This bank building once heralded one of the city's largest financial institutions and is an important skyscraper from the 1970s. Built by Houston developer Gerald Hines, InterFirst was clad in the same bronze curtain wall system he was using on Philip Johnson's Pennzoil Place in Houston (
HN8). Together with the gold-skinned MBank Tower (1973, Lloyd, Morgan and Jones) a block away, the bulkiness of InterFirst was one of the first to ignore Austin's setback ordinance and the scale of the old buildings along Congress.