The owners of the 46,451.52-square-meter concrete building, which was originally built in 1962, wanted to preserve the scale and the structure, integrating it into the fabric urban of the downtown area. They also establish three zones for different programs: cultural and retail, food market, and collaborative workspace. Within these zones are three atriums, labeled X,O, and Z, which each feature a monumental staircase that leads visitors to the rooftop.
Project description by OMA
Houston, called the “Bayou City,” is cut through with verdant swaths of land made resistant to development by their propensity to flood. Its downtown sits where two of these bayous, the Buffalo and the White Oak, cross. At the northern end of downtown— across the Buffalo Bayou from the core of 1970s and 1980s office towers, the vibrant theater district, and major civic institutions—a 500,000-square-foot concrete warehouse and office building sits on the site of what was once Houston’s Grand Central Station.
Formerly Houston’s main center for the United States Postal Service (USPS), the building was built in 1962 by Wilson, Morris, Crain & Anderson, the architects of the Astrodome. While the Astrodome housed nine men playing a ballgame watched over by 66,000 spectators, the Barbara Jordan Post Office housed 2,000 mail sorters watched over by a handful of men walking through “spy tunnels” above them.
When the USPS closed the facility in 2015, it was purchased by a local Taiwanese-American developer, Frank Liu. Other bidders had all immediately and unquestionably considered the site a potential tabula rasa, but Liu and his sons planned to keep and reimagine the warehouse. The building’s scale and solidity offered potential, but also posed questions and contradictions. How can we preserve it but avoid fetishizing its “industrial” character? How can we break its fortress-like relationship with its context without dismantling the building? How can we preserve its scale and aura when those qualities are precisely the elements that disaffect the building from downtown Houston? How do we tame the undifferentiated field of columns within it without creating a maze of dead-ends?
Our approach balanced wholesale preservation with surgical interventions. To integrate the 16-acre site into the fabric of the downtown without dividing it, we focused on a series of connections from the south. Like farmers working on concrete soil, we raked a series of horizontal thoroughfares into and through it. Along each line we cut an interior void. The cuts bring light into the deep floorplates and intersect the building’s three levels: a commercial ground plane; a second level of expansive offices; and a 6-acre rooftop park above. They also establish three bands across as zones for different programs—cultural and retail, food market, and collaborative workspace.
Within the bands are three atriums—named X, O, and Z— each of which contains a monumental staircase that leads visitors up to the roof-scape and vistas back to downtown. The stairs are distinct in character, structure, and material, but all are designed to encourage interaction. Their paths are doubled, intertwined, and expanded to provide not just trajectories up to the roof but places for accidental encounter—each is an instrument to bring people together.
On the eastern wing of the warehouse we carved out a fourth void to insert the 713 Music Hall, the 5,500-capacity music venue and cultural anchor of the complex. The venue features a large, flat general assembly like those of more nimble dance halls, with a tribune of tiered seating hanging over it. The flat floor allows for limitless arrangements. The tribune provides more traditional seating and a sheltered space where visitors can gather away from the performance, like students hanging out under the bleachers.
Like other areas of POST Houston, the 713 Music Hall required cutting a void into the existing warehouse. While the three atriums in the main building were introduced to bring in light, the cut for the venue allows for a 95-foot column-free span over the general assembly. Its new roof supports a “Texas-sized” urban farm that, together with an additional zone for large performance, a shaded garden, recreation areas, and two restaurant pavilions, will assemble 170,000 square feet of new public realm for downtown Houston. The building is as much a gateway as a destination. It is a link to a new public space within the city and dramatic view out over its juxtapositions—of infrastructure, business ambition, and natural vitality.
