Years before it closed, the future of the downtown post office on Franklin Street was the subject of much fascination.

In early 2012, students from architecture programs at Harvard, Columbia and other universities spent a day touring the 16-acre complex, gathering information and soaking up inspiration to come up with hypothetical development proposals for the property once it was no longer used for sorting mail and selling stamps.

Their ideas, which were part of a national design competition, ranged from creating dense housing districts and public plazas to reusing the sprawling building to house restaurants, a produce market, sports fields and a rooftop movie theater. One proposal combined thousands of residential units with an elevated park called the “the Hill at Houston.”

This morning, the owner of the property is expected to unveil the actual plan for the old post office, a former downtown institution that offered office workers a convenient spot to mail holiday packages and the place where countless Houstonians lined up to drop off tax returns just before midnight on April 15.

Lovett Commercial, the Houston-based company that purchased the property in 2015, plans to keep the structure and, with the help of historic tax credits, transform it into a coworking, shopping and culinary destination with a concert venue, hotel and rooftop farm. The ambitious project, which will fill more than 550,000 square feet of space, will be called POST Houston.

More Information POST Houston Address: 401 Franklin Developer: Lovett Commercial Architecture/design/construction: OMA, Powers Brown Architects, Hoerr Schaudt and Harvey Builders Financing: Construction loan from Prosperity Bank and financial support from Capital One, People Fund and MBS Urban Initiatives. Size: 550,000 square feet

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“We envision a catalytic development that will create something very unique, not only from an adaptive reuse standpoint, but what POST will offer in terms of showcasing the talent and entrepreneurial spirit of Houston’s diverse population,” said Frank Liu, Lovett’s president.

The developer and architects on the project say it will reinvigorate this quieter, more industrial northern part of downtown. The site is near the corner of Franklin and Bagby, across Buffalo Bayou from the bulk of the city’s office and residential towers. The location may prove challenging in one sense, but it is also a benefit.

The site offers postcard views of the Houston skyline, which will be highlighted from a rooftop park with restaurants, shaded greenspaces and an organic farm.

“It’s a site where you feel like Houston is a really urban place. Standing on it you have a view of downtown, Houston feels so metropolitan,” said Jason Long, a partner with OMA, an international architecture partnership founded by Pritzker Prize-winning architect Rem Koolhaas. The company is designing POST Houston, along with local firm Powers Brown Architecture.

Connecting pieces

The former post office campus is comprised of a sprawling two-story warehouse with a more than five-acre footprint and a five-story administration building facing Franklin Street. Surface parking surrounds the complex. Lovett officials declined to say what they were spending on the renovation of the property, which the Harris County Appraisal District valued at $42.5 million this year.

Lovett’s plan aims to transform the now-gutted warehouse with an edgy, urban aesthetic that brings in color and light. The building will be punctured to create three large atriums, each with a unique monumental staircase defining the space as coworking, culinary or retail. In the office section, for example, the “Z stair” zigzags and incorporates platforms where people can work.

Food stalls and kiosks will cluster around a staircase resembling a double helix, creating a dense, international-style market.

“The stairs are not just a way to connect pieces together, but spaces that could be social connectors in themselves where people could cross paths and intersect with one another,” Long said.

The first floor will house restaurants, shops and event space, while the second floor will cater to office users and arts organizations.

Distinctive feel

Lovett, founded in 1980 as a homebuilder, now develops an array of residential and commercial real estate in Houston, Dallas and Austin. Its commercial arm was created in 1994 to develop urban retail and suburban grocery-anchored projects.

This project will be different from other mixed-use developments in the way it combines uses, said Lovett’s Kirby Liu, Frank Liu’s son and a Lovett project manager.

“A lot of these mixed-use projects are actually what would be considered adjacent-use projects, in the sense that the way that the different programs interact with each other is still distinct and disparate, whereas our vision for POST is about a melting pot of programs that cross-penetrate and influence each other,” he said.

The project also aims to focus on energy efficiency as sustainability.

The atriums will be covered with a translucent roofing material called ethylene tetrafluoroethylene — or ETFE — which acts like an air-filled Ziplock bag to serve as insulation.

The rooftop park and garden, to be known as the “Skylawn,” is being designed by Hoerr Schaudt, the Chicago-based landscape architects behind Houston’s McGovern Centennial Park. The property’s restaurant tenants will be encouraged to source ingredients from the garden.

“It will be like rooftop-to-tabletop. Restaurants will be able to order from the farm with literally zero carbon footprint, no transportation whatsoever,” the younger Liu said.

The redevelopment of the warehouse is expected to be completed by next summer. The administration building will eventually become a boutique hotel, and Lovett is in talks with an operator. The developer is also in negotiations with an entertainment company to operate the music venue.

Leveraging history

By repurposing the 57-year-old building, a state historical landmark, Lovett was able to earn federal and state historic tax credits.

“Many residents of Houston have some sort of memory of the Barbara Jordan Post Office while it was in operation. Combining the building’s original Cold War-era design with modern architecture will make the building stand out for generations to come,” Frank Liu said in an email. “We’re breathing new life into an already iconic building and reintroducing it as a vibrant addition to Downtown.

The building was in use as a post office until 2014, when mail processing was consolidated into a north Houston facility. It was named after Barbara Jordan, a Houston native who was the first black woman from the South elected to Congress, and Lovett intends to incorporate some sort of monument to Jordan, who died in 1996, in the new design.

Before selling in 2015, the site had been on and off the market since 2009, when the Postal Service announced it would sell as many as 200 properties across the country to help offset financial losses.

While Lovett was still determining plans for the property, the space was used to host the Day for Night music and art festival, which drew more than 20,000 music fans to this corner of downtown.

Built just north of the bayou in 1962, the post office was designed by Wilson Morris Crain & Anderson, which also designed the Houston Chronicle building on Southwest Freeway. The former administration building is set on columns and its concrete fins represent the clean look of modern American architecture, according to the AIA Houston Architectural Guide. The warehouse, too, is a relic.

“When people ask us why we saved the building, it’s because no one in their right mind would ever build a 5.5-acre rooftop that’s cast-in-place concrete,” Kirby Liu said. “This to us was an opportunity to create something like Central Park meets The High Line.”