1600 Smith Street, Postmodern skyscraper in Downtown Houston, United States
1600 Smith Street is a 51-story, 732-foot (223 m) office tower in Downtown Houston, part of the Cullen Center complex. Completed in 1984, it was designed by Morris Architects in a postmodern style, with Linbeck Construction Company as general contractor. It holds about 1,098,399 square feet of rentable Class A office space and is currently the 9th-tallest building in Houston.
Completed in 1984, the tower stood largely vacant that year, becoming a symbol of Houston's overexpansion. In September 1997 Continental Airlines announced it would consolidate its Houston headquarters here, moving about 3,200 employees in stages from July 1998 to January 1999, taking 15 floors and leasing 600,000 square feet in the Cullen Center.
The building displays 1980s design language through its geometric patterns and mixed materials, typical of postmodern architecture from that era. Looking closely, you can see how these forms differ from older skyscrapers around it.
The tower's street-level lobby held a company store, a credit union and an employee service center added for Continental Airlines, and the airline also ran a ticket office on the ground floor. The building is part of the Cullen Center complex in Downtown Houston, so look for its entrance within that group of towers rather than as a standalone address.
An electrical failure in 2000 triggered widespread flight delays across the global network of the building's main tenant. This incident revealed how dependent international operations had become on a single location's infrastructure.
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