Mellie Esperson Building

The Mellie Esperson Building is an Art-deco skyscraper designed by John Eberson, and built between 1939 and 1941 in Houston, TX.

Mellie Esperson Building is not the only name you might know this building by though. The building is, or has also been known as Niels and Mellie Esperson Buildings.

Its precise street address is 815 Walker Street, Houston, TX. You can also find it on the map here.

At the time of its completion in 1941 the Mellie Esperson Building incorporated solutions that were quite advanced at the time, these included being the first skyscraper in Houston to be built with central air-conditioning.

The building underwent a major restoration in 2022.

John Eberson was the architecture firm in charge of the architectural design. But there was also one other architect involved, as far as we know. We are talking about Drew Eberson.

The Mellie Esperson Building can be categorized as an Art-deco building.

The Mellie Esperson 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 grey-colored stone clad from top to bottom. A small setback after the second floor creates a subtle visual distinction between the base and the rest of the building, but unlike many other buildings these two sections are not differentiated by material or color.

The Mellie Esperson Building is also unique compared to other art-deco buildings for choosing a 2-dimensional uniform grid of windows, as opposed to setting back or changing the color of the spandrels, to emphasize the verticality of the building, something which most art-deco buildings do.