magic of the location.” Guy Hagstette, director of parks and civic projects for the Kinder Foundation
rise. We were saving the site as much as the building,” said Anne Olson, president of the Partnership.
After a decade of public and private fundraising, including a half-milliondollar federal grant and close to $1 million from the downtown Tax Increment Reinvestment Zone, Houston First contributed the final $2.5 million to move the project forward.
Houston First will buy the 12,700 square-foot building and operate a first-floor café and rooftop event space. The Partnership will enter an agreement to keep their offices on the upper floor. They will also facilitate kayak and bike rental at the plaza level. Their offices have been housed in the building for roughly a year now, with the final purchase of the building and the café construction scheduled for the next few months.
The building had been abandoned for years when it was purchased. Inside were artifacts of its past lives. Psychedelic drawings lining the walls appeared to be relics of the Love Street Light Circus Feel Good Machine, an experimental rock club owned by local sculptor David Adickes that occupied the top floor in the late 1960s.
But before briefly serving as the hub of Houston’s counterculture music scene, the building stood through decades of cultural changes across the city: the desegregation of lunch counters and downtown hotels amid orchestrated media blackouts. Waters flowed past its footings on a night in 1917 when black soldiers and white policemen killed each other barely a mile up the bayou in Fourth Ward. In April 2006, responding to a federal immigration bill, tens of thousands of protestors marched there, invoking our shared history as a city of immigrants in what was possibly the largest rally in Houston’s history.
When construction began, the project team intended to save as much of the existing building as possible. Early hopes to salvage the exterior brick and structural clay tile dissipated when the mortar crumbled and critical damage was discovered. Portions of the clay tile were retained and left exposed on the building’s interior. New brick was carefully selected to match the old. Century-old concrete columns combine with newly introduced steel reinforcements. Heavy metal bollards that protected the original structure hug the corners of the building, rusted and buried in the concrete and brick.
The building’s most successful moments are at its boundaries in its interaction with public space. A wide galvanized walkway leads from Commerce Street over a plaza lined with pale crushed granite. The walkway seems to drop off or curl out of sight, but it ends in an overlook jutting across the north lawn. It feels farther extended than it is, like an outstretched arm that comes up just short.
During floods, the overlook is suspended over rippled waters rising up the bank. The building and the plaza are designed to receive water during major rain events. Perforated roll-up doors allow water to fill the lower level where kayaks and bikes will ultimately be stored. A new exterior stair touches down in the plaza and zigzags its way up alongside a multistory corrugated-steel cistern used for rainwater storage. It feeds a long red hose that will eventually be used to wash down kayaks and bicycles when they return from the bayou and its trails.
The building’s rooftop terrace is likely to become one of the most soughtafter small-event spaces in downtown. It inspires reflection on the patterns that have made the site significant. The constant passage of water carving out the banks, the rhythm of the tides pushing gently against the outward flow where the bayous meet the sea, the trickle of cyclists and runners on the trails, the intermittent freight train rumblings, the fiveto 10-minute cycles of the Metro rail. The skyline has its own visual rhythm. The massings of skyscrapers, the University of Houston’s downtown campus, the hulking county jail with its dark, false windows.
A portion of the roof is populated by native vegetation and intriguing, large spherical lamps. Some are softly perched on top of the grass, like white balloons that lost their lift. Others are nested in the grass like eggs. The terrace will overlook the trails leading from Buffalo Bayou Park, the connections coming from the Heights and, eventually, paths extending east to Highway 59, passing under and through currently abandoned buildings along the bayou.
Significant efforts have been spent in the past decade on reviving downtown’s East End, including Discovery Green, which stands as a model for transformative public space in Houston. But the Coffee Building could spark a shift back to the bayou.
Guy Hagstette, director of parks and civic projects for the Kinder Foundation, has one of the most extensive résumés related to urban design in Houston. He describes the Coffee Building as potentially as significant as Discovery Green, though for different reasons.
“It establishes a beachhead,” Hagstette said of the Coffee Building. “People who haven’t been there before are always struck with the magic of the location. It’s going to be one of those places that Houstonians seek out reasons to go to.”
Looking out over the bayou from the terrace, it’s possible to imagine the flow of kayaks, rented miles to the west at Lost Lake or arriving via White Oak from the Heights. It would be a return of the city’s first highway, leading to the foot of the Sunset Coffee Building, its orange brick now accented by tectonic steel attachments. People will again step from the murky water onto the bayou banks, only now over pavement, but still heading toward the clattering of cash registers and the smell of coffee.
Colley Hodges is an architect and former journalist who serves on Kirksey Architecture’s EcoServices team. This story originally appeared on OffCite, a publication of the Rice Design Alliance.