35-story medical tower going up at Memorial City

The newest gigantic medical tower in town won't be built in the Medical Center. Instead, Memorial Hermann's new 35-story tower will go up at Memorial City, which developers are saying could be the next Uptown. The $335 million, 915,000-square-foot building will include 15 floors of inpatient and 20 floors of outpatient services and will allow the Memorial Hermann system to consolidate all its employees at its Memorial City campus.

Architecturally, it's kinda hard to tell what the building will look like, other than that it'll be big. The tower looks like it'll have an exterior similar to that of the existing Memorial City hospital buildings, with a curved glass center section. According to the announcement from Memorial Hermann and MetroNational, the building will also have "a unique light feature at the top in keeping with the design of other recent Memorial Hermann hospital facilities ... it will be the focal point of the Memorial Hermann Memorial City campus and the greater Memorial City area." Which isn't surprising, considering that the building will be the tallest thing in the neighborhood. (Marshall Heins, head of Memorial Hermann's real estate operations, got a little carried away with the Chronicle, calling the nearby intersection of Gessner and the Katy Freeway "the geographic center of Houston." Well, sure, if you drop the east side, we guess that's sort of true.)

The new hospital tower seems to signal that MetroNational, the company that renovated Memorial City Mall, is serious about its plan to build up 200 acres surrounding the mall with residential buildings, offices, retail, parks, movie theaters and a hotel. The company has been pouring money into the area: $200 million for the mall update, $60 million in land acquisition late last year and several million more for a midrise condo building under construction now. In all, the company says it expects to spend $700 million on development at Memorial City. Interestingly enough, a similar — but far smaller — development is planned just down the road, on the site of the old Town & Country Mall. Good thing they're widening I-10, eh?