Houston Tower
skyscraper
The Houston Tower was a plan for a 500-story skyscraper conceived in the 1970s to be built in Houston, originally designed as a research project for the feasibility of a 500-story building. American Architect Robert B. Sobel of Emery Roth & Sons, with engineer and fellow American Nat W. Krahl of Rice University, created a concept for a 500-story building made from 200-foot sided bundled triangular tubes. Sobel had theorized the construction of a 500-story building as early as 1974.
According to Emery Roth & Sons, the project showed that the technology and materials existed to build a 500-story (or taller) building if someone wished to do so. Since its first inception, it has remained one of the tallest buildings ever fully envisioned, and would have taken up 16 city blocks of 250x250 feet if constructed. Its design features are reminiscent of the Sears Tower, which utilizes a similar construction pattern albeit on a smaller scale.
“Houston Tower” enters the record as skyscraper. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Houston, Tower and skyscraper can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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“Houston Tower” is worth following because a concise public description often conceals a longer documentary argument. Here, Houston, Tower and skyscraper provides the most credible route into that argument.
Vocabulary and entity names are the principal evidence signals here, because they determine the precision of every later search. The source revision retrieved here is dated Mar 12, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q1055987. Authority coordinates are 29.754, -95.367. 1 of 1 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1974.
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This entry incorporates text from “Houston Tower” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.