100 Years: Remembering Gerald D. Hines

Born: August 15,1925

“Gerald Hines envisioned Houston as a city of beautiful buildings, a truly quality built environment. He enlisted the aid of great architects to produce buildings that made people proud and that raised the quality of other developers.” – President George H.W. Bush – Comments at the U.S. Building Museum in 2000.

By Ralph Bivins, Editor, Realty News Report

As a boy, Gerald Douglas Hines, like many other boys, loved to build model airplanes and such. Then, one day he was on a trip to downtown Chicago with his parents. The amazing size of the skyscrapers inspired young Hines. “I’d like to build one of those someday,” Gerald said.

He would indeed create great towers like the ones he saw in Chicago – and a whole lot more.

Mr. Hines was born August 15,1925 in Gary, Indiana. As the 100^th anniversary of his birth approaches, we should remember the structural legacy he left behind and the places he built.

With an engineering sheepskin from Purdue, Mr. Hines arrived in Houston and lived at the downtown YMCA. He founded Hines Interests in 1957, developed some small buildings on Richmond Avenue, then stepped up to the major leagues.

Double Endeavors

Taking on enormous financial risk with personal guarantee, Mr. Hines tackled two monumental developments in Houston at the same time – the Galleria and One Shell Plaza. A quarter-point uptick in interest rates could have been the breaking point.

The Galleria, which covers 52 acres at the corner of Westheimer and Post Oak Boulevard, was inspired by Galleria Vittorio Emanuele, a shopping plaza in Milan, Italy.

When it opened in the fall of 1970, people flocked to the three-story Galleria with its classy blend of shops. Traffic jams were common and customers lined up outside of stores waiting to get in to see the merchandise.

With a design by Gyo Obata of the HOK architecture firm, the Galleria’s stores encircled a first-floor ice skating rink. High above was a vaulted glass ceiling.

The Galleria, now a 3 million square-foot mixed-use development with 900 hotel rooms and office space inspired nearby development in what’s called the Uptown Houston district.

One Shell Plaza, a 50-story downtown skyscraper, earned the title as the tallest building west of the Mississippi River when it was completed in 1971.

More important than its 715 feet of height, the building imported the headquarters of Shell Oil Company from New York City to Houston – aka the Energy Capital of the World.

This building, designed by Skidmore, Owings & Merrill, not only energized downtown Houston but it also signaled to the world that Gerald Hines was going to be a power hitter in global real estate.

The 1.2 million-square-foot One Shell Plaza, now known by its address at 910 Louisiana, was a precursor to a wild mushrooming of Houston’s skyline. Dozens of office and residential towers would be erected in downtown Houston in the years to come, including Hines’ 75-story Texas Commerce Tower (circa 1982).

The Trapezoids that Changed the World

Pennzoil Place was named the “Building of the Decade” in 1975 by famed New York Times architecture critic Ada Louise Huxtable. Pop artist Andy Warhol traveled to downtown Houston to take Polaroid snapshots of the trapezoidal Pennzoil towers that were wrapped with dark bronze-tinted glass.

The design of Pennzoil Place ignited the buzz. Mr. Hines had brought in the architectural team of Philip Johnson and John Burgee. The twin dark trapezoids – with only ten feet of empty space separating them – were different than the standard skyscraper of the day.

Pennzoil Place, situated on a block bounded by Capitol, Rusk, Milam and Louisiana streets, made a splash in commercial real estate in Houston, of course. But Pennzoil aftershocks ran deep, creating a tsunami around the globe. Signature office buildings with top-notch design were moneymakers. Corporate tenants paid top-dollar rents. Hiring a top-notch “Starchitect” to design a superior skyscraper became a reliable business plan for developers. Skylines everywhere became more interesting and more beautiful.

Hines Interests went on to expand across the nation and across the globe, creating trophy projects like Tour EDF in Paris, the Lipstick Building in Manhattan, Salesforce Tower in San Francisco, and Diagonal Mar in Barcelona.

International endeavors by the Hines organization continue today. Hines just announced plans to build a 1.5 million-square-foot, high-end office development in India, in Mumbai’s Bandra Kurla district.

The Local Legacy

In Hines headquarters town of Houston, the legacy is long. The Gerald D. Hines Waterwall is a must experience for tourists. Downtown’s 46-story Brava apartment tower pays homage to the headlines and the presses at the former Houston Chronicle which operated there. In the suburbs, a Hines master planned community, the 9,700-acre First Colony, has 15,000 homes and one of the most diverse populations in the nation. Around Houston, Hines has developed scores of buildings, including office towers, residential communities, warehouses, high-rise apartment buildings, seniors housing and the 47-story Texas Tower in downtown where its headquarters are located.

Mr. Hines passed away five years ago on August 23, 2020, at the age of 95. The company he founded now has 5,000 employees, working in 30 counties around the world, managing real estate assets valued at over $90 billion.

Many words have been written about Mr. Hines and more will be written in the future. But for people who aspire to accomplish great things, for people who listen to their childhood ambitions, for people who need to be bold, it would be instructive to consider what Gerald Hines did and how he did it.

Commentary by Ralph Bivins, founding editor of Realty News Report.

Photo: Gerald D. Hines portrait courtesy Hines

File: Gerald Hines