Landmarks and Monuments
The Merchants and Manufacturers Building (M&M Building) was built in 1930 and was the largest building in Houston at the time. It featured 14 miles (23 km) of floor space and could accommodate one-third of the city's population. The Art Deco–style building is recognized as part of the National Register of Historic Places, is a Recorded Texas Historic Landmark, and considered a Contributing Building in Downtown Houston's Main Street/Market Square Historic District. Since 1974, the M&M Building has been part of the University of Houston–Downtown and was given an official designation as "One Main Building" by the university.
The historic Trinity Church in Midtown on Main Street, which dates from 1919, is a neo-Gothic structure, designed by the architectural firm, Cram and Ferguson, whose Houston work also includes several buildings at Rice University and the Julia Ideson Building of the Houston Public Library. The church's Morrow Chapel was renovated in 2002 and features stained glass, artwork, and liturgical furnishings by artists such as Kim Clark Renteria, Kermit Oliver, Troy Woods, Shazia Sikander, and Selven O’Keef Jarmon.
The Uptown District is home to structures designed by architects such as I. M. Pei, César Pelli and Philip Johnson, including Saint Martin's Episcopal Church (with spires and antennae reaching 188 feet (57 m) into the sky), which was designed by Jackson & Ryan Architects and completed in 2004. St. Martin's was featured on the covers of three national magazines: Civil Engineering (April 2005), Modern Steel Construction (May 2005) and Structure (December 2005). The San Jacinto Monument is a 570 foot (173.7 m)-high column topped with a 220-ton star that commemorates the site of the Battle of San Jacinto, the decisive battle of the Texas Revolution. The monument, dedicated on April 21, 1939, is the world's tallest monument tower and masonry tower, and is located along the Houston Ship Channel. The column is an octagonal shaft faced with Cordova shellstone. It is the second tallest monument in the United States. The monument was designated a National Historic Landmark on December 19, 1960, and listed on the National Register of Historic Places. It was also designated an Historic Civil Engineering Landmark in 1992.
The Williams Waterwall is a multi-story sculptural fountain which sits at the south end of Williams Tower in Uptown. It and its surrounding park were built as an architectural amenity to the adjacent tower. Both the fountain and tower were designed by Pritzker Prize winning architect Philip Johnson. Completed in 1983, the semi-circular fountain is 64-foot (20 m) tall and sits among 118 Texas Live Oak trees. Approximately 11,000 gallons of water per minute cascades down vast channeled sheets on both sides from the narrower top rim of the circle to the wider base below.
Read more about this topic: Architecture Of Houston
Famous quotes containing the words landmarks and, landmarks and/or monuments:
“The lives of happy people are dense with their own doings—crowded, active, thick.... But the sorrowing are nomads, on a plain with few landmarks and no boundaries; sorrow’s horizons are vague and its demands are few.”
—Larry McMurtry (b. 1936)
“Of all the bewildering things about a new country, the absence of human landmarks is one of the most depressing and disheartening.”
—Willa Cather (1873–1947)
“If the Revolution has the right to destroy bridges and art monuments whenever necessary, it will stop still less from laying its hand on any tendency in art which, no matter how great its achievement in form, threatens to disintegrate the revolutionary environment or to arouse the internal forces of the Revolution, that is, the proletariat, the peasantry and the intelligentsia, to a hostile opposition to one another. Our standard is, clearly, political, imperative and intolerant.”
—Leon Trotsky (1879–1940)