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sanguine entity

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  1. and yet another new member... hello I work in Williams Tower for HOK architecture firm as an architecture/design technician. I've spoken with a few old timers here in the office about this topic and here is what I have found out. Wachovia hardly compares as a big time tenet in Williams Tower. They claim they own four floors and how that is a big deal... square footage wise they probably don't have more than HOK's three floors. Williams is on the 1st, 2nd, 34th and 35th floor. The first floor is split with Knoll and the art gallery giving them barely a 1/4 of that floor. The 2nd floor is also split with three other groups giving them less than the first. 34th and 35th to my knowledge are the only completely leased floors. HOK has 3 complete floors currently but will probably drop to 2 1/2 by the end of this year... Hellmuth Obata Kassabaum Tower hahaha So if the name should be changed to anything besides Williams... it surely wouldn't belong to Wachovia. As far as I understand this situation, Wachovia pays more for the prime space it has and ensures that the Wachovia logo is greatly seen upon entering the building... it is still hard to see amongst all the art typically in the lobby and more so difficult when Knoll has 10,000 sq feet of furniture exhibit just begging for people to come in. Williams at a time was the largest tenet (may still be technically) and as far as I can tell, never wanted to "own" the tower. But as the largest tenet it had a say on the name change when the ownership switched last. Hines, also does not own the building. A long long long time ago when cars looked completely different Hines owned this building. No one in this office is sure of exactly who owns the building now but is definitely a middle eastern developer, probably someone associated with Nakheel. Hines for nearly a decade has been the manager of the building. Not the owner. This is probably easily confused since almost everything with the building from our security badges to many of the memos laying around say Hines. On to the ludicrous idea of the Waterwall being demo'd. This is most definitely a fly-turned-elephant situation with something passed down through at least twenty people. Someone with Hines probably said "the repairs on the waterwall aren't worth a damn" (and they're not, the waterwall is seemingly always under maintenance now) and there was probably a delivery person in the office that heard that little bit of venting and carried down the 64 stories of elevator rides back to the loading dock where a group of people on a cigarette break all collaborated around the delivery person with "hot" gossip. This group then dispersed and one of them probably ran into a Wachovia employee on the first floor and continued to mention the gossip further. Thus bringing us to the Wachovia water tank gossip that brought it to this page. In my mind, it would be absolutely insane for the current building manager, Hines, to even think about demoing the waterwall. First, they claim nothing but the upmost respect for architecture and great architects as one of HOK's clients. Williams/Transco/something middle eastern Tower is a Phillip Johnson building. PJ designed the building and the waterwall as "campus beautification". Most all great towers have some sort of plaza, sculpture, oddness that is beautiful or accepted to all the people who smoke by it. To take down the waterwall would not only disrupt/uprage the laymen of Houston who have grown to love the mysterious water wall, it would make PJ turn in his grave as he shouted at the desecration of his thoroughly thought out site! Secondly, Hines owns/manages many starcatect buildings and prides itself in keeping these great pieces of work intact. Taking away the waterwall from Williams Tower would be looked down from every architecture historian in the country and probably some abroad as the dumbest thing any manager could have done to this site. Thirdly, most importantly... the waterwall is currently undergoing a major overall in its infrastructure. Hines would not be paying so much to have its pipes carefully maintained if it were planning on destroying it. Just last week I noticed a large amount of piping being replaced on the west side of the waterwall. If you go there today you will see dirt all along this side where they had been working. It is fact that the waterwall is a pain to keep up. During the movie shooting (Tree of Life) where Sean Penn and Brad Pitt were here, a lot of maintenance was occurring on the site for the waterwall. Since it is quite a large structure I'm sure keeping this lug pristine is a bit of work and a lot of dough and most importantly... endlessly worth it ; )
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