The facilities steering committee at UT’s M.D. Anderson Cancer Center has decided to demolish what’s left of the institution’s Houston Main Building at 1100 Holcombe Blvd. with several blasts of dynamite — before the end of the year. The announcement in an online employee-only newsletter cited safety concerns for the decision: “Manual demolition with jackhammers and blow torches would expose our employees, our patients, the public and dozens of construction workers to noise, dust and vibration for months. Implosion reduces that exposure to a matter of minutes.”
The 18-story Med Center structure was known as the Prudential Building before M.D. Anderson purchased it from the insurance company in 1975. It was vacated last year, and demo work on the building began this past April. The newsletter announcement also recaps the institution’s explanation for knocking down the structure, which was designed by Houston architect Kenneth Franzheim in 1952 as part of Houston’s first suburban office park:
In advance of tomorrow’s scheduled vote on the fates of historic districts in Heights South, Glenbrook Valley, and Woodland Heights, supporters and opponents of historic designation in those neighborhoods have been 
The color-coded maps, the front-yard tombstones, the shivering naked women, the Ranches and MCMs, the prayer nooks, the free tacos, the threatening drive-by waves . . . it all comes out (well, some of it anyway) in 
“Although I am a huge proponent of keeping architecturally significant buildings intact and committing to their re-use, this building is an exception. I worked on some interior spaces in this building and although it was beautiful on the outside (as beautiful as a limestone monolith can be) the interior, with the exception of the first floor was awful. Low ceilings, large thick structural walls and narrow passageways gave it a feeling somewhere between a habitrail and a cave. It is also loaded with asbestos. MD Anderson is committed to keeping functional buildings, as they showed by adding to to top of the existing Alkek tower last year, rather than tearing it down. Houston Main Building really did have to go.” [
