Larry Speck

THE CASS GILBERT ERA : 1910-1922 Cass Gilbert imagined a campus for UT that was grand and monumental. Even before actually receiving the commission, he produced ketches of a campus with powerful scale and clarity. His buildings conspired together to frame dominant vistas and define malls, courts, and plazas, creating memorable exterior spaces. In these images, the rural-feeling green lawns were…

From 1910 to 1942 the University of Texas at Austin built an extraordinary ensemble of buildings which demonstrated palpably to its public the ambitions of an emerging institution. In a relatively short period of time, the image of the University was transformed from a sleepy, small-town college housed in a hodgepodge of mismatched buildings into a powerful, sophisticated institution whose campus…

During his thirteen-year tenure as campus architect, from 1909 to 1922, Cass Gilbert made a seminal contribution to the University of Texas that would have a profound and far-reaching impact on the development of that institution. From his very earliest sketches, Gilbert portrayed an image of the university that was far more ambitious and sophisticated than had been imagined previously. In his…

When Cass Gilbert first visited the University of Texas campus at the request of the university's regents in 1909, he found a motley collection of eight buildings of widely disparate styles and materials which the university had collected over its first quarter-century of existence. Although attempts had been made when new buildings were added in 1903 and 1909 to create a "general plan" for the…