NowHouston

Architecture

Architecture in Houston

Houston has no zoning code, so its buildings are set by land ownership rather than plan and the good ones tend to be islands. Two generations of the de Menil family paid for most of the architecture worth crossing the city to see.

• Nancy and Rich Kinder Building

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  Completed 2020

  Steven Holl

  The modern and contemporary wing of the Museum of Fine Arts, across the campus from the older galleries. Holl clad it in vertical tubes of laminated glass hung off the concrete walls, which diffuse the light and dissolve the corners, and gave the roof curved clerestories drawn from Gulf cloud formations. Seven reflecting pools sit around the base. The building is opaque and luminous at once, which is the state Houston's sky is in most of the year.

• Cy Twombly Gallery

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  Completed 1995

  Renzo Piano

  A single-artist gallery across the lawn from the Menil, planned with Twombly from his own sketches. Nine rooms sit inside a square under a stack of filters: a fixed louvre canopy, then glass, then a taut sailcloth ceiling that turns what is left into an even wash. Piano called the steel grid floating over it a butterfly on a firm surface. The building has one job, to give a painter the daylight he asked for and then be quiet.

• Menil Collection

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  Completed 1987

  Renzo Piano

  A private museum set among bungalows in a neighbourhood the family bought and painted grey. Piano kept it to the height of the houses and solved the daylight with three hundred ferrocement leaves under a glass roof, curved to reject direct sun and bounce the rest into the galleries, worked out with the engineer Peter Rice. The light in the rooms changes when a cloud passes. It was Piano's first American museum and set the pattern for how he has lit every one since.

• Pennzoil Place

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  Opened 1976

  Philip Johnson · John Burgee

  Two office towers downtown, trapezoidal in plan and separated by a slot three metres wide. Johnson and Burgee sliced the tops of both at forty-five degrees and angled them apart, so the pair reads as one cut mass rather than two buildings, and the developer got the corner offices the geometry produces. The towers were finished in 1975 and occupied through 1976. It is usually named the first postmodern skyscraper, and the argument it started was whether a tower may have a shape at all.

• Rothko Chapel

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  Completed 1971

  Philip Johnson · Howard Barnstone · Eugene Aubry

  A non-denominational chapel commissioned by John and Dominique de Menil to hold fourteen paintings by Mark Rothko. Rothko wanted the room subordinate to the canvases and fought Johnson over his scheme until Johnson left, after which Barnstone and Aubry built an octagon inside a Greek cross in plain brick, lit from a central skylight. The paintings are black and plum and give up almost nothing at first. Rothko died in 1970 and never saw the room, the only interior he ever designed the light for.