Wallis State Bank I

The Wallis State Bank site, located 10 miles from Houston's Central Business District, is master planned for four structures that reflect an urban feel. The first phase is a 19,000-sq.-ft. floor plate office and bank function. This three-story building also has an executive fourth floor at 5,000 sq. ft. for a total of 65,000 sq. ft. It occupies the hard corner and is positioned to have favorable views from the executive level.

The south and the west elevations are punched openings, while the north and the east combine to form a bent facade are dominated by glass and glazing. The executive floor is an all glass box lightly seated atop the base building. The placement of glazing also indexes site as the facade coincides with the active hard corner intersection. The whole skin floats above a loggia space created by a series of tilt wall wickets on the front surface with a curtain wall expression of the entry and lobby area compositionally integrated into the facade plane. The bank drive-through and cover are part of this expression.

The southwest skin as mentioned is heavy, punched and has a lower glass-to-wall ratio. In juxtaposition, the northeast “floats” - is visually light and it literally does not touch the ground. The light or tectonic quality of the box comes from combining large opening punched panels with cantilevered corner panels and site cast spandrels. In some cases, spandrel glass extends over and hides panel legs giving the appearance of curtain wall. The wickets below are in some ways a transformation of tilt wall as structure to tilt wall as infrastructure; they are both load bearing and expressed. Turned vertically to the facade, they provide relief and depth that operates counter to the planarity of tilt wall used raw.