The crash of the oil and natural gas markets in 1982 had such disastrous economic consequences for Houston that the city's business elite made a concerted effort to diversify the local economy. The rise of a new economic sector based on the design and production of computers and the systems that power them in the 1980s coincided with Houston's diversification initiative. The one large Houston corporation emerging in this process to demonstrate exceptional architectural awareness was BMC Software, founded in 1980. Richard Keating, a Los Angeles (formerly Houston) architect, designed BMC's three-building complex. Keating pursued a formal strategy of varying the proportions, directionality, and materials of the buildings' curtain walls.