Great Southwest Building

The Great Southwest Building is an Art-deco skyscraper designed by Alfred Bossm, and built between 1926 and 1927 in Houston, TX.

Great Southwest Building is not the only name you might know this building by though. It is common for companies to want to attach their names to iconic buildings when they move in, or for the general public to come up with nicknames, and this one is no exception. The building has changed names several times over the years, and is also known as:

• Petroleum Building between 1927 and 1980.
• Great Southwest Building between 1980 and 2016.
• Cambria Hotel Downtown Convention Center from 2016 until this day.

Its precise street address is 1314 Texas Avenue, Houston, TX. You can also find it on the map here.

The Great Southwest Building is a structure of significant importance both for the city of Houston and the United States as a nation. The building embodies the distinctive characteristic features of the time in which it was built and the Art Deco style. Because of that, the Great Southwest Building was officially declared as a national landmark on September 21^st 2017.

The building has been restored 2 times over the years to ensure its conservation and adaptation to the pass of time. The main restoration works happened in 1972 and 2019.

Alfred Bossm was the architecture firm in charge of the architectural design.

But that's not all, there was also a whole team of architects involved, which included: Briscoe & Dixon, and Maurice J. Sullivan.

That being said, architecture is a complex discipline involving many professionals from different fields, without whom this building would have not been possible. We will surely be leaving out a lot of names here, but at the very least we know that there was one other part involved, that was Joseph S. Cullinan as the Main Developer.

The Great Southwest Building can be categorized as an Art-deco building.

The Great Southwest Building was completed in 1927, right when the Art Deco movement was at its peak, so it kind of went with the trend at that time.

The Great Southwest Building uses a frame structure made of steel columns and concrete slabs.

A frame structure uses a combination of beams and columns to sustain the building's weight. The walls in this case are non-load bearing, which allows for more flexibility when distributing the interior spaces.

The facade is a non-load bearing masonry facade. This type of facade became common during the period when buildings, especially taller ones, transitioned from load-bearing wall systems to frame structures.

Frame structures allowed facades to be independent from the building's frame, enabling the use of lighter materials and larger openings. However, it took some time for architects to incorporate these new posibilities into their designs, and so for a while they simply replicated the look and feel fo buildings people where used to seeing.

From an aesthetic point of view, the facade features a three-story limestone base over which rises the brown brick building which we all picture when we think about the Great Southwest building. The facade is decorated with Mayan relief figures, exploring the art-deco curiosity for ancient civilizations and exotic motifs. Windows are metal and primarily grouped in pairs of three on the four sides.

The ornaments of the facade are made out of glazed terracotta, and they evolve in complexity as we climb up the building. The decorations from the 17th floor onwards are particularly elaborate.

Other materials found at the Great Southwest Building include, terracotta, used for the building's exterior ornaments and in the main lobby to represent carved heads, brass, used in designs inset into the elevator doors and ornamental details as well as on the lobby's walls, and terrazzo, used on floors in black and cream colors.