Gerald Hines, corporate developer, pioneer of mixed use

In the early 1990s, I worked on a project based in Houston, and I would go there a few times a year.

That's how I was introduced to the Houston Galleria (right), an early example of "horizontal mixed use."

The shopping mall with an ice rink wasn't novel--even if an ice rink is still unusual in Houston--but the way that office buildings and hotels were integrated into the complex was novel.

It turns out that it was developed by Hines Interests, a firm founded in Houston by Gerald Hines.  He started assembling land for the Galleria beginning in the late 1960s.

The Houston Galleria is a multi-building complex anchoring the Post Oak district of Houston.  One of the buildings, Williams Tower, is the tallest building in the city outside of downtown. Photo: Houston Business Journal.

He claimed that the concept was inspired by the Galleria Vittorio Emanuele II Arcade in Milan ("A look at the legacy of the late Gerald D. Hines, the man who built Houston's skyline," Houston Chronicle).

And by the time I visited the city, they were active in many markets besides Houston, including DC (and the redevelopment of the Walter Reed Army Hospital complex, which is underway currently, branded as the Parks at Walter Reed).

Caption: Houston Chronicle. Visitors interact with a projection of Gerald D. Hines at Waterwall Park in Uptown on Saturday, Aug. 29, 2020. The public was invited to pay final tribute to Hines' life and global architectural legacy at the 64-foot fountain and Houston landmark. Photo: Annie Mulligan.

The New York Times obituary ("Gerald D. Hines, Developer and Architects’ ‘Medici,’ Is Dead at 95") discusses the importance Hines (Hines Interests, Hines Corporation) within real estate development more generally.  From the article:

At his death, Mr. Hines’s company had built 907 projects around the world, including more than 100 skyscrapers, many of them designed by architects like I.M. Pei, Harry Cobb, Philip Johnson and John Burgee, Cesar Pelli, Kevin Roche, Jean Nouvel, Frank Gehry, Robert A.M. Stern and the firm Kohn Pedersen Fox. ...

Architecture was his passion, although it would probably be more accurate to say that what he cared about most was fusing a point of intersection between serious design and profit-making real estate development. He took issue with colleagues who saw creative architects as dangerous to the bottom line. Spending a little more to create a better building would pay off in the end, he believed, because tenants would spend more to be in a better building that had a distinctive identity, and that would benefit both his tenants’ businesses and his own.

“Corporations are today’s equivalent of the Medici, or they can be,” Mr. Hines said in 1976, shortly after he had finished Pennzoil Place, the two-towered complex in downtown Houston that established him as an architectural patron. “I think I understand corporate executives because they are basically pragmatists, and what we’ve tried to do is create a way in which they can make some sort of real contribution to the quality of the city and yet not get sued by their stockholders. That’s where Pennzoil will convince people — not because it’s good architecture, but because it pays.”

Clockwise from left: Pennzoil Place, Houston; Lipstick Building, NYC; 101 California Street, San Francisco; Bank of America Center, Houston.

Hines constructed 27 buildings in Houston, and two new projects are currently underway.

Besides being a pioneer of the mixed use type ("the Galleria type") which he went on to create in other cities, like Dallas--meanwhile the Post Oak area in Houston developed into a kind of Edge City but still close to Downtown, he pioneered developing buildings with signature architecture and design, arguing that branding buildings with quality architecture helped to attract tenants and made more money.

From the Chronicle article:

“Most post-war development was kind of banal. It was dull and unimaginative. The world was waiting for someone to bring a little bit of a spark to it,” Goldberger said. “It was Gerry Hines who saw architecture as a way out of it. The architects themselves didn’t want to design buildings like that, and he knew tenants might well take it up. On that (philosophy), he built one of the largest and most successful real-estate operations in history.”

Goldberger knew Hines for decades, and saw the depth of his curiosity. He was as interested in a building’s HVAC system and materials as he was its budget and square footage.

[architect and critic Paul] Goldberger describes Hines as a man who saw buildings as part of a community’s culture. Not just structures that pedestrians would walk past invisibly, but things that people could stop and look at, admire and reflect on — that better buildings would make a community look, feel and actually be better.

“He was interested in how a building sat in a city and what it did for the city and public space and how people walked past it on the street. He cared hugely about that,” Goldberger said. “It’s important to realize that while he was one of the greatest architectural clients of modern times, he never gave an architect a blank check. … He had to find a way to make it buildable and profitable and still make it interesting enough so it will be distinctive and special. It was knowing that sweet spot where all that stuff intersects that was part of his genius. Now it’s more common, there are loads of small to medium-size firms in cities doing things like that. Hines was the beginning of it all.”

When Houston experienced one of its major downturns, instead of shrinking in response, he moved the firm towards a national profile, developing signature projects across the country.  He certainly wasn't the first commercial real estate firm to operate on a national footprint, but he was an early entrant.

Later, he left the US to build the firm's presence in Europe.

These days Hines Corporation owns or manages about 150 million s.f. of property.

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Hines and his commitment to civil rights.  Speaking of today's tumultous times, from the Chronicle article, comparing Hines to another real estate developer, Donald Trump ... :

Judson Robinson III, the current Urban League president and CEO, tells the story of an impromptu conversation in a parking lot in the 1960s, a tale captured in a book by the late Quentin Mease.

Apparently, Hines, Mease and a couple of other executives had finished a hospital board meeting and were chatting about civil rights unrest in the city and elsewhere. They needed an organization that could help effect change and asked Hines to convince city leaders that a chapter of the Urban League would be an important thing to have in Houston.

“You can pick a side and cast people as rioters and looters, or you can figure out why is there this degree of anger, hostility and frustration and do something about it. (Gerald Hines) was able to do something about it, rather than sit on the sidelines complaining,” Robinson said. “He chose to be something completely different, and that was to be part of a solution.