Architecture News

Pennzoil Place, Houston’s Most Influential Skyscraper, is for Sale

Archival photo of Pennzoil Place, Houston — Archival photo of Philip Johnson and John Burgee’s Pennzoil Place (1975) in downtown Houston. The duo’s TC Energy Center (1983) is in the background. Photo from the Carol M. Highsmith Archive, Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division, Public Domain

Pennzoil Place might not be the oldest skyscraper erected during Houston’s oil-driven building boom of the 1970s and ‘80s—SOM’s 1971 One Shell Plaza is generally considered the first. It also isn’t the tallest—those bragging rights belong to I.M. Pei’s granite-clad, 75-story JPMorgan Chase Tower (1981). But the Philip Johnson and John Burgee–designed Pennzoil Place, which comprises twin 36-story trapezoidal towers of dark bronze glass and aluminum connected by a 115-foot-tall atrium, is frequently heralded as one of Houston’s most emblematic tall buildings and one of the most influential skyscrapers of the late 20th-century. And for the first time in decades, the 50-year-old office complex is looking for a new owner.

JLL Capital Markets’ official listing touts Pennzoil Place as “representing an extraordinary opportunity to purchase one of the most notable and groundbreaking office buildings in the Unites States.” As reported by the Houston Chronicle, the listing by Metropolis Investment Holdings, which has owned the property for the past 25 years on behalf of Germany’s Hugo Mann family, “marks a significant movement in Houston’s real estate landscape.”

Main lobby (1) and atrium (2) views of Pennzoil Place. Photos by Bobak Ha'Eri, Wikimedia Commons/CC-By-SA-3.0

The city’s downtown has struggled with a highest-in-the-nation glut of vacant corporate office space. Pennzoil Place’s nearly 1.5 million square feet of Class-A office space is currently about 50 percent leased, according to the Chronicle. And that figure will soon fall to roughly 40 percent as major tenant Cheniere Energy decamps to the Texas Tower, designed by Pelli Clarke Pelli and completed in 2021. Gensler, which designed Pennzoil’s Place’s original interiors in a major early project for the firm, also previously maintained a significant presence in the building until 2019, when it moved its Houston office to 2 Houston Center.

Completed in 1975, Pennzoil Place is widely regarded as the first Postmodernist skyscraper. It was also a seminal project for Johnson, who went on to design with Burgee multiple corporate towers that offered a radical departure from the Miesian glasses boxes that had defined the Modernist era. Among the notable examples: TC Energy Center (1983), also in downtown Houston; Pittsburgh’s One PPG Place (1983); and New York’s 550 Madison Avenue (1984).

Pennzoil Place, the Texas State Historical Association (TSHA) writes, “was one of the most architecturally influential buildings constructed in the United States during the 1970s and 1980s. Its combination of unusual design, high style, and shrewd entrepreneurship made Pennzoil Place a model for the generation of tall office buildings designed the last quarter of the 20th century.” The TSHA also notes that the project was an early milestone for prominent Houston developer Gerald D. Hines, whose working relationship with Johnson and Burgee was the subject of an extensive feature in the November 1976 issue of Architectural Record.

The complex was widely lauded at its opening, with the New York Times’ Ada Louise Huxtable praising it as a “towering achievement” and naming it “Building of the Year” in 1976. The following year, it received a national Honor Award from the American Institute of Architects; the AIA later recognized the building’s lasting influence in 1999 with the Twenty-Five Year Award. A 25-Year Award from the Texas Society of Architects followed in 2018. Pennzoil Place was also a key contributor to Johnson’s AIA Gold Medal recognition in 1978 and, the following year, his winning of the inaugural Pritzker Architecture Prize.

As high vacancy rates continue to plague downtown Houston’s ample corporate high-rises (although things are looking up), does a 50-year-old skyscraper—even one with such an outstanding architectural pedigree as Pennzoil Place—stand a fighting chance?

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KEYWORDS: Houston Philip Johnson

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Matt Hickman is senior news/digital editor at Architectural Record. Previously, he served as Senior Editor at The Architect’s Newspaper and has over a decade of experience as a freelance writer and editor specializing in historic preservation, public space, and the intersection of the natural world and built environment. A native of the Pacific Northwest, Matt holds an MFA in creative nonfiction writing from The New School.