Williams Tower

The Williams Tower is a Postmodernist skyscraper designed by Johnson/Burgee Architects, with Philip Johnson as lead architect, in association with Morris-Aubry Architects, and built between 1981 and 1983, for a reported $300 million dollars, in Houston, TX.

Williams Tower is not the only name you might know this building by though. Between 1983 and 1999 it was also known as Transco Tower.

Its precise street address is 2800 Post Oak Boulevard, Houston, TX. You can also find it on the map here.

The Williams Tower has received multiple architecture awards for its architectural design since 1983. The following is a list of such prizes and awards:

• Award of ExcellenceAward for Architectural Excellence (AISC) in 1985
• Clean Air Award in 2015
• BOMA Building of the Year Award

Adjacent to the tower, on the South end, a 12,100 square meter linear park with an impressive 19-meter high Water Wall creates a sense of symmetry and classicism.

The building is also linked to a 10-story parking garage with a capacity for 3,208 cars via a sky bridge on the west side.

The Williams Tower used to have a sky deck open to the public, but it was permanently closed after 9/11.

The building underwent a major restoration between 2019 and 2021. The architect commissioned to undertake this restoration was Ziegler Cooper Architects.

Johnson/Burgee Architects, with Philip Johnson as the lead architect, was the architecture firm in charge of the architectural design, in association with Morris-Aubry Architects.

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 here is a list of the people we do know also played their part in making the Williams Tower a reality:

• CBM Engineers Inc. in charge of Structural Engineering
• J.A. Jones Construction Co. as the Main Contractor
• Enclos Corp. in charge of Facade Consultancy
• Gerald D Hines Interests as the Main Developer

The Williams Tower can be categorized as a Postmodernist building.

The Williams Tower was completed in 1983. At that time Postmodernism was the prevailing style. Fresh, bold and daring, architects were exploring the freedom of designing without having to follow the strict, sometimes arbitrary rules of a specific architectural movement (which ironically became a movement itself). The Williams Tower was therefore every much in line with what the architecture community, and the people liked and wanted at the time.

The Williams Tower 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 building is designed as two distinct towers stacked vertically, with the first occupying the initial forty floors and the second spanning the forty-first to sixty-fourth floors. Each with its separate elevators, lobbies and services. The reason for this is that the original main tenants only had the need to occupy half the floors, and put the remaining half up for rent

From an aesthetic point of view, the facade features pink granite framing the spectacular entrance with a 27-meter-high arch, and a continuous dark-gray reflective glass curtain wall. The curtain wall is adorned with light-colored frames forming a grid of perfect squares, which makes it hard to distinguish individual floors and therefore makes the viewer lose sense of the scale of the building..