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Four-Leaf Towers

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1982, César Pelli and Associates, Albert C. Martin and Associates, and Melton Henry Architects. 5100 San Felipe Rd.
  • (Photograph by Gerald Moorhead )

Four blocks and twenty years separate 5000 Longmont ( HN7) from the Four-Leaf Towers, a pair of forty-story condominium apartment buildings built by Interfin, a development corporation headed by Milanese investor Lorenzo Borlenghi and his son Giorgio Borlenghi. By the early 1980s, just before the crash of the oil market, international investors chose the Post Oak sector, where the Galleria shopping center is located ( HN7) , to build high-rise apartments aimed at an international clientele. Pelli stationed the square-planned towers so that they offset each other and organized the paneled curtain walls of rose and ivory glass, and a darker red glass banding, to expressively portray the organization of living spaces within apartments. The colors were intended to connote domesticity. Pelli's rigor and imagination elevate what might otherwise have been a nondescript pair of buildings. Positioned between the two towers is Polygenesis (1981), a fifty-foot-tall steel sculpture by Beverly Pepper. SWA Group of Houston was landscape architect.

Across S. Post Oak Lane from Four-Leaf Towers is Four Oaks Place of 1983 by César Pelli and Associates and Melton Henry Architects, a complex of mid-rise and high-rise office towers at 1300 to 1400 Post Oak Boulevard. Four Oaks Place was also built by Interfin.

Writing Credits

Author: 
Gerald Moorhead et al.
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Data

What's Nearby

5000 Longmont
Post Oak Central
St. Martin's Episcopal Church
The Galleria
Williams Tower (Transco Tower)

Citation

Gerald Moorhead et al., "Four-Leaf Towers", [Houston, Texas], SAH Archipedia, eds. Gabrielle Esperdy and Karen Kingsley, Charlottesville: UVaP, 2012—, http://sah-archipedia.org/buildings/TX-01-HN86.

Print Source

Cover: Buildings of Texas

Buildings of Texas: Central, South, and Gulf Coast, Gerald Moorhead and contributors. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2013, 357-357.

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