Dome

Looking up through the glass atrium and support system to the twin towers; A set of two 36-story towers in downtown Houston, designed by Philip Johnson and John Burgee and built in 1975. Johnson worked with John Burgee (born 1933) from 1967 to 1991. It was Burgee’s experience with the large commercial firm of C. F. Murphy Associates in Chicago that prompted Johnson to hire him, setting the stage for a remarkably prosperous two-decade-long partnership and a multifaceted catalogue of high-rise buildings. Pennzoil Place (with Wilson, Harris, Crain & Anderson) was significant in breaking free of the parallelepiped form common in post-war skyscrapers. It consists of two 151 m trapezoidal towers placed ten feet apart and sheathed in dark bronze glass and aluminum. The buildings are mirror images of each other. The entire street-level plaza joining the two structures is enclosed in a 115-foot (35 m) glass pyramid-shaped atrium. It is deliberately designed as an optical illusion. Pennzoil Place is considered significant for breaking the modernist glass box design made popular by followers of Ludwig Mies van der Rohe and for introducing the era of postmodernism. Pennzoil Place was named "Building of the Decade" in 1975 by The New York Times architecture critic Ada Louise Huxtable; Johnson also won the Pritzker Prize in 1979. Source: Grove Art Online; http://www.oxfordartonline.com/ (accessed 7/20/2012)