Here’s the M.D. Anderson Cancer Center’s massive new 1MC (for “Mid Campus Building 1”) at 7007 Bertner Ave., just a short hop into the medical frontier south of Brays Bayou. 25 stories, 1.4 million sq. ft., $350 million. All to consolidate various leasing tenants from 8 sites around the Med Center, plus get some space for future expansion. Swamplot reader Stephen J. Alexander hopped from parking garage to parking garage to capture these views:
COMMENT OF THE DAY: WHY’D THEY LET THE ASTRODOME ROT? “. . . It doesn’t have to just sit there and waste our tax dollars, but unfortunately taxpayers are letting that happen by not pressuring the county to take immediate steps towards making it useful. Instead of doing nothing while waiting on what it will be in its grand ‘next life’ they should be getting it up to code, bit by bit, step by step so that it can be used, or at least parts of it be used – like maybe just the field – to start bringing in revenue. Before the doors closed permanently, a family paid around $18,000 to rent the field for a bar mitzvah. Don’t know how much director/producer John Lee Hancock paid to lease it for his movie Friday Night Lights (Sport & Convention Corp. wouldn’t tell me) but it wasn’t chickenfeed. If the county had been doing stuff like this all along the building would still be inhabitable and probably be at least paying for itself. It certainly would be a lot more attractive to potential investors. Taxpayers need to be pro-active and tell their commissioners to start fixing it up NOW and not wait another month or six months (at $300,000-400,000 a month) or a year! They should put that money to work and not down the drain. Taxpayers should show up at Commissioners Court and insist that the process to get the building operational, even in some small way, should start NOW.” [Cynthia Neely, commenting on How To Demolish the Astrodome: No Dynamite, Please]
“One of the construction workers told me that a self-storage place is going in here,” reports the Swamplot reader who sent in these photos of the “massive pile and hole” taking shape at 2412 W. Holcombe Blvd., on the northwest corner of the Morningside intersection, west of the Texas Medical Center. Look, flatlanders, before it’s gone: This is kinda what an actual hill looks like!
Last fall, the planned $500,000 rescue of a curved fresco painted by muralist Peter Hurd from the lobby of its Houston Main Building at 1100 Holcombe Blvd. was the focus of a small publicity campaign by UT’s M.D. Anderson Cancer Center. From the institution’s perspective it was probably a better story to focus attention on than the circumstances that instigated the move: the planned (and now active) demolition — despite the grumblings of many preservationists — of the 18-story 1952 Prudential Tower by Kenneth Franzheim that housed it. Since late January, when Linbeck (M.D. Anderson’s contractor) took the extraordinary step of firing fresco-conservation expert Nathan Zakheim from the job before the most delicate and proprietary portions of the process had been completed — and concerns were raised about how well the rescue could possibly be completed without him — the PR effort behind the tricky operation has been silent. Until today, that is.
HOW TO DEMOLISH THE ASTRODOME: NO DYNAMITE, PLEASE 
“. . . the Dome is also a mess right now, full of deadly asbestos, molds, a whole geological stratum’s worth of dust and who knows what else. But that nasty stew, ironically, may be its ultimate salvation. Although they blew up Texas Stadium for about $7 million, the figure for leveling the Dome is said to be in excess of $100 million . . .
Why so much? Even after the asbestos is removed, the tremors caused by imploding it could damage Reliant Stadium, so a ‘piece by piece dismantling’ will be required, explains Narendra Gosain, a senior principal with Walter P. Moore, the firm originally responsible for the Dome’s structural design. Walter P. Moore also consulted when San Antonio took apart the Hemisfair Arena, which Gosain calls a ‘mini-Astrodome.’
Explosives couldn’t be used on that venue, either, because of how close it stood to the Henry B. Gonzalez Convention Center.
‘The frame was the same, just much smaller,’ Gosain said, ‘and it required a very slow, painstaking process.’” [Houston Chronicle, via Off the Kuff; previously on Swamplot] Photo: Candace Garcia
COMMENT OF THE DAY: ROCK ON, PRUDENTIAL DEMO 
“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.” [LISA, commenting on Report: M.D. Anderson Begins Demolishing Med Center Icon; more recently on Swamplot]
Yes, it’s probably been a while since the University of Texas M.D. Anderson Cancer Center’s 18-story Houston Main Building — the former Prudential Tower at 1100 Holcombe St. designed by Kenneth Franzheim — has had its windows washed. But that’s not what these guys on the gondolas are doing to the 59-year-old building. Off with the limestone! Hey, how’d that fresco come out?
Photo: Candace Garcia
COMMENT OF THE DAY: PUSHING DAISIES “The Greenbriar house is on a 11,500 sq ft lot just a stones throw from the Med Center. I bet the new construction will be something modest, leaving most of the grounds for a beautiful garden.” [Old school, commenting on Daily Demolition Report: All Together Now]
COMMENT OF THE DAY: WHERE YOU WANT ALL THOSE FLOWERS “Seriously – in the bathroom sink? In the yard? By the pool? It’s like if you crossed Ladies Home Journal with Dr. Seuss (‘Would you, could you on the grass? Would you, could you on desk of glass? What about near the commode? Or three vases, on the road?’)” [LT, commenting on Old Braeswood House of Bouquet]
Flowers sure do dress up a room! . . . or two. But where’d they get the budget to deck this house on Morningside Dr. with so many identical arrangements and vases?
Note: Linbeck has posted a response, which we’ve now included at the bottom of this story.
If everything goes well, the giant ranch-scene mural by artist Peter Hurd that’s stood in the lobby of the M.D. Anderson Cancer Center’s Houston Main Building at 1100 Holcombe in the Medical Center since the structure was built as a Prudential Life Insurance HQ in 1952 will likely qualify as the largest fresco painting ever moved successfully to a new location. A donor is paying more than half a million dollars for the curved 16-by-46-ft. wall painting, appraised for more than $4 million, to be dismantled, preserved, and transferred eventually to a new home in a public library in Artesia, New Mexico, where the artist once had a studio. But at this point it’s not entirely clear that the move will go well, because Linbeck, the contractor hired by the Texas Medical Center institution to manage the enterprise, has fired the mural-conservation consultant who’s been working on the job for more than a year, only days before a looming deadline: the handing over of the famous 18-story building the painting occupies to a demolition contractor.
To move the mural, in January 2010 Linbeck hired Nathan Zakheim Associates, an art conservation firm from California, to develop a complex multi-stage process that included painting the back of the structure with resin and fiberglass and attaching it to massive trusses. Last month, the building’s entrance canopy was demolished to allow enough room for the painting’s exit. The mural was originally scheduled to be out the door before February 11th of this year. But efforts to meet that deadline were stymied by an almost two-and-half-month delay — which one source blames on the engineering firm hired by Linbeck — in the fabrication of the two 9,000-lb. curved steel trusses required for the job. After the trusses were finally delivered on January 10th, the conservator submitted a revised proposal that pushed the move-out date into the first week of March. Linbeck fired Zakheim from the job on January 20th.
“When you fire your conservator and bump up the schedule, it doesn’t mean it’s because you want to do the job right,” a source complains to Swamplot, expressing fears Linbeck will meet its original deadline for getting the mural out of the building — and damage or destroy it in the process. Linbeck would have had to pay additional fees to the conservator in order to keep him on, according to the source, and Linbeck’s contract with M.D. Anderson stipulates financial penalties for construction delays. “They re-read the contract, and the contract does not prohibit them from taking the mural out in crumbled pieces,” explains the source.
The mural was painted to illustrate Prudential Life Insurance’s motto at the time: “The Future Belongs to Those Who Prepare For It.” Linbeck has reportedly expressed confidence to M.D. Anderson and the donor that the company can manage the move successfully without the assistance of the conservator. But to do that, the company will have to overcome a couple of significant obstacles:
One of the things UT’s M.D. Anderson Cancer Center will be doing with that $150 million gift the president of the United Arab Emirates is handing over: Constructing a new 600,000 sq.-ft. therapy building, named after the donor’s dad: the Zayed bin Sultan al Nahyan Building for Personalized Cancer Care at MD Anderson. But where in the Med Center will they fit it? It won’t be replacing M.D. Anderson’s Houston Main Building, the former Prudential Life Insurance Tower already being hacked away at, and which the medical institution reportedly plans to demolish within weeks — a new treatment facility of some sort has been planned for that site for almost 9 years. The new building funded by the Khalifa bin Zayed Al Nahyan Charity Foundation will land instead on a different demo site: the southeast corner of Moursund St. and M.D. Anderson Blvd., a 5-acre lot which until last year was the home of the UT Health Science Center’s Mental Science Institute. M.D. Anderson bought the 2-story concrete-and-brick building at 1300 Moursund from its sister institution, then had it torn down over the summer, identifying the land at the time only as a location for “future expansion.”
A couple more photos of that site, from last year’s demo:
Responding to Swamplot’s request last week for photos of the former Prudential Life Insurance Tower the University of Texas’s M.D. Anderson Cancer Center is getting ready to demolish, architect Karen Lantz sends in a few photos she took while on a mod-gawking expedition in September 2003. Last week the medical institution began knocking down the porte-cochere at the building’s Holcombe St. entrance — to allow workers to remove one of the few items being preserved from the building: a mural in the building’s lobby painted by Peter Hurd in 1952. Lantz, who’s a bit of a demolition expert herself (her piece-by-piece dismantling of a home in Ranch Estates was awarded Swamplot’s Best Teardown Award in 2009), includes a few views of the grand entrance to Houston’s first-ever corporate campus:
The only part of M.D. Anderson’s Houston Main Building at 1100 Holcombe Blvd. being demolished today is a “coach canopy” outside the structure, cancer center spokesperson Laura Sussman tells Swamplot. Removal of the canopy will allow workers to extract a large mural from inside the space before the building is demolished. Sussman couldn’t confirm when demolition of the 18-story former Prudential Life Insurance Building would take place, but a source tells Swamplot it’s been scheduled for the middle of February. Mournful modernists, you have a few more weeks to get the building’s obituary in order.
Update, 5:14 p.m.: Today’s demo is just of an exterior canopy. But the entire building will likely be demolished next month.
The Rice Design Alliance is reporting that M.D. Anderson has begun tearing down the former Prudential Life Insurance building at 1100 Holcombe St. in the Med Center. Since 1975, it has served as the “Houston Main Building” for the medical institution’s campus. The 18-story limestone tower was constructed as the centerpiece of Houston’s first suburban office park in 1952, from a design by Kenneth Franzheim. For almost 10 years, the M.D. Anderson Cancer Center has been floating plans to knock it down and replace it with a new medical facility. Got any pics of the action, or images of the building’s notable interior to share? Send them in! We’ll publish updates as we get them.
Photo: Candace Garcia
