Two Allen Center: Office Tower At 1200 Smith St.

[Subdude]

I think of it as office-park brutalism.  Most of the "classic" modernism was years before these.  The plain concrete-facade office building seemed to have its heyday from around the mid 1960s to late 1970s, when architects got sick of it and moved into post-modernism.  My guess is that a large part of the rationale for these designs wasn't as much the theoretical tenets of minimalism as much as economics.  It must have been relatively cheap to stamp out hundreds of standardized concrete facade units that could be plugged into place.  

 

Re: One and Two Allen Center, the exteriors are rather banal but I think the interiors are rather nice, considering.  

[ChannelTwoNews]

https://www.bizjournals.com/houston/news/2023/08/01/chamberlain-hrdlicka-office-renovations.html?cx_testId=40&cx_testVariant=cx_27&cx_artPos=0#cxrecs_s

"Chamberlain Hrdlicka, a Houston-based multi-practice law firm, is in the process of giving its headquarters a $6 million update, which it said is necessary to accommodate the firm’s recent growth.

The improvements to the firm’s offices in Two Allen Center at 1200 Smith St. will include adding new amenities, bringing in more natural light and building a new collaborative space, the firm said in a news release.

The project will also include building new non-loadbearing partitions, new finishes, as well as improvements to the offices’ mechanical, plumbing, electrical, communications and ceiling systems. The firm is also adding a new interconnecting stairway, according to a filing submitted to the Texas Department of Licensing and Regulation."