Once the hub of the city’s U.S. mail system, the long-abandoned USPS headquarters in Houston is being transformed by Lovett Commercial into a dynamic mixed-use complex expanding the city’s vibrant downtown.
Built in 1934, POST was first established as a depot adjacent to Houston’s Grand Central Station, the city’s gateway for travelers and freight. Grand Central Station was purchased by the US Government in the late 1950’s and demolished. Originally designed by Wilson, Morris, Crain & Anderson, the same architects that designed the Astrodome, the present building swallowed the remaining portion of the original 1930’s depot structure in its brick walls.
When the USPS building opened to the public in 1961, the United States was locked in a cultural, military, and technological contest with the USSR. As a result, the building was designed to FBI security standards with an ultra robust structure that included multiple nuclear bomb shelters. Moreover, the architects designed the building to showcase American industrial prowess and to be a machine that would streamline the sorting and distribution of mail.
The architects’ design included a number of industrial management technologies that have been selectively preserved in our redevelopment. One of the features that we are strategically preserving is a network of lookout galleries — we affectionally call them “Spy Tunnels” — that were originally designed to allow supervisors to furtively watch workers to ensure they were not pilfering cash or other valuables sent through the mail.Other preserved and rehabilitated features include the front administrative office and an elevated public plaza. Reflecting the Modern Era’s emphasis on integrating civic life with work, Wilson, Morris, Craine & Anderson designed the central plaza to be a hub for public events and celebrations. At the building’s opening ceremony in 1961, the Post Office organized an elaborate event at the plaza that included the Boy Scouts carrying American flags and lions from the Houston Zoo.
In 1984, twenty two years after its opening, the Post Office was renamed in honor of Barbara Jordan, the South’s first female African American legislator elected to the US Congress. A Fifth Ward native and civil rights icon, Barbara Jordan was passionate about public service and representing Houston. The inimitable orator stood at the public plaza and delivered these words: “I belong to you. You know me and if you want to honor me that is the highest tribute.”
In 2015, the US government decommissioned the Barbara Jordan Post Office and sold the building to Lovett Commercial. Designed by OMA/Jason Long in collaboration with Houston-based Powers Brown Architecture, the development of POST Houston balances preservation with strategic architectural interventions.
In 2016, after an exhaustive search, OMA New York/Jason Long was selected as the principal design architect for Lovett Commercial’s adaptive reuse of the former USPS headquarters in downtown. The architects began the design of the massive 16-acre parcel with an urbanistic approach that considers how the site could more holistically engage with the surrounding city fabric.
How could the design use POST to stitch together the strategic neighborhoods of Sawyer Heights with downtown’s Theater District and Buffalo Bayou Park?
OMA’s design balances preservation with architectural intervention to create a vibrant new cultural and commercial hub for the city. To integrate the site with north downtown, OMA imagined a giant rake pulling the city into the building and cultivating a new future for the isolated parcel. Each tine of the rake represented an almost surgical puncture into the historic structure, manifesting as three distinct atriums each with its own programmatic and material character. The design uses the building’s rigid column plan to form an internal urban grid with the atriums acting as interior streets.Furthermore, with POST being a landmarked historic site, OMA’s design leverages the Cold War building’s structural rigidity to propose a radical new program that would connect the project with Buffalo Bayou Park — Skylawn, Texas’ largest rooftop farm and park. To facilitate access to the public rooftop park, the architects inserted three monumental stairs (the X, O, and Z stairs) whose sculptural forms enhance and anchor the programs of each of the three atriums.
The resulting design is an intricate layer cake, with each level of the project accommodating a different use and offering its own spatial experience. The ground floor acts as a public podium with experience ranging from culture to food to creative work space. Above is a second level of expansive, interactive and collaborative office space. And the 210,000 sft rooftop park, whose meandering paths are a welcome deviation from the rigid orthogonal circulation patterns of the interior, offer occupants and visitors respite with a postcard-worthy view of Houston.
As it once was, the post office will remain a public building, but further enhanced to create a new openness and a gathering place for Houston. The project aims to be an adaptive reuse cultural epicenter linking the city’s past with its future aspirations.
Contact Professional Development Committee chairs, Edgar Moctezuma (mocteze@stthom.edu) & Sabrina Gomez (sabrina.gomez@jll.com), for more information.
