Modern NASA Building

A change of space

A little-known piece of the city’s NASA past is being renovated, modernized and opened to the public

By MIKE SNYDER
HOUSTON CHRONICLE

 

NASA

A southeast Houston building was home to the Manned Spacecraft Center in the 1960s

Until recently, many employees of Houston's Parks and Recreation Department weren't aware that when they strolled down to the supply room for paper clips they were walking in the footsteps — literally — of pioneers of the American space program.

The department's offices are in a southeast Houston building that was home to NASA's Manned Spacecraft Center from 1962 to 1964. It was here that the Mercury astronauts paved the way for their Apollo successors to win the race that put Americans on the moon before their Soviet competitors.

The building's history and design have been highlighted in a $16 million renovation intended to transform it from an obscure bureaucratic center into a public amenity. The parks department intends to lease part of the building and its courtyard for public events, such as weddings, to recover some of the costs and make the property more familiar to the community.

“I consider this building a piece of art,” said Joe Turner, the city's parks and recreation director, who has overseen the renovation and successful efforts to achieve local, state and federal historic designations for the building.

City officials will dedicate the renovated building in a ceremony Friday. Turner said he hopes the public event leases can begin by the spring of next year.

The low-slung building, made from a distinctive green stone known as green-cast quartzite, was commissioned in 1956 as the headquarters for a Houston-based construction firm, Farnsworth & Company. Employees of that company would later develop such well-known contemporary firms as Spaw Glass and Williams Brothers.

Farnsworth hired MacKie & Kamrath, a local architectural firm, to design the building. The designers were influenced by Frank Lloyd Wright and incorporated certain elements that Wright took from Mesoamerican civilizations such as the Aztecs and Maya, said Anna Mod, a preservation consultant who prepared applications for the building's historic designations.

“When I saw the building in Houston, that's the first thing I thought of,” Mod recalled. “Frank Lloyd Wright had borrowed the same vocabulary.”

Stephen Fox, a Rice University architectural historian, said MacKie & Kamrath incorporated some of the same elements into other corporate headquarters built in the 1950s, including the Schlumberger building on the Gulf Freeway (1953) and what is now the Exxon-Mobil research center on Buffalo Speedway (1954). These buildings represented part of Houston's first wave of suburbanization after World War II, Fox said.

Bought by city in 1976

In 1961, oil drilling magnate Oscar Lee Gragg and members of his family bought the building as an investment but never occupied it.

A year later, Gragg leased the building to a 4-year-old federal agency, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, which used it as offices for the Mercury program and the Mercury 7 astronauts — the daring fliers immortalized in Tom Wolfe's The Right Stuff — until 1964.

The city purchased the building in 1976, and the Gragg family donated surrounding property for a park.

The renovation project presented a challenge in modernizing the building — it wasn't wired for computers, for example, and “we had cables everywhere,” Turner said — without compromising its historic qualities. Accomplishing that required close consultation with the agencies that grant historic designation, Turner said.

The only piece of furniture retained from the Mercury days is a large conference table, Turner said. Other furnishings in the original style have been purchased, and the green linoleum floor looks just like the one where Gus Grissom, Alan Shepard and their colleagues walked.

Boon to preservation

The renovation added windows and skylights to allow more natural light into the building, which was helpful in the effort to obtain the U.S. Green Building Council's Leader in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED) designation for environmental sustainability. That application is pending, Turner said.

Leasing the property for public events on weekends, when the parks department isn't using it, will provide more than financial benefits, Turner said. It's a way of acquainting Houstonians with a historic piece of property most of them have never seen.

Fox said this could provide a general benefit to historic preservation efforts in Houston.

“It's great when the public gets to experience a place like this,” he said. “The building is a little bit off the beaten path.”

 

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