Images are leaking of the new tower Marathon Oil wants to build on a patch of recently-vacated land between CityCentre and the Katy Fwy. In an email sent out to employees on Tuesday, company CEO Lee Tillman set a tentative move-in date of 2021 for the imaginary building and wrote that its planned location was a plus partly because it’s closer to where the average Marathon employee lives, out in “west Houston and along the I-10 corridor.” The new whereabouts are just under 6 miles away from Marathon’s current ones in the eponymous Marathon Oil Tower at 5555 San Felipe, near the Galleria.
The rendering at top of the new building shows it looking a lot like the middle structure in this group of 3 that Midway proposed building on the site last year:
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Neither the residential highrise in the foreground, nor the 2 adjacent office buildings (nor the traffic circle at Town & Country Blvd. and Town & Country Wy.) have materialized yet, but there’s nothing standing in their way. Following a few twists, turns, and the unexpected formation of a near-perfectly-rectangular lake, the last of the site’s most recent occupants — the Town & Country V office building — collapsed in its place at 908 Town & Country Blvd. last August. Its 2 neighbors Town & Country IV and III (shown directly below) disappeared a few months earlier:
A look at Town & Country V (on the right) with Midway’s already-built CityCentre Five highrise shown distantly to the south:
- Previously on Swamplot: Almost All Clear on CityCentre’s Northern Front; The Last Part of Town & Country V Comes Down with a Twist;Â How To Pull Down an I-10 Office Building, Town & Country Style;Â Taking the Edge off Town & Country V;Â Underground Parking Garage near CityCentre Replaced with Garage-Shaped Lake;Â How To Topple That Last Bit of Seventies Mod Office Building Without Letting It Topple You;Â Smashing Views of a Half-Eaten Katy Fwy. Office Building from CityCentre Five;Â Midway Fences In Empty 1970s Office Park Where 3 More CityCentre Towers Might Sprout
Photos: Stephen Garcia (Town & Country V); Jeff Day (Town & Country III). Renderings: Marathon Oil (first); Midway (second)
Has anyone also noticed the new AWS sign on City Centre 5 office buiding?
Soooo, why are they moving? To save 6 miles? Got to be more to it than that.
Goodness. The Energy Corridor and City Centre buildings are some of the most blandest, shortest, boxy buildings that all look similar. Why Marathon would want to move out of their tall, iconic building into one that looks like all the neighboring buildings is beyond me. I blame Exxon’s move to the bland burbs.
Amazon Web Services (AWS) is moving into City Centre 5.
@Glen Oil companies like to be near one another as it makes meetings with partners much easier. The Marathon Tower is now an outlier and is getting on in years. The big question is who will be able to absorb all that space?
The traffic circle is 99% complete and open.
More great news for West Houston, following the announcement of Occidental’s move to the Energy Corridor and westward relocations of a handful of other smaller companies.
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Would’ve been nice if Marathon could’ve moved into existing vacant West Houston office space, of which there is still plenty, but I guess being City Center-adjacent was a priority.
It may be a short distance as the crow flies, but for practical purposes these two suburban locations are very different. The existing location is plainly inconvenient to anybody approaching it from any direction and adjoins no other development of interest. The new location is arguably just as easy or easier to access from Houston’s urban core, is closer to where the action is in the energy industry, provides its employees with better lifestyle options, and will hold its value well at least inasumch as any part of Houston will.
I’m surprised any major companies are still retaining offices inside the BW8 loop. It just doesn’t make sense for employee commuting patterns unless their lines of business are directly tied or related to existing infrastructure and locations (courts, medical plaza’s , etc.).
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@TheNiche, any particular reasons or for citing these 2 locations as “suburban”? Both are in the city of Houston with far higher levels of surrounding density than the majority of Houston.