Sold: The Son of Pennzoil Place, Market briefs

In Houston, It wouldn’t be right to call it an illegitimate offspring. It stands on its own as a place of high quality.

Only a few people know about this. But here is the cold truth.

Houston’s Pennzoil Place, the world’s most important skyscraper, has a son.

The son is now 51-years old and it’s 26 stories tall. It stands at the corner of Congress Avenue and Sixth Street, one of the most prominent locations in downtown Austin.

The building, originally known as the Austin National Bank Tower, has just been sold.

The Austin building and Pennzoil Place were both developed by the late Mr. Gerald D. Hines, the greatest and most visionary developer of the twentieth century.

But the DNA match between the two buildings runs much deeper than that.

The Austin building and Pennzoil Place were both clad with the same batch of dark bronze glass, a highly unusual exterior that made them stand out on bland skylines of sameness.

The amazing story of Pennzoil Place has been documented by many. The aggressive and demanding Hugh Liedtke, the chain-smoking wildcatter who was CEO of Pennzoil, wanted a distinctive headquarters in downtown Houston.

Mr. Hines brought in the architectural team of Philip Johnson and John Burgee. Their plan called for two, dark-glass Pennzoil trapezoids with only ten feet of empty space separating them. The tops of the towers were sharply slanted, not flat. When Pennzoil Place opened in 1975, the hubbub echoed on an international stage. The era’s trendy pop artist, Andy Warhol, traveled to Houston to take Polaroid snapshots of the towers. Pennzoil Place was named the “Building of the Decade” in 1975 by famed New York Times architecture critic Ada Louise Huxtable.