Skyscraper Designs

[Montrose1100]

We all know the completion date for our Skyscrapers all over town. My question is how many months or years was the design drawn up before completion? 1100 Louisiana was completed in 1980. So it was really a design and product of the 70's, even though it looks very 80's.

Before AutoCad, I'd imagine the process of designing & engineering a huge skyscraper would take more time. So which of our skyscrapers are really a late 1970's design that where completed in the 80's?

[LTAWACS]

I would say probably most of them.

[strickn]

When I was concerned that Park Plaza Hospital buildings weren't in the Houston Architectural Guide, I went off looking through the Bertrand Goldberg collection at artic.edu and wound up finding a multiple rehash of his 1974 Delaware/Seneca tower proposed and unbuilt for Hines Interests in Houston. What struck me especially about the proposal was not its Marina City lineage but the fact that back in 1977 an architect could be inscribing Transco's building on site plans, a building which even Anchorage Press' 2002 compendium on Philip Johnson makes no indication had been in the works for so long before it finished off in 1983. Transco does seem to take its skin color cues right from three towers to its south that were opened in '78-'80+'82.

http://www.artic.edu/aic/collections/artwork/category/73?page=8 and page on alphabetically through to Galleria South

Dallas' characteristic Big Designs were largely 1980s, 1950s and 1920s, while Houston's were 1970s, '60s and '20s.

[strickn]

Indeed, some of the perception and much of the corroboration for the feeling that Houston was culturally avant-garde of Dallas came from the eras in which the marks were being made.

20s-30s-40s50s-60s-70s

80s-90s-00s

arguably the same held for the 1890s-00s-10s as well; that a period of gaudy exuberance had some set of traits taken to be essential and refined into less exuberant forms by the next decade, and then to outright austerity

yet exuberance bristles back up from expressive restraint, again: and away from the formal, at least in part.

What formalities of hubris had been established this time I supposed *our* decade could be the one to do away with for the next go-round. Think about how.

But it was Dallas and Houston, primarily down-town, that got me thinking of a pattern in practice to abstract when I wrote down these observations.