Architecture studio OMA has completed the first phase of transforming a US Postal Service building into a multi-purpose destination in downtown Houston.
The public areas at POST Houston opened on 13 November 2021 within a 500,000-square-foot (46,450-square-metre) concrete mail-sorting warehouse and office building, which was used by USPS until 2015.
POST Houston occupies a former USPS warehouse, which has been overhauled by OMA
The huge structure was built in 1962 by Wilson, Morris, Crain & Anderson ? the firm behind the Texas city's Astrodome sports arena ? on the site of what was once Houston's Grand Central Station.
Led by partner Jason Long, OMA's New York studio masterplanned the adaptive-reuse project and designed a series of spatial and structural interventions within the former warehouse. The building is organised around three atriums that each have a sculptural staircase
To connect the 16-acre site with the downtown business and theatre districts, the team created a series routes to the building that continue inside as voids.
"Like farmers working on concrete soil, we raked a series of horizontal thoroughfares into and through it," said OMA.
The atriums zone the ground-floor commercial spaces, which include a food hall
These cut-through sections serve as large atriums that bring light into the building's deep floorplates.
Named X, O and Z, the atriums also organise the ground floor into zones for cultural and retail, a food market, and collaborative ...