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With Jahn's classy design comes innovative engineering. The principal structural engineer for the project is LeMessurier Associates of Cambridge, Mass. For the Houston tower, William J. LeMessurier, 56, will use for the first time a system called "the Ultimate Structure," which he developed over the past 15 years. It consists of eight concrete columns connected by four vertical steel trusses that span the building like bridges, carrying the gravity load and providing rigid bracing to resist hurricanes. With this system, no other inside supports are needed.
When Jahn's building is completed in 1986, it will top a number of widely acclaimed modern buildings in Houston. Among them: Skidmore, Owings & Merrill's Allied Bank Plaza and Tenneco Building, Philip Johnson and John Burgee's Pennzoil Place, and I.M. Pei's Texas Commerce Tower. But Jahn's is not the first building to break the modern mold of all these glassy buildings.
The mold was shattered four years ago when New York's Johnson/Burgee released the drawings for Manhattan's AT&T Building. Critics tossed their choicest epithets at the design for the 37-story building with its beautifully detailed pink granite façade and broken-pediment top. Architects were almost unanimously indignant but then, in considerable numbers, stole to their drawing boards to try their hands at heresy. Now almost complete, the AT&T structure has turned out to be an exceptionally handsome skyscraper. Before Jahn's Houston building, Johnson and Burgee were the only modern architects who succeeded in letting "history be the generator of new design." Others who tried lost themselves in contrived new architectural forms and ornaments that are not historic but bizarre. Examples are the two other entries in the Houston competition. Skidmore, Owings & Merrill submitted a colorful tower, enlivened by ludicrously small windows and frothy art deco topping. Kohn, Pedersen & Fox produced what looks like an enormous lighthouse, adorned with Aztec motifs and surrounded by four playful pavilions. Drawing boards everywhere are suddenly full of such psychedelic fantasies.
Jahn's building, with the assistance of a proposed 18.2-mile metropolitan transit system, may begin to turn Houston's center into a real city that does not die at 5 p.m. The Bancshares-Century tower with its shopping and festivities, supplemented by other attractions, might give people a reason to come downtown, where the action is supposed to be.
—By Wolf Von Eckardt