PUTTING NEW STAMP ON OLD POST OFFICE
Sprawling complex with restaurants, office space and more taking shape
In a northern corner of downtown, a cyberpunk dream is unfolding in a gargantuan abandoned post office between Buffalo Bayou and the intersection of Interstates 45 and 10.
A glowing double helix stretches to the top of the 555,000-square-foot former mail-sorting warehouse, one of a number of unusual staircases leading to the roof; another is suspended from above. A translucent, lightweight plastic known as ETFE, designed for the aerospace industry, is stretched in bubbles across large, excised portions of the ceiling, letting natural light filter down into a food hall. A winding 5.5-acre rooftop garden with a revolving concert stage unfolds overhead.
Google Maps describes POST Houston as a shopping mall. Kirby Liu, who is developing the project with Lovett Commercial, sees POST Houston in looser terms. “Day for Night,” a local art and music festival once hosted in the building, “remains the core DNA of the project,” Liu said. During the festival in 2016, the reclusive elec
tronic musician Aphex Twin, composer John Carpenter and multimedia artist Björk performed sets and set up installations in the empty post office.
The sprawling complex — which, according to plans, will incorporate restaurants, retail and office space, a hotel, a concert hall and a wedding venue — encompasses the real estate sectors that depend most heavily on social interactions. POST Houston, which is slated to open in the fall, represents a bet that as more people become vaccinated, those sectors will not only rebound, but also reward designs that can offer what we missed most while quarantined during the past year. Skyline views, social media-ready lighting and architecture, and spaces where visitors can enjoy art, music and food with friends and family are central to the project.
On Tuesday afternoon, rooftop gardeners shoveled a lightweight potting mixture around azaleas and trees. “We’re already booking weddings,” Liu said.
The rooftop has a space that can be reserved for events and a park where winding paths lined with curving benches help fulfill a design inspired by Brazilian landscape architect Burle Marx. A lawn faces a stage that when not hosting performances will offer shade to visitors and that can, with a push of a button, rotate to provide views of the skyline.
Restaurants, which can request ingredients from the rooftop gardens, are also under construction. On Tuesday, the floors had been ripped out to lay down the infrastructure needed to support a maze of Asian night market-style booths.
But there are challenges building for a post-COVID future that has not yet arrived. The food and beverage industry has been hard hit by the pandemic, and only about 50 percent of the food hall space is tentatively committed, said Liu, down from 60 percent in September.
“We had quite a bit of skepticism from Houston vendors,” he said. “But we had more success going around the globe.” He’s currently in talks with chefs from Norway and Barcelona, and he hopes the international selection will “shock and awe, in a good way.”
Similarly, Liu said, the office market has been slow. POST Houston will include between 90,000 and 100,000 square feet of collaborative and private office space and 20,000 to 30,000 square feet managed by a coworking operator. The hotel is on the back burner until the hospitality industry improves.
But Liu believes that as people come, the rest will follow. The building, designed by the same architects behind the Astrodome and the Houston Chronicle building, will retain historical features such as its high-security mail vaults that will become homes for art installations, and spy tunnels that administrators used to watch and listen to workers before security cameras became popular. With the addition of the rooftop green, the food hall, retail space and concert venue, Liu envisions the building as a destination: an amenity-laden cross between New York’s Central Park and High Line, where locals and visitors go to unwind.
“That’s the goal,” he said.