First, it envisioned a grand classical building located at the very center of campus. Over his ten-year term as university architect, three distinctly different architectural approaches were developed for this ”University Hall. ” It was a grand domed node in sketches as early as February 1909 and as late as October 1920. It was a large pedimented temple with a dominant gable-front facing the State Capitol Building to the south in sketches as early as January 1910, also appearing in much later designs, as well. In a sketch from 1920, University Hall was comprised of a single very tall tower rising from a low, flat base. Gilbert was the seminal voice that established the idea of a very large building, one so prominent on the Austin skyline that it would serve as an iconic symbol for the emerging university.

A second powerful feature involved the creation of four axes which led down the hill from University Hall in roughly cardinal directions. The South Mall was the most prominent of the four, forcefully linking the front of University Hall to the Capitol Building at the other end of the axis. A broad Main Plaza, articulated by a pair of double rows of trees flanked by symmetrical buildings and continuous arcades, introduced the South Mall. This grand urban ensemble of University Hall, Main Plaza, South Mall, and Capitol sought to stretch the realm of the campus and make it a dominant player in the larger context of Austin. It established a parallel between the university and state government, allowing the campus to borrow some of the grandeur of the State Capitol. As this plan eventually came to fruition 20 years later, it did indeed establish UT as a powerful physical presence in the city.

The other three axes, though less grand, established important connections and contributed significantly to a sense of clarity and coherence for the campus. The East and West Malls focused on the short ends of University Hall and were terminated by well-defined gateways on Guadalupe and Lampasas Streets. The somewhat shorter North Mall was about as broad as it was long, giving it a less directional character. But its axial walkway with flanking pavilions at the northernter minus focused it clearly back to University Hall. Gilbert’s axes indicated multiple connections to the surrounding city and provided ready options for expansion beyond the original campus site . At the same time they exuded an aura of strength and confidence, of order and stability. They set a tone for the public image of the campus, creating a lasting mark on the character of the university.

A third feature envisioned quadrangles defined by the cardinal axes, creating a more intimate, personal campus scale. Each of these four spaces possessed its own distinct character, but all were loosely contained by an assemblage of carefully aligned, mostly linear buildings.

In these less formal outdoor “rooms,” faculty and students were expected to thrive throughout their everyday academic lives. They, along with the four malls, acknowledged the dual role of UT as both a powerful institution and a nurturing place of learning.

The fourth feature of his plan that appealed to university leaders was its attitude toward consistency versus inclusiveness in the architectural character of campus buildings. His vision embraced existing buildings of diverse styles as well as a range of new architectural expressions designed to fit various functions and sites. Gilbert proposed retaining all existing structures except one. He very cleverly integrated Brackenridge Hall, the Women’s Building, the Engineering Building, and the Law Building – all with very diverse architectural expressions – into his grand scheme. He worked with very different architectural vocabularies in the two buildings he completed, the Library (now

Battle Hall) and the Education Building (now Sutton Hall). In sketches for other projects, including University Hall, a gymnasium, and an outdoor theatre, his range of style was also quite broad . This approach is consistent with his contemporaneous campus work at Oberlin College, where the five structures he designed represent a striking architectural range. Gilbert clearly imagined university campuses, not as a military-style assemblage of uniform buildings, but as a community of diverse structures. He believed buildings should be carefully coordinated with each other while not being restricted by an imposed stylistic code.

THE HERBERT M. GREENE ERA: 1922-1930
In 1922 the Board of Regents decided not to renew Gilbert’s contract. For the next eight years the role of university architect was filled by Dallas architect Herbert M. Greene, whose firm later became Greene, La Roche and Dahl. Throughout the early years of his tenure, Greene worked closely with James M. White of the University of Illinois, who created two new development plans for the UT campus. The first, completed in 1923, envisioned the demolitions of all existing buildings, except the two recently created by Gilbert. Though not iinfluential as a whole, this scheme over the next few years did locate several buildings – most notably, a new stadium and a new gymnasium – off the original 40-acre campus site. Responding to criticism by Dr. William Battle, the head of the Faculty Building Advisory Committee, White revised his plan in 1926, retaining more buildings and creating a stronger sense of formal order. The buildings completed by Greene in the core campus over the next few years did not follow White’s development plan. Greene’s greatest contribution may well have been the series of buildings he built just off the 40 acres, extending the campus domain to the north and east and broadening its functions to include athletic facilities and a women’s residence hall. His Littlefield Dormitory of 1927 staked out a residential precinct to the north of the campus and became seminal in the subsequent development of an entire women’s quadrangle a decade later.

In terms of athletic facilities, Greene completed a new stadium in 1926 (now the much expanded Darre ll K. Royal-Texas Memorial Stadium), a baseball field in 1927 (later Clark Field), a men’s gymnasium in 1930 (later Gregory Gym), and a women’s gymnasium in 1931 (later Anna Hiss Gym). Through these bui ldings he stretched both the architectural and materials vocabulary for the campus, enriching its range of color, texture, and scale. Greene designed a total of 12 buildings for the campus during his tenure as university architect and left an indelible mark on its character. His respect for the planning and architectural acumen of his predecessor, as well as his own creative capabilities, made him an excellent architect for this era of the university ’s growth. His knowledge of and commitment to the state of Texas generated references to regional characteristics in the ruggedness of structures like Gregory Gym and the erudite detail of buildings like Garrison Hall. By early 1930, with the design of most of his UT buildings complete, Greene’s health began to fail. Although his contract as university architect was not due to expire until 1933, his direct role in the work became greatly curtailed . Greene died in February 1932, leaving his firm to complete the last year of h is contract.

THE PAUL CRET ERA: 1930-1942
In March of 1930 the Board of Regents signed a contract with Paul Phillippe Cret to become consulting architect for the university in order to create a new vision for the next era of campus growth . Initially engaged to conceive only a development plan, Cret was awarded a second contract by the Board of Regents in June 1931 to design ten new buildings. This extraordinary flurry of construction activity was provoked by the creation of the Permanent University Fund by the Texas Legislature in April 1931. This mechanism authorized the university to pledge its income from oil production on lands in West Texas to secure long-term loans. The Regents, fearful that the Legislature might rescind the loan authorization when it met again in 1932, took the architect they had at hand and moved forward quickly.

In these initial ten buildings, Cret established four distinctive architectural vocabularies, which he would extend to all 19 buildings he eventually designed for UT. Like Gilbert and Greene before him, he knew a campus the size that the university would eventually need required diversity. In a report written to the Regents in 1933, he advocated buildings, “related, to be sure, but independent, and requiring a certain variety of treatment, to avoid the monotony and the ‘institutional ‘ character inherent to the repetition of similar units.”

In addition, Cret’s legacy includes the preparation of a comprehensive development plan for the whole campus in 1933. Completed after ten of his buildings were already essentially finished, this plan knit together the work of Gilbert, Greene, and Cret’s own work to date. The scheme was remarkably respectful of Gilbert’s Master Plan of 1914, where malls defined four varied quadrants with long simple building forms defining pleasant outdoor rooms. Cret’s South Mall was about the same width as Gilbert’s and also had similar double rows of trees along each side and buildings connected by colonnades. But Cret’s buildings were arranged perpendicular to the mall, which more resembled Gilbert’s plan for the University of Minnesota than the one created for UT.

Cret’s development plan of 1933 also paid great homage to Greene’s work during the 1920s. Anna Hiss Gymnasium and Littlefield Dormitory became key delineators of an entire women’s quadrangle to the north of the 40 acres. Here, the women’s gym became the focus of a grand symmetrical composition of buildings. Gregory Gym and Greene’s buildings for the Engineering School similarly became centerpieces for formal open spaces masterfully woven around them.

The holistic development of the campus from 1910 to 1942 represents an exemplary balance between contextual considerations and fresh innovation. All three key architects, Cass Gilbert, Herbert W. Greene, and Paul Phillipe Cret – as well as their collaborators who often bridged the transitions between them (including Ayers and Ayers, Greene, La Roche, and Dahl after Herbert Greene’s death, Robert Leon White, John Staub, and Page Brothers) – demonstrated a remarkable commitment to creating a powerful, coherent, and dynamic place. The Board of Regents, the university administrations, and key faculty members like Dr. William Battle, who was Chair of the Faculty Building Advisory Committee through much of this era, had the vision to select extraordinary designers and then support them in the pursuit of both enlightened planning and architectural innovation.

The resulting physical environment has played a prominent role in shaping the best aspects of the University of Texas at Austin today. The power, prestige, and dignity embodied in buildings constructed when the institution was nascent predicted its future. The campus felt big and strong long before it actually was. The environment of the university set a benchmark that the institution grew to achieve over time. The campus has become the crucible in which the ethos of the University of Texas is best contained. For many people, this physical environment is UT: a place they return to over and over to connect to the institutionand its role in transforming their lives.

When this era began, the University’s 27-year-old campus consisted of a motley collection of makeshift structures on the crest of a hill just north of the city’s center. In the late 1880s the State of Texas had replaced the origi¬nal Greek Revival Capitol Building with an impressive new granite edifice designed by Detroit architect Elijah Myers. The mammoth structure with its vertical cast-iron dome (taller than the nation’s capitol in Washington) sat atop a hill at the termination of Congress Avenue-the main street of Austin, the modest city below. The city’s grid, which had been laid out in 1839, provided the basis for a coherent urban ensemble with the Colorado River forming a southern boundary, prominent bluffs creating east and west edges, and the Capitol on its hilltop crowning ¬the City to the north. With the new Capitol reinforcing the symmetry and grandeur of the original plan, the fledgling capital city had a memorable pres¬ence and a striking skyline.

The University’s image in 1910 was significantly less impressive. Its first structure, a portion of Old Main Building, was located thoughtfully by architect the Frederick E. Ruffini in 1882 on the highest point ¬the forty-acre campus, near its center. It faced the Capitol Building to the southeast, establishing an axis between the two hills which was slightly skewed to the city’s grid. But the initial structure remained an odd fragment for years until the building was fi¬nally completed in 1899 after three construction ¬phases directed by three different architects. By ¬the time it was finished, its collegiate Gothic style was dated and old-fashioned. Even so, in 1900, the ¬only other building on the campus, a simple brick ¬men’s dormitory (Brackenridge Hall), just to the east of Old Main, was remodeled to add a series of highly decorated towers in a somewhat futile effort to make the adjacent structures complement each other.

The buildings that followed in the first decade of the twentieth century discarded the spiky towers and elaborate ornamentation of their predecessors but failed to establish any new order of their own. ¬Although San Antonio architects Atlee B. Ayers and Charles A. Coughlin were hired to do a formal development plan for the campus in 1903, little regard ¬was given to the very ordinary plan, even in the place¬ment of the three buildings constructed over the next few years. The Women’s Building of 1903 by Coughlin and Ayers was a Neo-Romanesque structure which if enlarged, could have complied with the master plan. The neoclassical Engineering Building by the same architects in 1904 and the Neo-Palladian Law Build¬ing by Atlee B. Ayers of 190B, however, were located clearly at odds with the master plan.

Rejecting the disappointing results they were get¬ting from their local consultants, President David Houston and Regent George Brackenridge began in early 1907 to search for a nationally respected archi¬tect to create a new campus master plan and to es¬tablish a greater cohesion for the growing university. They selected Frederick M. Mann, head of the Depart¬ment of Architecture at Washington University in St. Louis, to prepare a new development plan in 1909.

Mann had established a strong reputation as an advocate for quality campus design largely through his involvement with the implementation of Cope and Stewardson’s competition-winning 1899 master plan for his home campus.

Mann’s plan essentially recommended starting over from scratch. It advocated demolition of all but the two most recent buildings on a campus, barely a quarter-century old. The massive but stylistically regressive Old Main Building was to be replaced by a smaller building of similar T-shaped footprint capped by a polygonal lantern. A broad green lawn with a double row of trees down its center would link the new building to the Capitol Building, creating a grand, open gesture to the south. The rest of the campus buildings were tightly clustered in a U-shaped ensemble wrapping the west, north, and east sides of the forty acres. Consistent rows of fairly uniform buildings lined Guadalupe Street, 24th Street, and Lampasas Street (later Speedway), Walling the campus off on three sides.

THE CASS GILBERT ERA, 1910-1922
Even before Mann’s plan was complete, University of Texas regents and administrators had contacted New York architect Cass Gilbert for advice. They were disappointed, as they had been earlier, with Frederick Mann’s failure to create a compelling vision for the University’s future. Cass Gilbert was just the architect to project a more powerful and ambitious direction. Schooled at M.IT. and later in France, Gilbert had worked for McKim, Mead and White, the most prominent American architectural firm of the era. He had won prestigious competitions for the design of the Minnesota State Capitol and the U.S. Customs House in New York. At the time, he was working on a comprehensive development plan for the University of Minnesota. At fifty years old, he had reached a peak of maturity in his career with recent projects in Ohio Minnesota, Michigan, and Missouri as well as on the East Coast. Beginning in 1908 he had served a term as president of the American Institute of Architects. The University of Texas had finally found a nationally known architect with ambitious vision capable of creating an enduring image for the campus and the institution.

Cass Gilbert, from his very early sketches, imag¬ined a campus for the University of Texas that was grand and monumental. Even before actually receiv¬ing the commission, he produced sketches of the UT campus with a powerful scale and clarity well beyond the work of Coughlin and Ayers or Frederick Mann. In these images, buildings conspired together to frame dominant vistas and to create memorable exte¬rior spaces. Gilbert imagined an urban campus with well-defined malls, courts, and plazas. The rural-feel¬ing green lawns of previous schemes were replaced by rigorously ordered outdoor spaces defined by ar¬cades and formal planting as well as the buildings themselves.

Four powerful features set Gilbert’s plan apart from its predecessors. First, it replaced Old Main with a much larger and grander classical building called Uni¬versity Hall at the very center of the campus. Three distinctly different architectural approaches were en¬visioned for University Hall over Gilbert’s 10-year tenure as University architect. It was a grand domed node in sketches as early as February 1909, and as late as October 1920. It was a large pedimented temple with a dominant gable-front facing the State Capitol Building to the south in sketches as early as January 1910, and much later as well. In a sketch from 1920 University Hall was comprised of a single very tall tower rising from a low, flat base. (By the 1920S Cass Gilbert had become famous for designing towers – his Woolworth Building in New York of 1913 being the tallest building in the world at the time.) Gilbert was the seminal voice that established the idea of a very large building, prominent on the Austin skyline, that would serve as an iconic symbol for the emerging university.

A second powerful feature that distinguished Gil¬bert’s plan involved the creation of four axes which led down the hill from University Hall in roughly cardinal directions. The South Mall was the most prominent of the four, linking the front of University Hall forcefully to the Capitol Building at the other end of the axis. A broad main plaza flanked by sym¬metrical buildings introduced the South Mall, which was articulated by double rows of trees flanked by continuous arcades. This grand urban ensemble of University Hall, Main Plaza, South Mall, and State Capitol stretched the realm of the campus beyond the forty acres to make it a dominant player in the larger context of the city. It established a parallel be¬tween the University and state government and allowed the campus to borrow some of the grandeur of the State Capitol. As it eventually came to fruition twenty years later, it established a signature presence of the University of Texas as a strong, confident insti¬tution commanding a powerful physical presence in the city.

The other three axes, though less grand, estab¬lished important connections and contributed sig¬nificantly to a sense of clarity and coherence for the campus. The East Mall and West Mall focused on the short ends of University Hall and were terminated by a well-defined gateway on Guadalupe and Lampasas streets respectively. The somewhat shorter North Mall was about as broad as it was long, giving it a less-directional character. But its axial walkway with flanking pavilions at the northern terminus focused it clearly back to University Hall. Contrary to the schemes of earlier architects, Gilbert’s axes indicated multiple connections to the city around and provided ready options for expansion beyond the forty acres. At the same time the axes exuded an aura of strength and confidence, of order and stability. They set a tone for the public image of the campus that made a lasting mark on the character of the University.

A third feature of Gilbert’s plan, which would have lasting significance, focused on the creation of a more intimate, personal scale for the campus. Within the four quadrants created by the cardinal axes, Gilbert envisioned well-defined quadrangles. Each of the four spaces had its own distinct character, but all of them were loosely contained by an assemblage of carefully aligned, mostly linear buildings. It was in these less¬formal courts that the everyday academic life of fac¬ulty and students could thrive. They, along with the four malls, acknowledged the dual role of the Univer¬sity as both a powerful institution and a nurturing place of learning.

The fourth feature of Gilbert’s plan which gave it appeal to University leaders over previous efforts had to do with its attitude toward consistency versus inclusiveness in the architectural character of build¬ings on the campus. Whereas Frederick Mann had proposed demolishing all but two of the extant build¬ings in order to create strong cohesion, Gilbert pro¬jected retaining all of the existing structures except Old Main. He very cleverly integrated Brackenridge Hall, the Women’s Building, the Engineering Build¬ing, and the Law Building, all with very diverse archi¬tectural expressions, into his grand scheme. Even in the two buildings he completed for the campus, the Library (now Battle Hall) and the Education Building (now Sutton Hall), he worked with two very different architectural vocabularies. In the schemes he project¬ed for other projects-sketches for University Hall, a gymnasium, and an outdoor theatre – the range of architectural character he imagined for the campus was quite broad. Gilbert’s vision embraced existing campus buildings of diverse styles as well as a range of new architectural expressions designed to fit vari¬ous functions and sites. This approach is consistent with his contemporaneous campus work at Oberlin College, where the five structures he built represent a striking architectural range. Gilbert clearly imag¬ined a university campus, not as a military-style as¬semblage of uniform buildings, but as a community of diverse structures. He believed buildings should be carefully coordinated with each other, but not re¬stricted by an imposed stylistic code.

Battle Hall, which Gilbert began conceiving in 1909, was to be the westernmost of the two symmet¬rical buildings flanking the Main Plaza in the Master Plan. Its design was based loosely on the form of a Renaissance palazzo with office and administrative functions located on the ground floor behind heavy walls with plain, spare openings. The gracious reading room was raised to the upper piano nobile and graced with high ceilings, arched windows, and a monu¬mental facade treatment. This approach owed much to late-nineteenth-century library precedents such as Henri Labrouste’s Bibliotheque Ste.-Genevieve in Paris and McKim, Mead and White’s Boston Public Library as well as to Gilbert’s own St. Louis Public Library, the commission for which he had won in a competition in 1907.

But the library for University of Texas had its own distinct character apart from its precedents. It was much smaller and simpler than the very urban librar¬ies in Paris, Boston, and St. Louis. Its campus location gave it a softer, gentler context and allowed it to be more an object building than urban in-fill. Its hipped tile roof with deep, shadowy overhangs differentiated its massing and placed it firmly as a southern build¬ing distinct from its more-northern counterparts. Battle Hall also had a more festive, lively character, built as it was from the cream-colored Central Texas limestone rather than a more dour granite and dec¬orated with exuberant, brightly colored terra cotta ornamentation.

Design of Gilbert’s second building, Sutton Hall, began in 1915 with construction completed in 1918. It was a general purpose academic building conceived by Gilbert to be the first step in creating the purest of the four quadrangles in the Master Plan at the south¬east corner of the campus. Although planning docu¬ments had indicated flanking projections on the north face of the building at each end, the structure as com¬pleted became a long, simple rectangle in plan with a double-loaded center corridor and an entry hall facing south at its midpoint. Ironically, even though Sutton Hall was immediately adjacent to Battle Hall, there was very little relationship between the two either formally or functionally. Battle Hall created the west face of what was to be the new Main Plaza. Sutton Hall delineated the northern face of what was to be a new southeast quadrangle. They each seeded develop¬ment for the future, but, because of the twelve-foot topographical change between the two, they were ini¬tially rather isolated from each other.

In terms of architectural character, Sutton Hall was also strongly differentiated from Battle Hall. Though each building relied on the Renaissance palazzo as a precedent, their material usage, scale, color, and ornament were substantially different. Sutton Hall was much darker and less monumentally scaled than Battle Hall. Predominantly faced in a rough textured brick in browns, tans, oranges, and ochers, Sutton Hall had a ruddier, less refined building character. Even the stone used for its base was a grayer color than the creamy hues of Battle Hall. Paint colors were much darker and even the roof tiles were a deeper red and more variegated in color than the Library.

Though Gilbert did not complete as many build¬ings as might have been anticipated during the twelve years he served as University Architect, he left an indelible mark on the campus’ future. Both through his Master Plan and through the diverse architectural vocabularies of his two completed buildings he estab¬lished an inspiring vision for what the University of Texas might become. Gilbert helped the University administration and regents make the leap from seeing their institution as a small-town college to envision¬ing it as a sophisticated institution “of the first class.” Though his successors would create more buildings, Cass Gilbert was the seminal and visionary force in the development of the core UT campus as it exists today.

THE HERBERT M. GREENE ERA, 1922-1930
In 1922 the regents decided not to renew Gilbert’s contract. For the next eight years the role of Universi¬ty Architect was filled by Dallas architect Herbert M. Greene, whose firm later became Greene, La Roche and Dahl. Greene was born in Pennsylvania, received his education in architecture at University of Illinois, and moved to Dallas in 1897 at the age of twenty-six. By the early 1920s his successful practice had spread beyond Dallas and included the Scottish Rite Dormi¬tory just north of the UT campus as well as work for the University of Texas Medical Branch in Galveston. At about the same time as he received the appoint¬ment as University Architect, he became the first Texas architect to be named a Fellow in the Ameri¬can Institute of Architects. He was a very talented and capable architect who was a good friend of Sam Cochran, then chair of the UT Board of Regents.

In the early years of his tenure as University Ar¬chitect, Greene worked closely with James M. White of the University of Illinois, who did two new devel¬opment plans for the campus, neither of which had much lasting significance. The first, done in 1923, envisioned the demolitions of all existing buildings except the two most recent ones by Cass Gilbert. Though not influential as a whole, this scheme over the next few years did locate several buildings-most notably, a new stadium and a new gymnasium-off the original forty acres. White revised his plan in 1926, responding, in particular, to criticism by William Bat¬tle, the head of the Faculty Building Advisory Com¬mittee. The new scheme for the forty acres retained more buildings than the earlier one and had a stronger sense of formal order. Even the buildings completed by Greene in the core campus over the next few years, however, did not follow White’s development plan.

Herbert Greene’s first project built after his ap¬pointment was the Biology Building (later called the Biological Laboratory) of 1926. Though not entirely in compliance with Cass Gilbert’s Master Plan of 1914, it came close. It created a long, hard boundary on the northern side of the forty acres as well as a western edge for a tightened axis projecting north from the Main Building. The architectural character of the Bio¬logical Laboratory also owed much to Gilbert-espe¬cially to the vocabulary he established in Sutton Hall. Though the budget was clearly much lower than for the Gilbert precedent, the general conformation of the Biological Laboratory was the same. The long, thin rectangular volume had a stone base made of Leud¬ers limestone, two brick-faced floors above pierced by regular windows, and a red tile roof. Because of the significant slope of the site, the building’s basement was exposed on the east end and faced with a rusti¬cated version of the stone used on the first level. Win¬dows for an attic floor also pierced the frieze under the eave, so that the building actually had five floors with natural light, although it generally looked like a three-story building.

Concerns for maximum economy, which may have driven this extraordinary utilization of the building volume, did not have such a positive effect on exterior finishes. The use of terra cotta ornament was far more parsimonious than in Sutton Hall, restricted as it was to a band under the eaves, turned columns flanking a few special windows, and occasional decorative pan¬els. Themes depicted in the ornament included both classical motifs and local botanical elements such as bluebonnets and oak branches. The building’s duller, less variegated brown brick and flat tile panels did not have nearly the same richness and liveliness as Sutton Hall.

But Greene’s second building, Garrison Hall, of 1926, demonstrated his capability to produce the same kind of strong character and texture that Gilbert had accomplished. Sited in a very prominent location on the east side of the Main Plaza opposite Battle Hall, the new building, which would house the History De¬partment, was, again, generally located in compliance with Gilbert’s 1914 plan. Its L-shaped massing, with the shorter leg facing the plaza and the longer leg run¬ning down the hill to the east, enabled Greene to get four usable floors with generous basement windows in a building that looked to be three floors (and about the same height as Battle Hall) on the plaza side. The Leuder’s limestone base-rusticated at the basement level, smooth above-is pierced by arched windows on the first floor, like Sutton Hall. The brown/tan/orange/ochre brick colors and quantity of terra cotta ornament are also much more like Sutton than like the Biological Laboratory.

But the theme of the ornament was, distinct from Gilbert, tied very strongly to the building’s use and locale. The ornament evokes scenarios of Texas his¬tory in the form of longhorn skulls, Lone Stars, blue¬bonnets, and cactus and by means of the names of state heroes like Austin, Travis, and Lamar embla¬zoned above focal windows. Rondels feature brands of famous Texas ranches over more than a century. In Garrison Hall Greene successfully transformed Cass Gilbert’s general building vocabulary into an expres¬sion quite uniquely his own and strikingly Texan.

Greene designed two other academic buildings employing Gilbert’s Renaissance palazzo format and generally in compliance with the 1914 Master Plan – ¬Waggener Hall and the Chemistry Building, both completed in 1931. Waggener Hall was distinguished by its greater height-five full floors-as well as by the creation of a very deep limestone frieze under the eave which makes its top floor seem more a part of the cap than of the midsection of the building. Again, Greene manages to increase the density of build¬ing on campus without losing the basic motif of the stone base, brick midsection, and prominent cap. As in the Biological Laboratory and Garrison Hall, the ornament of Waggener Hall, which housed classes in Business, was themed to its use and locale. Emblems around the frieze under the building’s bracketed con¬crete eave depict the industries of Texas. The domi¬nance of agriculture (corn, cotton, citrus fruit, pecans, peaches, onions, cabbage, etc.) is striking, though live¬stock (cattle, sheep, goats) is well represented, as are oil and construction.

The design of the Chemistry Building differed from the others of this genre by its extraordinary length¬ – almost twice as long as Sutton Hall or the Biological Laboratory. With its three short wings projecting on the south side, it had a much larger building foot¬print than these precedents. The Chemistry Building anchored the northeast corner of the forty acres and, with Waggener Hall and the Biological Laboratory, be¬gan to create a strong edge to the academic part of the campus along 24th Street and what is now Speed¬way. A very elaborate stone portal in the center of the north face divided the building’s most dominant fa¬cade into two segments of more pleasing proportion. Outside of the limestone portal, which contained em¬blems depicting beakers and other equipment related to chemistry, Greene employed far less color and or¬nament on the building than he had on Garrison and Waggener. Again, Greene demonstrates ingenuity and finesse in adapting the original Sutton Hall model to very different programmatic needs, site situations, and budgets.

Greene’s greatest contribution may well have been in the series of buildings he did just off the forty acres, extending the campus domain to the north and east and broadening campus functions to include athletic facilities and a women’s residence hall. His Littlefield Dormitory of 1927 staked out a residential precinct to the north of the forty acres and became seminal in the subsequent development of an entire women’s quad¬rangle a decade later. Located about halfway between the Biological Laboratory and the Scottish Rite Dormi¬tory for girls that Greene had completed in 1921, the Littlefield Dormitory generally had a U-shaped plan with a forecourt facing south like the Scottish Rite facility. However, whereas his earlier dormitory had been a red brick Georgian building with three-story limestone columns and a slate roof, the newer Uni¬versity-sponsored dorm had a strong stylistic connec¬tion to other campus buildings. Above its split-face ashlar stone base, it was a primarily brick building of roughly the same coloration as Sutton Hall. There was no terra cotta ornament, but windows on the ground floor were lined with vaguely Moorish carved stone ornament. Turned columns and heavy wood fram¬ing on a small loggia gave a feeling of southern Spain without placing the building within any doctrinaire architecture style.

In terms of athletic facilities, Greene completed a new stadium in 1926 (now much expanded to become Darrell K Royal-Texas Memorial Stadium), a baseball field in 1927 (later Clark Field), a men’s gymnasium in 1930 (later Gregory Gym), and a women’s gymnasium in 1931 (later Anna Hiss Gym). Through these athlet¬ics buildings Greene stretched both the architectural and the materials vocabulary for the campus, enrich¬ing its range of color, texture, and scale. In the sta¬dium he created a grand curved concrete arcade with massive, very plain arches providing generous light to the spaces below the raked seats. In the women’s gym he produced a diminutive ensemble of single-story volumes around an intimately scaled courtyard. But it was in the men’s gym that Greene made the stron¬gest departure from the vocabulary employed in the academic buildings on the forty acres and established the important precedent for sympathetic but very dis¬tinctive special-function buildings at the outer ranges of the campus.

Gregory Gym was sited generally in the same lo¬cation as had been indicated in James M. White’s de¬velopment plan of 1923-just east of the street that became Speedway at the southeast corner of the campus. (Gilbert’s 1914 plan made no provision for build¬ing off the forty acres.) Its tall, flat front faced the aca¬demic campus to the west. This monumental facade with its great central flight of steps and nested gables presented a very strong contrast to the horizontal, hipped-roof volumes of the newer academic buildings on the forty acres. The gymnasium sat on a rather raw concrete base and had concrete spandrels articulated by bold geometric designs traversing grand arches on its north, west, and south facades. The shiny, colorful terra cotta ornament of other campus buildings was strikingly absent. The gymnasium was robust and muscular compared to its more delicate neighbors.

Stylistically, Gregory Gym eschewed the Renais¬sance precedent set by Battle Hall and Sutton Hall in favor of the more ancient Romanesque. This dramatic shift may have been provoked in part by an extended trip which Greene took to Europe in 1928, just prior to designing the gym. The building adopted a vaguely Lombard flavor, particularly in its distinctive relieving arches and corbel tables. Dominantly brick, the gym utilized limestone only sparingly in a few deco¬rative balconies. It was the brick, similar in color and texture to that used in Sutton and Garrison halls, that tied Gregory Gym back to the rest of the cam¬pus. Even here, however, Greene employed more ex¬otic configurations than had been used previously – ¬abstracted dentils, herringbone and diaper patterns.

Inside, the lower floor of the building contained a maze of handball courts, dressing rooms, and exercise spaces. Above was a single grand room with a basket¬ball court surrounded on three sides by bleachers el¬evated a full level above the gym floor. Interior walls were faced in the local Austin Common brick, which was lighter and softer than that on the exterior. Dra¬matic steel trusses in a tapered gable configuration spanned the space, which had a stage with fly-loft on the east, allowing the gym to double as a performance venue.

Perhaps because of its distinctiveness and its de¬parture from the dominant surrounding vocabulary, Gregory Gym soon became a favorite building on the campus. It demonstrated the importance of both Gilbert’s and Greene’s notion that there should be a variety of styles and materials in campus buildings, especially as utilized to create landmarks and to par¬ticularize exceptional functions. The building also demonstrates Greene’s capabilities as an outstanding architect who could generate appropriate expressions independent of precedents set by Cass Gilbert before him.

Greene designed a total of twelve buildings on the UT campus during his tenure as University Ar¬chitect and left an indelible mark on its character. His respect for the planning and architectural acu¬men of his predecessor as well as his own creative capabilities made him an excellent architect for this era of the University’s growth. His knowledge of the state and his commitment to it generated referenc¬es to regional characteristics in the ruggedness and toughness of structures like Gregory Gym and in the erudite detail of buildings like Garrison Hall. By early 1930, with the design of most of his UT build¬ings complete, Greene’s health began to fail. Al¬though his contract as University Architect was not due to expire until 1933, his direct role in the work became greatly curtailed. Greene died in February 1932, leaving his firm to complete the last year of the UT contract.

THE PAUL CRET ERA, 1930 -1942
In March of 1930 the Board of Regents signed a contact with Paul Phillippe Cret to become consulting archi¬tect for the university and to create a new vision for the next era of campus building. Initially engaged to conceive only a development plan, Cret was awarded a second contract by the Board of Regents in June 1931 to design ten new buildings. This extraordinary flurry of construction activity was provoked by the creation of the Permanent University Fund by the Texas Legis¬lature in April 1931. This mechanism authorized the University to pledge its income from oil production on lands in West Texas to secure long-term loans. The regents, fearful that the legislature might rescind the loan authorization when it met again in 1932, took the architect they had at hand and moved forward quickly.

In these initial ten buildings Cret designed for UT he established four distinctive architectural vocabu¬laries which he would extend to all 19 buildings he eventually designed for the campus. Like Gilbert and Greene before him, Cret knew a campus the size that the University would eventually need required diver¬sity. In a report written to the regents in I933, Cret advocated buildings “related, to be sure, but indepen¬dent, and requiring a certain variety of treatment, to avoid the monotony and the ‘institutional’ character inherent to the repetition of similar units.”

The first of the vocabularies Cret employed was a clear outgrowth from the palazzo-based work of Gilbert and Greene in academic buildings like Sut¬ton Hall, the Biological Laboratory, Garrison Hall, Waggener Hall, and the Chemistry Building. Cret’s Physics Building of 1933 (now Painter Hall) had the same limestone base, brick midsection, and elaborate bracketed eaves with red tile roof that was, by then, well established on the campus. In this version, the four-story height was reduced in scale by treating the top floor as a broken frieze rendered in limestone, much like Greene had employed at Waggener Hall. Several elements in Painter Hall were new, however. A perpendicular tower at the western end of the build¬ing broke the otherwise simple massing of the long hipped roof, acknowledging the location of that end of the building on the north axis of the campus. In addi¬tion, a much lighter, yellower brick was used as well as smooth limestone edging at vertical corners. Both of these gestures created a somewhat cooler, cleaner, less rugged feeling to Painter Hall in comparison to its predecessors.

The Geology Building of 1933 (now Will C. Hogg Building) also extended the familiar vocabulary of other Forty Acres academic buildings. More elabo¬rately ornamented than Painter Hall, the Hogg Build¬ing gave Cret the opportunity to use the same sort of department-specific theme that Greene had em¬ployed earlier. A horizontal carved limestone band that wrapped the structure utilized seashells, starfish, dinosaurs, and other prehistoric creatures as symbols for geology. Thick concrete brackets under the eaves were comparable to those employed by Greene in Waggener Hall. But, here again, there were some new touches as well. Blank slate panels were inserted be¬tween vertically stacked windows, and brick pilasters with carved limestone ionic capitals rose between the window stacks to give a more classicized character to the building. Rusticated quoins were applied to corners the building. Rusticated quoins were applied to cor¬ners extending the direction begun at Painter of us¬ing brick as infill panels in a stone frame. Over the following decade, Cret utilized this first vocabulary with some significant variations on six other campus buildings, ranging from residence halls like Carothers Dormitory of 1937 to academic buildings for Chemi¬cal Engineering and Petroleum Engineering in 1942.

The second vocabulary Cret employed was more rugged and varied in massing like Gregory Gym, Anna Hiss Gym, and Littlefield Dormitory from the Greene era. Cret used it in the vicinity of Gregory Gym and for functions comparable to Littlefield Dormitory. The first building of this genre was Brackenridge Hall of 1932, a men’s dormitory located on 21st Street just southeast of the men’s gym. The building’s conforma¬tion was looser than the vocabulary generated from the rectangular palazzo format. Its long, thin vol¬umes were broken in plan and featured a prominent tower at the west end. A rusticated base was created by corbeling out every ninth course of the brick on the first floor, lending a very rugged character in striking contrast to the Physics Building or the Hogg Building. Clearly an economy-minded project, Brackenridge Hall had coffered plaster eaves rather than bracketed ones with a simple stucco frieze below. The sparse ornament in the frieze picked up regional themes similar to the sort Greene had used in Garrison Hall and Waggener Hall. Western and cowboy images were predominant – cacti, lone wolves, shotguns, broncos, pistols, and knives. Cret did two other buildings in this genre on the campus-Roberts Hall of 1936 and Prather Hall of 1937.

The third vocabulary utilized by Cret was also characterized by informal massing with buildings as¬sembled as collections of separate, sometimes juxta¬posed, volumes. These buildings, however, eschewed brick, which had become a dominant material in ev¬ery new campus building since Battle Hall, in favor of creating all-stone buildings. Three of Cret’s best works, the Home Economics Building (now Mary E. Gearing Hall), the Architecture Building (now Gold¬smith Hall), and the Student Union – all of 1933 – de¬fined this genre. They were all composed of one, two, three, and four-story elements sheathed in a combina¬tion of smooth limestone and random ashlar fossilif¬erous limestone. Together, they created a fresh new look for the campus, quite distinct from any previous projects.

Mary E. Gearing Hall was created as a combina¬tion of a four-story north-facing central block with a hipped roof, two flanking three-story wings with flat roofs, two dominant towers at the intersection of the central block and the wings, and a lovely one-story loggia surrounding a courtyard with a fountain on the south side. The building’s composition was symmetri¬cal, appropriate to its location on the north axis of the campus, but was, nonetheless, extremely varied and romantic. Window rhythms were syncopated and sel¬dom aligned floor to floor. Cret originally conceived the building to be clad in rubble stone, which would have made it even more rustic and distinctive in its context. He used heavy timber beams and purlins in the loggia and turned-wood handrails on balconies projecting from the building to contribute a far more informal, rural character than existed in the Gilbert and Greene buildings.

Goldsmith Hall similarly incorporated a tower, a loggia, and a courtyard, along with volumes of varied heights to create a loose composition reflective, like Mary E. Gearing Hall, of its varied internal functions. Two thin wings with long north/south faces housed well-lit design studios. A thicker, taller block with windows oriented east and west stacked a lecture hall on the first floor, a library on the second floor, and classrooms on the top to create the third side of a well-scaled courtyard. Unlike Gearing Hall, Gold¬smith was dominantly asymmetrical with the eccen¬tric four-story tower anchoring the northwest corner of the building and a flat-roof two-story volume trail¬ing off the southwest edge. Local symmetries, as in the entry portal or the west facade of the lecture hall/ library/classroom wing, contributed partial order but also served to differentiate the various parts from each other.

The Student Union was composed of two wings with a corner tower at their intersection that matched Goldsmith Hall’s tower across the West Mall. Togeth¬er the two towers created a prominent gateway to the campus from Guadalupe Street. The long wing of the Union on Guadalupe Street was two stories and ac¬commodated the most-public building functions, like the cafeteria and ballroom. The shorter wing along the West Mall housed less formal activities like meet¬ing rooms.

The Union and Goldsmith Hall formed a striking ensemble at the major pedestrian entry point to the campus. They were similar to each other in composi¬tional character and materials, but quite different in fenestration and detail. Together, they created a to¬tally new architectural character very different from Cass Gilbert’s seminal landmarks nearby. The simple stereometric volumes, palazzo compositional format, and materials treatments of Battle Hall and Sutton Hall were rejected in favor of a fresh but compatible new expression. These were looser, less formal, more dynamic buildings than their predecessors. They rein¬vented, twenty years later, a vocabulary for the cam¬pus which Cret imagined would eventually be gener¬ously represented on the forty acres.

The fourth vocabulary Cret employed was also a new invention for the campus. Reserved for the most monumental buildings and ensembles, Cret called this vocabulary “New Classicism,” dominated as it was by traditional architectural elements like columns, pilasters, architraves, keystones, quoins, cartouches, and so forth. The most prominent example of this vo¬cabulary was the Main Building, constructed in two phases in 1933 and 1937. Planned to house both the li¬brary and the University administration, Cret located the Main Building on the top of the hill at the center of the forty acres just as Cass Gilbert had envisioned. Even its composition of tower atop a broad base had been conceived by Gilbert more than a decade before its construction.

The role of the Main Building as the center of what was rapidly becoming a very large urban campus de¬manded a monumentality and scale much greater than any prior campus project. Cret rose to the occasion with building forms that were gigantic and impressive in their context. As in the Union and Goldsmith and Gearing halls, the previously ubiquitous UT brick was avoided in favor of lavish expanses of creamy limestone. But unlike these three gentler buildings, the stone in the Main Building was cut, carved, and refined to embody a feeling of power and dominance. Huge stones with highly articulated joints formed a monumental base. Giant columnar orders accentu¬ated by deeply recessed balconies inflated the scale of upper floors. The comparatively plain, but massive, shaft of the tower was capped by classically ornament¬ed clocks on four sides, with a grand temple housing nothing but bells at the very top. Both in massing and in architectural character the Main Building lorded over the campus and created a striking counterpoint to the dome of the Capitol Building on the Austin skyline.

Cret designed three other buildings in the “New Classicism” vocabulary, though in far less grandiose versions than the Main Building. Hogg Auditorium, completed in 1933, drew both its symmetrical com¬position and its ornamental articulation from classi¬cal sources. But the interpretation was more severe, blocky, and abstracted than in the Main Building. Texas Memorial Museum of 1937 was simpler and cleaner still. Modern and progressive in general feel¬ing, the museum emphasized the “New” in Cret’s “New Classicism.” Its flat roof, glass-block windows, and large unrelieved surfaces made it fresh and strik¬ing. But its symmetrical composition as well as its abstracted pilasters with “longhorn” capitols kept it comfortable within the larger campus context. The Music Building of 1942 (now Homer Rainey Hall) was among the last buildings done under Cret’s influence, his involvement at UT being significantly reduced after his surgery for cancer in 1939. Its “New Classicism” set the tone for a formal six-building ensemble which would line both sides of the South Mall.

In addition to the 19 buildings for which he was supervising architect from 1930 to 1942, Cret’s legacy includes the preparation of a comprehensive develop¬ment plan for the whole campus in 1933. Completed after ten of his buildings were already pretty much fin¬ished, the plan knit Cret’s own work to date together with the work of Cass Gilbert and Herbert Greene. The scheme was remarkably respectful of Gilbert’s master plan of 1914 with north, south, east, and west malls defining four varied quadrants of the campus, where long simple building forms defined pleasant outdoor rooms. Cret’s South Mall was about the same width as Gilbert’s with similar double rows of trees along each side and buildings connected by colon¬nades. But Cret’s buildings were arranged perpendicu¬lar to the mall, more like those Gilbert had planned for University of Minnesota (and had suggested in a 1909 sketch for UT) than like the arrangement in his 1914 master plan.

Cret’s development plan of 1933 also paid great homage to Greene’s work of the 1920s. Anna Hiss Gymnasium and Littlefield Dormitory became key de¬lineators of a Women’s Group to the north of the forty acres in Cret’s plan. The women’s gym became the fo¬cus of a grand symmetrical composition of buildings in the district. Gregory Gym and Greene’s buildings for engineering similarly became the centerpieces for formal open spaces masterfully woven around them by Cret.

The holistic development of the campus from 1910 to 1942 represents an exemplary balance between contextual considerations and fresh, new innovation. All three key architects-Cass Gilbert, Herbert W. Greene, and Paul Phillipe Cret – as well as their col¬laborators who often bridged the transitions between them (including Ayers and Ayers; Greene, La Roche and Dahl after Herbert Greene’s death; Robert Leon White; John Staub; and Page Brothers) demonstrated a remarkable commitment to creating a powerful, co¬herent, and dynamic place. The Board of Regents, the University administrations, and key faculty members like Dr. William Battle, who was chair of the Faculty Building Committee through much of this era, had the vision to select extraordinary designers and then to support them in the pursuit of both enlightened planning and architectural innovation.

The resulting physical environment has played a prominent role in shaping the best aspects of the Uni¬versity of Texas at Austin today. Winston Churchill’s often-quoted dictum, “We shape our buildings; there¬after our buildings shape us,” is certainly applicable in this instance. The power, prestige, and dignity em¬bodied in UT buildings when the institution was still fledgling predicted its future. The campus felt big and strong long before it actually was. The environment of the University set a benchmark that the institution grew to achieve over time. Generations of prospective students have looked up the South Mall toward the Main Building and have sensed an ambition and as¬piration that matched their own. Thousands of fresh¬men over seven decades have discovered the intimate courtyards and warm interiors of buildings like the Union or Goldsmith Hall and have felt welcome and “at home.” Faculty, staff, and students from all over the globe and with diverse and conflicting values have mingled and engaged in meaningful dialogue amidst the civility and graciousness of the West Mall. The campus has become the crucible in which the ethos of the University of Texas is best contained. For many people this physical environment is UT and is a place they return to over and over to connect to the institu¬tion and to its role in transforming their lives.

Barnes’ landmark Walker Art Center of 1971 in Minneapolis established him as a creative innovator willing to take a fresh look at what an art museum might be – both as a home for art and as a focus for a city’s cultural life in the late 20th century. His Sarah Scaife Gallery of 1974 for the Carnegie Museum of Art in Pittsburgh demonstrated his ability to insert an important new building seamlessly into a strong existing context and his willingness to sublimate his individual work in order to create a larger fabric. By the time he received the commission for the Dallas Museum of Art in the late 1970s, Barnes was well equipped to take on what would be his largest museum project and to hone ideas he had developed earlier into a rich, mature work of architecture.

Barnes had very strong and consistent notions about architecture in general and about art museums in particular. Educated at the Harvard Graduate School of Design under Walter Gropius and Marcel Breuer, he has been lauded for his unfaltering fidelity to modernist principles of “purity, simplicity, quiet elegance, and integrity.”[1] In his museums, and strikingly in the Dallas Museum of Art, four strong design parameters predominate.

CONTEXT
From the earliest projects that established his reputation, such as the Haystack School in Maine of 1962, Barnes drew significant design inspiration from the site and regularly created buildings inextricably linked either to natural topography, as in the case of the Haystack School, or to urban fabric, as in the case of the Dallas Museum of Art. Considered a “practitioner of contextualism even before it became an architectural buzzword,”[2] Barnes was deeply involved in the urban plan of the sixty-acre Dallas Arts District from its inception. Harry Parker, Director of the Dallas Museum of Fine Arts during that period, has noted that while others contributed to the overall district plan, “the basic concept of the Flora Street spine of what was later to be called the Arts District, and the position of the Museum as an anchor within the Arts District, came directly from Ed Barnes.”[3]

The most fundamental concept of the building, in fact, became the creation of cityscape rather than of building. The plan became a kind of neighborhood of volumes and open spaces oriented to both internal and external passageways. The primary orientation device of the Museum became a long ramped spine with various functions – permanent galleries, theater, bookstore, temporary exhibition space – able to open or close on their own schedules “like buildings on a street,”[4] as Barnes described it.

Not only the plan arrangement but also the exterior character of the building was shaped by considerations of context. Barnes justified the severity of the building’s massive limestone facades on the grounds that a low, flat building in a downtown environment must be “rugged, even brazen”[5] to hold its own in a high-rise world. Shapes of building faces, locations of entries and windows, and, most notably, the creation of the emblematic vault as the heart of the Museum and as the termination of Flora Street all responded to Barnes’ impressive interest in making the building a natural outgrowth from its urban context.

MOVEMENT
In museum design, Barnes noted, “Flow is more important than form.”[6] He believed that patterns of movement through a museum should often be the “genesis of the design” and that passage through the rooms should always be “effortless and logical.”[7] Beginning with his extraordinary helical organization of galleries stepping up continuously around a core at the Walker Art Center, Barnes consistently used movement as a memorable design feature, drawing museum visitors gradually and intuitively through what were often large, complex series of spaces.

In the Dallas Museum, “flow” is accommodated significantly by the striking ramped spine, which links the site’s lower north elevation (with its primary auto access point) and the higher south elevation (with primary pedestrian orientation to downtown). But close attention to movement is also powerfully evident in the parallel axis of circulation through the south Sculpture Garden, across the axis of the vault, and through the terraced volumes of the permanent collection. As in the Walker Art Center, visitors are gradually transitioned up partial levels, in this case drawn by light from courtyards carefully aligned with stairs. Movement up, around, and through the collections, with changing vistas constantly enriching the viewing experience, provides a powerfully orchestrated museum experience. It also allows a large building with multiple floors to be continuously linked, providing greater curatorial flexibility.

FOCUS ON ART
Barnes believed that “within the museum the architect must not upstage the art.”[8] Directors who have worked in his buildings describe his galleries as “serene, seemingly anonymous backgrounds for art” (in the case of the Walker) or as “clean, unadorned, and well proportioned … a friendly environment for works of art from the whole range of the history of civilization” (in the case of the Scaife Gallery). In the Dallas Museum of Art, as Harry Parker noted early in the building’s life, “one is first conscious of the objects on display, not the … building itself.”[9]

Barnes’ original environments of long clean white walls, diffuse light, and minimal detail in the Dallas Museum suited a broad range of art from classical works, to Mondrians, Monets, and Rothkos, to the ancient American and African collections that are the Museum’s strongest points. Though substantially altered today, the Barnes approach exemplified in these spaces became a standard for art museums, especially in Europe, where architectural reticence became a watchword for gallery design. Even today, the work of architects as diverse as Herzog and de Meuron and Yoshio Taniguchi strongly support Barnes’ attitude toward the relationship of art and architecture in the museum environment.

REFINEMENT
The aesthetic strength of the Dallas Museum of Art lies most substantially in its subtlety, elegance, and refinement. At the time of the building’s opening, nationally renowned reviewers such as John Morris Dixon and Peter Papademetriou applauded its “minimalist aesthetic,” its “primitivism … recalling vernacular structures,” its “understatement,” “sobriety,” “decorum,” and “ascetic sensibility.” The Indiana limestone skin, laid up in two-foot six-inch courses (the basic module of level changes) and crisply chamfered at every third course to create strong horizontal shadow lines, was immaculately detailed. Windows and other openings were incised with bladelike precision. Inside, stair rails, exhibit cases, light tracks, and air diffusers received lavish attention in both placement and detailing. Natural light provided by courtyards and perimeter skylights (which Barnes had been refining for several decades) was bounced, softened, diffused, and made adjustable in order to render it appropriate for diverse applications.

Barnes’ refinement, both inside and out, was elegant and sophisticated but also extremely vulnerable to the ravages of weathering, wear and tear, and changes in curatorial attitude. The design precision and exactness so evident on opening day is less clear now, though still discernible on close inspection.

The original 1983 Dallas Museum of Art building, along with the Hamon Building added to it a decade later, demonstrates Edward Larrabee Barnes’ strengths as a late-modern designer as well as his contributions to defining the contemporary genre of art museums. The project also took a major step in defining a whole district of Dallas and laid claim to a large segment of downtown that is only now reaching full fruition as an arts district. Without the confident strength of the Dallas Museum of Art building quietly staking out the western edge of the district and without its towering vault giving presence and climax to Flora Street, it is hard to imagine that the resolve to build an arts district would have continued over the past twenty years. As the eastern end of the Dallas Arts District finally matures, it is time to appreciate once again the importance of that first bold step to make the Arts District a focus of architectural excellence – Edward Larrabee Barnes’ Dallas Museum of Art.

[2] John Morris Dixon, “Art Oasis: Dallas Museum of Art,” Progressive Architecture (April 1984), 127.

[3] Edward Larrabee Barnes Museum Designs (Katonah, New York: The Katonah Gallery, 1987), 31.

[4] Dixon, “Art Oasis,” 128.

[5] David Dillon, Dallas Architecture 1936-1986 (Austin, Texas: Texas Monthly Press, 1985), 173.

[6] Edward Larrabee Barnes Museum Designs, 6.

[7] lbid.

[8] lbid.

[9] Ibid., 31.

When Gilbert’s involvement with the University of Texas began, the school’s twenty-seven-year-old campus was a hodgepodge of mismatched buildings strung across a hilltop just north of Austin’s central core. The Old Main Building, begun in 1882 and placed near the center of the forty-acre campus, had been designed by Frederick E. Ruffini in a Victorian Gothic style that was common among American university buildings of the 1870s and 1880s. Just east of Old Main was Brackentidge Hall, which originally was built as a plain-brick men’s dormitory and later remodeled to incorporate a prickly series of towers with steeply pitched caps and elaborate ornamentation. A series of three buildings designed by San Antonio architects Charles A. Coughlin and Atlee B. Ayres shortly after the turn of the century rejected the Victorian vocabulary of earlier structures in favor of a variety of more contemporary idioms. The Women’s Building (1903), the Engineering Building (1904), and the Law Building (1908), individually and taken together, failed to define any clear architectural vocabulary that might direct the future development of the campus.

Though Coughlin and Ayres had prepared a formal campus master plan for the university when they began their work in 1903, the motley collection of buildings completed by 1909 was not built in accordance with any larger planning vision. The 1903 plan depicted a row of pavilion buildings around the southern half of the forty-acre campus, with a large tree-filled commons between the peripheral structures and Old Main at the center of the campus. The scheme was rural in feeling and very unsophisticated compared with the plans that had been generated for other American campuses such as Stanford University and Columbia University a decade earlier. Little stock was put in the Coughlin and Ayers plan, even in the placement of the three buildings completed by the university between 1903 and 1908. Though the Women’s Building could have been enlarged to comply with the scheme, both the Engineering Building and the Law School were sited in locations not in keeping with the master plan.

Dissatisfied with the piecemeal and disappointing results that they were getting from local Texas architects, President David Houston and Regent George Brackenridge began in early 1907 to search (or a new campus architect who had the ability to provide greater architectural cohesion for the university and to incorporate sound campus planning principles. They settled on Frederick M. Mann, who was then head of the Department of Architecture at Washington University in St. Louis. That university had held a widely publicized competition for their own campus master plan in 1899, which had been won by the firm Cope & Stewardson, beating out Cass Gilbert’s own entry (see chapter 16). Mann had been involved in the implementation of that plan, establishing his own reputation as an advocate for campus design of high quality. Mann’s plan for the University of Texas, completed in early 1909, maintained a large, open green space as its central feature, just as the 1903 plan had done. Mann’s college commons, however, was open to the city on its south face and had a more strongly defined, tree-lined axis at its center, connecting the university’s main building visually with the state capitol on the hill beyond. The east, west, and north sides of the forty acres were much more densely developed than those in the 1903 plan. Uniform ranks of three-story buildings with hipped and gabled roofs defined a range of different courts and quadrangles on three flanks of the campus. Essentially walled off from the city except to the south, the scheme had a strong inward focus with specific quadrangles designed for natural sciences, engineering, visual arts, and language arts. Circulation between these tightly defined areas was minimal and somewhat mazelike.
Mann retained only the two most recent campus buildings in his own master plan, proposing the replacement of Old Main with a new structure that would become the architectural focus of the campus. The new building was capped by a monumental polygonal lantern that stood well above the roofs of surrounding buildings. University President David Houston had requested that the architectural character of the campus buildings be responsive to the Spanish legacy of Texas. The new main building met this criterion by combining a range of Spanish motifs drawn from Romanesque and baroque traditions.

Mann built only one building on the campus, the Power House at its western edge made of heavy limestone pavilions capped by red-tile roofs with very deep overhangs. He also completed, however, two private commissions across the street from the campus, the University Methodist Church to the northwest and a building for the YMCA midway along the university’s western edge. Like the Power House, these buildings had a striking Mediterranean character with strong Romanesque roots. The church even had a polygonal lantern not unlike the one depicted in the master plan for the new main buildings of the campus.

Frederick Mann’s work for the university did not provide the overall vision for the University of Texas that its leadership had sought. Even as drawings for Mann’s scheme were still being completed, representatives of the university were making queries on its behalf in search of a new architect. Gilbert would have been a logical candidate on any well-conceived short list for such a position. Though Gilbert had been unsuccessful in his submission for the comprehensive plan for Washington University, by 1908 he had bolstered his campus planning credentials by winning the well-publicized competition for the University of Minnesota. As early as February 15, 1909, Gilbert made a conceptual sketch for the Texas campus (Figure 13-1) that had strong roots in his work for the Minnesota campus. The sketch illustrated a broad mall stepping up the hill to a very grand, domed University Hall. The mall was lined on either side by perpendicular, rectangular buildings similar to those in his Minnesota master plan. A monumental University Hall with its enormous flanking towers bore a strong resemblance to a similarly domed composition that was present in early versions of the Minnesota plan.

Gilbert’s energetic early sketch, conceived almost a year before he actually won the commission at Texas, illustrates the striking difference between the vision he conjured for a new university campus and the very timid-by-comparison visions that Coughlin and Ayers and Frederick Mann had for the University of Texas. Gilbert’s sketch was influenced by the modest diagram of Thomas Jefferson’s campus at University of Virginia but was expanded into a larger-than-life ensemble full of pomp and grandeur. As he commenced discussions with university officials, it was evident from the start that Gilbert was an architect with sweeping vision who sought to create a university of the first class.

In June 1909 Gilbert responded to an inquiry from Colonel Edward M. House, brother-in-law to recently appointed university President Sidney E. Mezes. (House was also a friend and advisor to President Woodrow Wilson and the client for a distinguished Shingle-style house in Austin designed by New York architect Frank Freeman.) Gilbert outlined his ideas about campus planning and architecture in broad strokes in his correspondence with House. In October of the same year, President Mezes visited Gilbert’s office in New York, and the following month Mezes recommended that the university commence preparing a new general plan with a new architect. He advised, in fact, the creation of a new position of university architect and recommended that the best-qualified architect in the country who could be secured should be selected for the position. The following January, Gilbert made his first trip to Austin. He discussed with university officials his ideas for a new library, which was the highest priority for the university at that time. (Gilbert was, at that point, in the midst of designing both the St. Louis Public Library and the Ives Memorial Library in New Haven.) He investigated the forty-acre site, making a series of preliminary sketches for the campus and especially for a new University Hall at the top of the hill. On January 10, 1910, the Regents’ Building Committee recommended Gilbert for the position of university architect, and he commenced design officially on both a new campus master plan and a new library building.

At the age of fifty, Gilbert was at the peak of his career when he accepted the commission in Texas. Recent projects in Ohio, Minnesota, Michigan, and Missouri as well as on the East Coast had established him as a nationally known architect. Beginning in 1908, he started to serve a term as president of the AIA. The University of Texas, after several abortive attempts, finally had found an architect of ambitious vision and national reputation capable of creating an enduring image for the campus and for the university.

Back in 1907 Gilbert had been invited to participate in a limited competition for a new central library for St. Louis, which he won after two stages of submissions. His scheme, though quite innovative, was based significantly on McKim, Mead & White’s Boston Public Library (1888-95), which in turn had been based on Henri Labrouste’s Bibliotheque Ste.Genevieve in Paris. The libraries in St. Louis, Boston, and Paris took the Italian Renaissance palazzo as a starting point, placing more mundane library functions on a ground floor behind heavy walls with simple, spare openings. Reading rooms and other more gracious library spaces were lifted to an upper piano nobile with high ceilings, tall arched windows, and monumental exterior treatment. Having worked for McKim, Mead & White in their New York offices (1880-82), Gilbert was well equipped to elaborate on and refine the Boston scheme in his St. Louis project.

The Texas library, which Gilbert began to conceive in 1909, was much more modest in scope than either the Boston or St. Louis municipal works. The budget at St. Louis was almost two-and-a-half times that of the Texas project, and its program required four major reading/display rooms, whereas the university library needed only one. From his earliest soft-pencil sketches, Gilbert conceived the Texas library as a palazzo but of a very different sort than what might have been the prototype for St. Louis. Its smaller scale allowed the building to sit as a free-standing pavilion rather than filling an urban block. Its hipped tile roof became a distinctive cap for an object building rather than another horizontal layer in a broader composition. Deep shadowy roof overhangs distinguished the Texas library from its more northern counterparts, and a more festive, lively character-even present in early drawings-indicated a distinctly different feeling from the dour edifices in Boston and St. Louis.

A watercolor rendering of the library’s east elevation, dated March 19, 1910 (Figure 13-2), illustrates a well-proportioned, two-story building with a rusticated stone base punctuated by eight rectangular windows and an arched central entry portal. A more elaborate upper floor was articulated with a series of nine tall arched windows alternating with pilasters that supported an ornate frieze under broad eaves. Ornamental balconies topped a dominant stringcourse, which separated the two floors on the facade, and lanterns of similar treatment flanked the doorway. A later perspective drawing (Figure 13-3) indicated the same general approach but with some significant changes and refinements. The two floors received identical stone treatment without the heavier base that had been indicated in the earlier scheme. Seven, rather than nine, arched windows punctuated the facade with proportions more robust than in the previous version. The pilasters disappeared but were replaced by an ornamental treatment along the arched portion of the monumental windows, similar to that employed at the Boston Public Library (and very different from the window treatment at the St. Louis Public Library). Rondels, similar in size and placement to those employed in the entry portal at St. Louis, were located on each side of the arched openings. Terra cotta tiles were also added in the deeply recessed upper floor openings around the windows. Detailed ornament in the tiles was matched by a highly articulated, bracketed soffit under the building’s dominant roof cap. The exuberance and delicacy of the ironwork balconies and terra cotta ornament and the ornate treatment of the eaves set the Texas library apart from its counterparts in Boston and St. Louis. The cream-colored Texas limestone used for its construction was also softer and gentler than the granite employed in the earlier buildings. The feeling of this new scheme was fresh and original, more southern in character with its deep shadows and bright colors to counterbalance the bleaching effect of the strong sun; less tough and urban than its big-city precedents.

As built, Gilbert’s Texas library, named Battle Hall in 1973 after Dr. William J. Battle, longtime chair of the university’s faculty building committee, was almost identical (Figure 13-4) to the perspective rendering. The only substantial change was that the proposed balustraded terrace in front was never constructed. The terra cotta window surrounds were executed in lively greens, yellows, and blues and depicted appropriate iconographical images for a library, including open books, torches, and lamps of enlightenment. The owl, which Gilbert had used in the attic story of the St. Louis Public Library, was employed repeatedly, both in the terra cotta surrounds and to support the brackets of the deep eave overhangs. The signs of the zodiac (which Gilbert also had employed in St. Louis) provided the theme for the twelve rondels, beginning with the start of the calendar year on the south side of the building, working sequentially around the east facade, and terminating on the north face (Figure 13-5).

Inside, a low barrel-vaulted passageway led from the east entry through the front volume of the T-shaped building to a well-lit stair hall. Winding marble stairs, with a gracefully detailed wrought-iron balustrade, ascended to a compact, polygonal delivery hall. Located at the very center of the building, the delivery hall was capped by a domed glass skylight. West of the stairway and delivery hall, and completing the rear leg of the building’s T shape, were the library stacks. The most elaborate interior space was the reading room on the upper floor of the east wing behind the great arched windows (Figure 13-6). Its plain limestone walls were topped by elaborate wood-faced trusses, very similar to those Gilbert had proposed for the interior of the Finney Memorial Chapel at Oberlin College in 1907 (see chapter 14). Similar in character to many Spanish and Italian Romanesque buildings, the Battle Hall trusses employed elaborate ornamental brackets and exposed metal straps to provide a robust, tectonic feeling. They were colorfully stenciled with largely geometric patterns, including lone stars like that on the Texas flag.

The east wing of Battle Hall was constructed of load-bearing masonry walls with limestone quarried in nearby Cedar Park. Openings were filled with terra cotta tiles and wood windows. The deep eaves under the hipped red-tile roof were made of a combination of wood boards and carved wood. T he wing of the building containing library stacks was constructed as a steel cage with low floor-to-floor heights and structural marble slabs as the complete floor/ceiling assembly. The very different exterior treatment of the more utilitarian volume was evident elsewhere in Gilbert’s work. The west facade of Battle Hall (now covered) originally had vertical strips of windows alternating with stone piers, very similar to the treatment used on the north-facing stack wing at the St. Louis Public Library.

Battle Hall currently houses the Architecture and Planning Library and a portion of the School of Architecture at the University of Texas. The building’s exterior has been very well maintained and is in excellent condition, with the current paint carefully matched to the original colors. Interior functions have remained similar to those initially planned for the building, with offices, conference rooms, and special collections on the ground floor and primary library functions operating from the reading room and delivery hall on the upper floor.

By the end of 1910 Gilbert had completed and submitted the first version of his master plan for the University of Texas campus, including a sparely drawn ground plan and a bird’s eye perspective (Figure 13-7). A very similar, but more detailed ground plan is documented in a drawing dated August 15, 1914 (Figure 13-8). Unlike the Mann scheme of 1909, most existing buildings on the campus were retained and cleverly integrated into the new plan. One significant removal, however, was Ruffini’s Old Main Building, which was replaced by a new University Hall accommodating administrative offices and a large assembly room. The dominant new structure at the center of the forty acres was a linchpin for the plan, serving as the terminus of four axes that divided the campus into roughly equal quadrants. The south axis was clearly primary, introduced by a wide main plaza in front of University Hall. Gilbert’s new library created the western edge of the plaza and was matched by a projected building of similar massing to the east. Perpendicular to the main plaza was a broad tree-lined south mall that created the critical visual connection between University Hall on the north end and the dome of the state capitol on the south end of a grand urban axis.

The southwest quadrant below the new library was the only area unencumbered by existing structures. For it, Gilbert proposed an almost square courtyard with long, thin buildings on each of the four sides. The two westernmost corners were filled with small squarish structures while the easternmost corner buildings projected farther out to create anchors at the edge of the south mall. The new library and a companion structure on the north side of the quadrant similarly defined the border of the west mall that connected a major campus entry point on Guadalupe Street to the end axis of University Hall.

The southeast quadrant began with a similar approach but was altered to accommodate two very oddly positioned existing buildings. The 1908 Law Building became the centerpiece for a composition of new buildings that took the general spirit of the parallel face of the southwest quadrant and repositioned its elements slightly. The result was a well-balanced and compositionally strong southern edge of the campus with a new image that incorporated the Law Building as an integral part. Brackenridge Hall at the northern edge of the same quadrant was used similarly to create a minor north-south axis that became the focus of a new courtyard on its south side. Although the east axis of University Hall was located so as to just miss the northern end of Brackenridge Hall, it was here that the strain of incorporating existing buildings into the new plan became most evident. Dealt with very cleverly, Brackenridge Hall was still a bit awkward in relation to the east mall.

In the northeast quadrant, Mann’s L-shaped Power House formed one corner of a courtyard that Gilbert completed with two similar L-shaped structures and the existing 1904 Engineering Building. Mann’s building, in fact, became more natural and appropriate in Gilbert’s master plan than it had been in his own. The northwest quadrant similarly incorporated two existing buildings with three new L-shaped structures and one linear building to form a fourth well-defined academic court. For all three quadrants with problematic existing buildings, Gilbert created a seeming inevitability out of difficult exigencies and demonstrated his extraordinary skill in responding to local conditions without allowing them to destroy his larger conceptual framework.

The strength of that conceptual framework has proved very potent indeed. The powerful monument at the focus of well-defined linear public spaces gave an appropriate civic grandeur to the campus that the University of Texas needed. And yet, the smaller-scaled courtyards at each of the four corners, defined by a series of more modest and variable buildings, provided the campus with intimate personal spaces for individual collegiate components. Both as a whole and in individual pans, Gilbert’s master plan had great dignity and presence. It was sophisticated without being intimidating. It was visionary but also very practical. Even ninety years later, the original site remains fundamentally organized according to Gilbert’s ideas of what a campus for the University of Texas should and could become.

Active planning for the second building designed by Gilbert for the University of Texas did not begin until 1915, and it was not completed until early 1918. It was a general-purpose academic building located in the southwest quadrant of the campus on the north side of what was to be an academic court in the master plan. Although the 1914 master plan rendering indicated flanking projections at each end of the north face of the building, the final version became a simple long rectangle with a double-loaded corridor down the center and a perpendicular entry hall at its midpoint. Despite the fact that the Education Building was very near Gilbert’s recent library, there was, curiously, little functional or formal relationship between the two. The library faced east toward the proposed new main plaza, with only a basement door on the south side toward the newer building. The Education Building faced south, toward the projected academic court and distinctly away from the library to the northeast (Figure 13-9). Because of the topography in this area, the Education Building also sat a full twelve feet lower than the library, which had been placed near the top of the hill.

In an undated watercolor rendering of the elevation of the Education Building (Figure 13-10), Gilbert included nearly all of the elements that would eventually constitute the structure. These included a smooth stone ashlar first floor with arched openings; a second and third floor of contrasting material (perhaps stucco in the rendering); an even rhythm of regular rectangular windows in the center of the long facade syncopated by a more highly ornamental vertical stack of windows on each end; a colorful, highly articulated frieze of ornament under the eaves with heavy brackets; and a red-tile roof with deep overhanging projections. The building as built differed from the rendering, however, in several important ways. The material on the second and third floors of the Education Building became a distinctive textured brick of variegated color ranging from tan to ochre, orange, and brown. The number of windows in the midsection was increased from ten to eleven, and the entry portals stretched from two to three openings, creating a more classic odd number of bays. An elaborate terracotta attic treatment was created to encompass the midsection windows on the third floor, and balconies were transferred from second-floor windows up to the third floor.

Later named Sutton Hall for William Seneca Sutton (who was the first dean of the School of Education), the new building added a distinctly different vocabulary to Gilbert’s vision for the campus, beyond that established by the library. Both buildings relied on the Renaissance palazzo as a precedent but differed substantially in scale, material usage, color, and detail. Although the scale of the library was elevated by the huge double-story windows and the unified facades made of large limestone blocks, the scale of the Education Building was diminished by the use of several different wall materials, both horizontally and vertically. The brick and terra cotta as well as paint colors on the Education Building were much darker than those on the library, and the rough texture of the brick produced a ruddier, less refined building character. The stone selected was from a quarry in a different part of Texas and had a much darker, grayer hue. Even the roof tiles were a deeper red and more variegated in color than those on the library. The construction methods used for the Education Building differed as well. The exterior walls on the bottom two floors and on the ends of the third floor were load-bearing masonry, whereas the interior support of the building and the exterior support in the midportion of the third floor were provided by a reinforced concrete frame.

The School of Architecture at the University of Texas currently occupies Sutton Hall, which was renovated substantially in 1980. The general structure of rooms opening off a wide central corridor was carefully retained in that renovation, though the exact partitioning of spaces was altered. Two grand rooms with vaulted ceilings at each end of the third floor were recovered for use as open studios. The only substantial changes to the exterior were the addition of a new entry portal on the north side of the building, which generally resembles the original south-side entry, and a dormer window on the north face of the roof to provide natural light for newly occupied space in the attic. In 1998 the exterior of the building was completely restored, returning finishes and details to near-mint condition.

Several hundred surviving documents illustrate Gilbert’s various proposals for other campus buildings between 1909 and 1922. Besides the library and the Education Building, the single element most frequently depicted in those documents is Gilbert’s unrealized University Hall, which was to be the centerpiece for the campus. Three distinctly different approaches to the building were studied. In the February 15, 1909, sketch noted earlier (see Figure 13-1), University Hall was rendered as an ornate domed structure with a monumental portico on the front and enormous towers to either side. The composition was distinctly baroque at a grand scale. University Hall lorded over the buildings on the south mall below. A simpler, though still quite grand dome with more restrained classical roots capped the version of University Hall depicted in a 1911 colored cross-section drawing taken through the entire campus and indicating Gilbert’s new library beside the central monument. As late as a pencil sketch dated October 5, 1920, Gilbert revisited the dome as a focus for the campus, this time flanked again by towers.

A second approach by Gilbert created a pedimented temple at the center of the campus, a notion he had used in his entry for the University of Minnesota competition. In a sketch dated January 12, 1910 (Figure 13-11), University Hall was portrayed as a mammoth structure, three times the height of the library to its side and festooned with elaborate ornament above a giant colonnade. The temple version of University Hall was elaborated in a number of other studies, including some that depicted a two-tiered building with a large gabled volume at the scale of the city and a lower pedimented portico scaling down to adjacent campus structures.

The third distinct approach Gilbert experimented with for University Hall was a single very tall tower. In a small pencil sketch from 1920 (Figure 13-12), he portrayed a hefty shaft rising from a low, flat base not unlike Bertram Goodhue’s Nebraska state capitol that had been conceived the previous year. A similar undated sketch of probably the same period depicted a tower with a pointed peak and a prominent clock at its top. By the 1920s Gilbert had become famous for his towers. The Woolworth Building in New York, which he completed in 1913, was the tallest building in the world until 1930, and his Union Central Life Insurance Company Building in Cincinnati was the fifth tallest building when it was constructed.

Clearly, Gilbert’s studies for University Hall and also his sketches for other projects (such as a gymnasium and an outdoor amphitheater) depict a very broad architectural vocabulary that he imagined for the campus. Just as the Education Building was quite different from the library, both of them were very different from his proposals for University Hall. Gilbert’s vision for the whole campus therefore was inclusive, encompassing existing campus buildings of disparate styles as well as a range of new building expressions designed in reaction to functional and site dictates. This attitude was consistent with his work on the Oberlin College campus in roughly the same period. Gilbert portrayed the college campus, not as a cookie-cutter, military-style collection of uniform buildings but as an assemblage of diverse structures, related and carefully coordinated with each other but not constrained by an artificial stylistic code.

In 1922, the regents decided not to renew Gilbert’s contract, and for almost a decade, the role of university architect was filled by Herbert M. Greene and his firm, Greene, La Roche & Dahl, from Dallas. Greene’s excellent work in this period followed both general and specific intentions that Gilbert had established. Garrison Hall of 1925, for example, was placed opposite the library, creating the eastern edge of the main plaza as outlined in the master plan. Its architectural character was very similar to that for the Education Building, with a stone base, brick upper stories with generous terracotta ornament, and a red-tile roof. In the spirit of Gilbert’s acceptance of diversity, Greene created an iconographic palette for Garrison Hall which was very different from that of the library or the Education Building. Built for the history department, the building’s ornament depicts the heritage of Texas with names of political heroes, branding irons from historic ranches, and emblematic symbols like longhorns, bluebonnets, cacti, and lone stars. Gilbert’s hand was clear in the building’s general orchestration, but Greene had the freedom to customize as well.

In the ten or so buildings Greene designed, there is a broad range of stylistic liberty but still a conscientious effort to create a coherent whole. His men’s gymnasium of 1930, for example, was designed in a sober Lombard style with no bright terra cotta ornament, but its use of a variegated brick similar to that of the Education Building made it comfortably a part of the larger campus. Although two new versions of a campus master plan were produced in 1923 and 1926 by James M. White of the University of Illinois, the proposals were not influential. Even the Greene-designed buildings that were built after the late 1920s (e.g.,Waggener Hall and the Chemistry Building, both 1931) were placed according to Gilbert’s scheme rather than White’s. In March 1930 the university appointed Philadelphia architect Paul Phillipe Cret as a consultant to design a new library. At the time, French-born and Beaux-Arts-educated Cret was teaching at the University of Pennsylvania as well as heading a thriving practice. The university had outgrown the 250,000-volume capacity of Gilbert’s library and had decided that expansion of it was not feasible to meet long-term needs. During the 1930s Cret designed sixteen buildings for the university and in 1933 created a new master plan (Figure 13-13) that guided the development of the campus through the 1940s and well beyond the original forty acres. What Cret proposed for the area Gilbert had planned was remarkably similar to Gilbert’s own scheme, A main building of grand scale was placed at the focus of four axes, creating four roughly equal quadrants, Cret admired Gilbert’s “plaza in front of the Main Building and the South Mall approach” and reiterated these two features almost verbatim, He even lined the mall with perpendicular buildings alternating with courts, almost exactly like those Gilbert proposed in his earliest schemes but modified somewhat in later versions, In each of the four quadrants, Cret created an academic court, with each court taking its own distinct character just as Gilbert had suggested, Cret’s east mall and west mall were narrower than Gilbert’s but retained essentially the same location and role in the larger plan.

The vocabulary of Cret’s buildings certainly owes a debt to Gilbert’s in their general character and materials. But, perhaps more significantly, Cret also adopted Gilbert’s liberal attitude about the range of styles and building forms that should energize the campus and keep its development lively and progressive over time. Some of Cret’s designs, like that for the lower part of the main building, are strongly influenced by the same kind of monumental Mediterranean classicism that inspired Gilbert’s library. Others, such as the Geology Building and the Physics Building, owe a great deal to Gilbert’s Education Building with their stone base, second and third floors in variegated buff brick, and red-tile roofs. Still others, such as the Union and the Architecture Building, were rendered in more picturesque, vernacular styles with asymmetrical massing punctuated by towers and characterized by varied, sometimes irregular fenestration. Original versions of these buildings even had rubble stone walls and crafted wooden balconies, very different from, but compatible with, the clear, regular palazzi Gilbert designed nearby. By the end of the 1930s, Cret had completed an Art Deco gem, the Texas Memorial Museum, which related strongly to the rest of the campus in placement, scale, and materials. It also substantiated by its clean, modern lines Cret’s desire for the campus vocabulary to allow for progress and innovation. Cret’s centerpiece for the campus, the University of Texas Tower, also has Art Deco touches in its shaft but is crowned by a classical lantern. In its vertical punctuation atop a low horizontal base and in its bold scale, it was comfortably aligned with Gilbert’s earlier schemes for a tower as the focus for the campus.

The forty or so projects that were designed according to the intentions of Gilbert, Greene, and Cret from 1909 to the end of the 1940s represent an extraordinary campus ensemble of great character and vitality. These buildings have created a distinctive and highly valued image of the university that helps to define it to this day. Though Cret is often given great credit because of the number of buildings he had a hand in, Cass Gilbert was the seminal and sustaining design force in the development of the University of Texas campus. The vision, sophistication, and ambition he brought to his service as campus architect left an indelible mark on the University of Texas.

The firm, based in Houston, eventually grew to an international practice with over 1000 employees under Caudill’s leadership. Its innovative design methodology, rooted in reliance on interdisciplinary teams of architects, engineers, environmental specialists and user groups, became a pattern for many large architectural practices in the 1970s. The firm also developed techniques for group dynamics management and post-occupancy evaluation which were broadly influential. ‘

WRITINGS

Space for Teaching (College Station, TIC, 1942)

Architecture by Team (New York, 1971)

Soleri married Corolyn Woods and in 1950 they returned to Turin, where they supported themselves designing cards, fabrics and ceramics. In 1953 Soleri designed his first major building, the Ceramica Artistica Solimene ceramics factory and studio at Vietri sul Mare on the Amalfi coast of southern Italy. It had five storeys of workshops wrapped in a continuous spiral ramp around a great skylit hall filled with angular concrete supports. Perched on a cliff overlooking the Mediterranean and faced with glazed pots, the building relied on locally available materials, handcraft and a dramatic structure.

Soleri rernrned to Arizona in 1955. He and his wife opened a new crafts workshop, first producing ceramic wind bells and later cast bronze and aluminum bells. The family industry that evolved from these provided the major source of income for Soleri’s building projects. He established his Cosanti Foundation, dedicated to creating plans for alternative urban environments, on a dry, flat five-acre site in Paradise Valley. The first building there, the ‘Earth House’ (1956), was constructed of concrete reinforced with wire mesh, poured on a form made directly from the sandy soil of the site. The first modest Cosanti structures sought a full integration of land, climate, craft and livability. Soleri called this design approach ’biotechtonic’ for its concern for solving human biological and spiritual needs through an integrated imaginative technology.

Supported by grants from the Graham and Guggenheim Foundations, Soleri began to explore massive urban applications of his philosophies, initially in the City on the Mesa project (1958-67), an urban plan for two million inhabitants on a plot the size of Manhattan. Using huge translucent plastic models to depict his ideas, he designed numerous high-density cities that he called ‘arcologies’ from their combination of architecture and ecology. From the early 1970s he built his prototype ‘arcology’, Arcosanti, on 14 acres of an 860-acre parcel the high desert of central Arizona. The project was intended eventually to house 5000 people in a 25-storey chain of futuristic buildings perched on the edge of a mesa.

WRITINGS

Arcology: The City in the Image of Man (Cambridge, MA, 1970)

The Sketchbooks of Paolo Soleri (Cambridge, MA, 1971)

Arcosanti: An Urban Laboratory (San Diego, 1983)

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Contemp. Architects

P. Heyer, ed.: Architects on Architecture: New Direction sin America (New York, 1966, 2/London, 1967)

D. Wall: Visionary Cities: The Arcology of Paolo Soleri (New York and London, 1970, 2/1971)

S. Caldwell: Paolo Soleri: Architectural Drawings (New York, 1981)

Paolo Soleri’s Earthcasting (Layton, 1984)

Harris’s best-known work, the Havens House in Berkeley, CA (1941), employed a stack of three inverted triangular gables to support decks overlooking a dramatic view of San Francisco Bay. This was one of Harris’s many designs that addressed the problems of the steep hillside sites so common in California. The truss structure of the Johnson House in Los Angeles (1947) is made up of many small components and shows his articulated but unaffected use of wood. Harris’s academic career as director of the architecture programme at the University of Texas at Austin (1951-5) and as a faculty member at North Carolina State University in Raleigh (1962-73) took him away from California in his later years and expanded his practice, although it still consisted mainly of private houses.

WRITINGS

K. Smith, ed.: Harwell Hamilton Harris: A Collection of his Writings and buildings (Raleigh, 1965)

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Contemp. Architects

S. Woodbridge, ed.: Bay Area Houses (New York, 1976)

E. McCoy: The Second Generation (Salt Lake City, 1984)

L. Germany: Hanrwell Hamilton Hams (Austin, 1985)

This seems to me a good example of the attitudes appropriately embodied in the elusive term, “Regionalism”. Regionalism reveres the making of a place. It acknowledges the rich and particular confluence of landscape, weather, language, food, social customs, values and ways of building/ living by which mankind creates a place – a culture. Regionalism views architecture as a means to an end of cultural identity and expression.

Identification of culture is a fundamental issue in any era, but I would suggest that it is an especially important issue in our own time. Knowing who we are and where we are “in space, in time and in the order of things” is an inescapable element of any real self actualization. There is a grounding, a stability and often an inspiration that comes from a meaningful identification with the cultures in which we participate.

I would argue that, at this point in the world’s complicated cycles, we need to be working on the development of particular cultures. We are coming out of an era dominated by the assumption that broad-based and universal twentieth century technological culture might suffice. Political trends emphasized the presence of world superpowers with dominance over global empires. Economic forces encouraged the development of multinational corporations and international banking and monetary systems. There was talk of world capitals, with New York being the most frequent candidate, where trends in economics, technology, theater, cinema, art and music would all emanate to the provinces around the globe.

But, in the last ten years, the myth of a meaningful, dominant world culture has waned significantly. Many Third World countries – Iran being an early and prominent example – have overtly rejected superpower dominance. In the face of the Shah’s well-financed, carefully orchestrated transformation of local culture into a more universal Western culture, a reactionary revolution in 1978 re-established radically traditional values.

Western economics, Western dress, Western architecture, Western morality were all tossed out in favor of an ancient religious order. While the extremist political developments and nationalistic fervor that has followed seems astounding to most of the world, it is, I think, indicative of the need for and reliance on traditional local culture which exists in many parts of the world in the late twentieth century.

Recent political developments in Eastern Europe have emphasized the fragility of even long standing alliances which obviate local culture. Even after 45 years of Eastern Bloc dominance during which two generations have passed, the Czechs, the Poles, the Hungarians, the Germans and others have bounded at a chance to re-establish their own independent identities. The long-standing Soviet Union shows signs of impending dissolution as the Baltic States – Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia seek to jump ship and return to former and traditional cultural identities. These urges cannot be laid totally at the feet of political mismanagement. There is, it seems, within human experience, a powerful urge to understand ourselves as a part of an identifiable culture which is authentic and particular.

In much the same manner as global politics, global economics have suffered some disturbing defeats in recent years. Enormous loans from Western banks to Third World countries, which are now in great jeopardy, demonstrate a naivete and lack of real understanding of local economic forces on the part of global economic powers. Conventional economic wisdom, as defined by global standards, has not proven operative in local circumstances and economists have begun to speak more frequently of regional economic systems.

When traveling in India several years ago, I was struck by an economic parable I was told by a local university guide. He recalled how the Ford Foundation had come to his village in the early 1960’s with modem Western agricultural technology and grand stories of mechanization, increased productivity and efficiency in farming methods. The primitive village, which was still dependent on water buffalo and crude plows, nature’s cycles of rain and sun, and very few staple crops, was given tractors, irrigation systems and new seeds and plant hybrids through the well meaning generosity of the Ford Foundation.

Agricultural advisors supervised the rapid transitions to new methods and genuinely endeared themselves to the local population. Within a few years the transformation was complete and the advisors left the village capable of operating within the new system. Gradually, the old plows rusted; the water buffalo were sold; the old seed strains were neglected. The new tractors, pumps and hybrids had made them obsolete.

Then, in 1972, the energy crisis came and fuel prices escalated rapidly for a few years. The villagers, with no monetary resources apart from each year’s meager crops, simply could not afford gasoline. Without gasoline, of course, the tractors and irrigation pumps wouldn’t run and without the more sophisticated cultivation and irrigation methods the new plant hybrids wouldn’t grow. Within a single year the village, which had been modestly operational and self-sustaining for centuries, was destroyed. The sophisticated global technologies failed a local culture that might have been better off with a greater respect for their customary local technologies.

The emphasis on valuing particular culture in Third World countries is growing and, indeed, in architecture there seems to be an increasing awareness of the issue, as evidenced by the emergence of publications such as Mimar and a number of new journals in Pakistan, India and Latin America. The issue of local culture is not, however, restricted to global versus national values, but also has a very powerful application within a single national context. Certainly, the presence of local forces should be an important factor in a nation as geographically and culturally diverse as the United States.

Henry Cisneros, former mayor of San Antonio and one of the few political figures of our era with academic credentials in urban planning, wrote an article recently in which he described two trends in American society today which seem to him positive and optimistic for the future.[ii] Both are based on a heightened consciousness of regional forces.

The first is a trend toward an ideology of local-over-federal political and economic identification. Cisneros noted the disillusionment of the American constituency with the ability of the federal government to address many real political issues. He noted the increase of decision-making at local levels and the increased role of many cities across the country as focal points for economic transactions. He noted the very real political enfranchisement of minorities which has first occurred in local government – with Black mayors in Los Angeles, Washington, D.C., Philadelphia, Atlanta, Chicago, and Cincinnati – Hispanic mayors in Denver, San Antonio and Miami – and mayors who are women in San Francisco, Dallas and Houston.

Cisneros spoke of a “new democratic energy” at local levels, where breadth of public participation in government has never been higher. He spoke of the explosion of local business entrepreneurship which has dispersed economic clout in the country away from Wall Street, whose crash several years ago did not, in fact, bring with it the faltering of the whole economic system. San Francisco’s Silicon Valley and the Boston/ New England powerhouse of the 1980’s are examples of economic regionalism.

The second trend Cisneros described was toward an ideology of the pragmatic over the abstract – an interest in making things work, rather than making them follow preconceived models or formulas. He noted a local or regional implication here as well. What works in Kansas may not fly in Virginia. What is good for Atlanta may not be good for Phoenix. There is a pragmatic realization here that decision-making must follow local and particular conditions and values.

Cisneros claimed that the new crucible of culture in our society is the city, and he pointed with pride to the way a number of cities, over the last decade or two, have transformed themselves from weak, deteriorated victims of neglect, to vital and lively centers. Pittsburgh and Seattle, he observed, have risen from physical and economic doomsday to become strong, liveable centers of their regions. He noted Indianapolis, which even locals called “India-no-place” a few years ago, and its emergence as a city with identity and presence through its concentration on amateur sports and physical redesign.

In America, we are no longer a singular political entity dominated by Washington. Judicial, legislative and administrative decisions are being spread more broadly. We are no longer an economic entity dominated by New York and Chicago. Corporate and entrepreneurial power have moved to Houston, Phoenix, Miami, Minneapolis and every other urban center in the country. We are no longer an artistic entity dominated by New York and Los Angeles.

When I was a child, we took trips to New York because one could see cultural events there that simply didn’t exist elsewhere. Movies could be viewed that wouldn’t come to local theaters for another six months. Exotic food could be eaten in restaurants, food completely unavailable and unheard of in the hinterlands. The “real” museums, opera, ballet and symphonies existed only in a few “great” cities.

But now the cultural and artistic growth of America is everywhere. Cleveland, St. Louis, and Cincinnati have first class symphonies, while Minneapolis’ Walker Art Center regularly shames the New York museums with the creativity and innovation of their traveling exhibitions. Houston’s young opera is one of the finest in the country. Nashville and Austin, as well as Detroit and New Orleans, have set a pace for live music and films are made everywhere, reveling in the small town flavor of Waxahachie, Texas or the startling preservation of 19th century buildings in Cincinnati’s neighborhoods.

There is a recognition today, I think, of a kind of inherent emptiness in universal culture. There is a loss of reality, authenticity and poignancy in mass culture which we have tried, but have not found fully satisfying. Without seeking to escape the universals in culture, which are themselves real and appropriate, it seems time to return again to what is not common to all places – what is particular, distinguishing and potentially inspiring about our own local cultures. Herein, I think, lies a real potential for invention and progress in our own time.

In this context it is important to view architecture as a means to the end of a greater, more satisfying cultural identity, rather than just as an end in itself. As Kenneth Frampton has advocated a dedication “to place creation and to the sustenance of an intimate and continuous relationship between the architecture and the local society it serves.”[iii] Architecture has, too often in the late 20th century, become inwardly oriented as a discipline. We have been frequently speaking only to ourselves, a professional coterie, demonstrating an aloofness and arrogance toward the cultures of which we are a part. We need to accept a more humble but more profound role as participants in larger cultural goals.

Certainly in these efforts it is instructive to examine those regions and cultures which have tenaciously held onto their distinctive identities through the onslought of several decades of universalizing tendencies. It is illuminating as well, to inspect the work of architects who have reinforced regional identities conscientiously through their design work. The subject matter of this exhibition offers one such opportunity.

Northern California has long been fertile ground for spawning architects with a strong allegiance to place-making. At the turn of the century, architects like Ernest Coxhead, Willis Polk, A.C. Schweinfurth and Bernard Maybeck sought, as Donlyn Lyndon has noted, “to create buildings that would suit their place especially – not by inventing de novo, but by studying, absorbing, adapting, modifying, bringing into new relationships, distorting as pragmatics required, and giving alternative vision to all they had learned and experienced in buildings of the past.”[iv]

The seminal work of these architects became an important model for subsequent building in their region. Indeed, in the case of Maybeck, in particular, the work itself has influenced many architects in Northern California up to the present day. But it is, perhaps, the ethos of original thinking and creative place-making that provides an even greater contribution on the part of designers like Maybeck. The inspiration to design independently according to forces at hand and break away from extraneous stylistic trends is at the heart of any authentic regionalism. It is this independence that has allowed several generations of architects in Northern California to create, over time, an evolving, vital sense of their place.

This is certainly the contribution offered by William Turnbull, Jr. and his partners, Charles Moore, Donlyn Lyndon and Richard Whitaker in the Sea Ranch condominium and other seminal projects of their early careers. The condominium, in particular, offers an extraordinary encapsulation of its place. It is as one with the sea, the coastline, the nearby redwood forest, the rural building vernacular of the area and the retreat lifestyle of its inhabitants. The building responds symbiotically to the mist, the sun, the wind and the vegetation of this memorable place.

The design of the condominium is powerfully generated by regional forces. “The chapel of the Russian settlement at Fort Ross,” a local vernacular building of the early nineteenth century had, according to the architects, “a strong hold on us when the Sea Ranch was the starting.”[v] Further, the architects note that, “People recognized similarities between the condominiums and the old buildings on mining and timbering sites. Since we have been enthusiasts for barns and country industrial structures we were pleased, though the resemblance was not intentional.”[vi]

Building traditions of the region are only one source of “fit” at Sea Ranch. The building is as comfortable an extension of the regional landscape forms as it is an extension of regional built forms. Its muscular, craggy profile matches the toughness of the dramatic, rugged coastline. The long, low slope of its roof bows to the ocean’s winds. The building’s scale is robust enough to hold its own against the barrenness and splendid desolation of the site, and yet in color and texture the building merges with the coastal terrain. It is a great “wooden rock” perched on the edge of the world.

Even the interiors of the condominium units maintain the grand sense of space, the massive strength and the rugged informality of their place. Every issue of design, from construction to spatial organization, to choice of finish materials reinforces the sense of inhabitants knowing where they are.

The individual building inspired by regional forces, like the Sea Ranch condominium, often exhibits beautiful and admirable formal invention. Indeed, the fresh shapes and original arrangement of elements at Sea Ranch won extraordinary recognition around the world. Powerful and salient form creation, it seems, often emanates from a deep and trenchant perception of the particulars of a place.

And yet it is not formal invention that is the ultimate goal of a generative regional sensibility. This is only a by-product. The real goal is participation in a broader cultural dialogue about what life is to be in a given place. The magic of being at the Sea Ranch condominium and feeling its contribution to the power of that memorable place is proof of its success in this regard.

Architects can, through their buildings, contribute to the growing dialogue in the communities and regions around the country and around the world where local cultural identities are evolving and being redefined. The physical environment can be a very powerful tool in such a dialogue, materializing and making visible the presence and identity of a place. As such, a regional architecture becomes, as William Curtis has noted, a means by which we might “penetrate to what is of lasting worth in the present culture and in tradition.”[vii]

[ii] Henry G. Cisneros, “Architecture, Planning and Public Poliry”; CENTER: A Journal for Architecture in America, Vol. 6, 1990, pp. 8-20.

[iii] Kenneth Frampton, “Towards a Critical Regionalism”; Perspecta 20, pp. 147-162.

[iv] Richard Longstreth, On the Edge of the World, New York: The Architectural History Foundation, 1983, p. xiii

[v] Moore, Ibid., p.41.

[vi] Moore, Ibid., p.34.

[vii] William J. R. Curtis, “ Towards an Authentic Regionalism”, Mimar 19, January-March, 1986, p. 24.

Here in the long valleys that terrace away from the banks of the upper Rio Grande River in New Mexico, permanent human settlements were established as early as the tenth century. Still standing are ruins of structures built seven hundred years ago by sedentary, agricultural Indians dwelling in well-planned villages of stone and adobe. In his remarkable expedition across Texas in 1534-1535, the Spanish explorer Cabeza de Vaca found Indian communities that jealously guarded their claim to an indomitable land. In 1540 Coronado discovered in the Southwest a highly indigenous culture of some 20,000 to 30,000 people, living in seventy different settlements and speaking distinct languages.

Today, more than four hundred years later, the Southwest remains a frontier still being settled. Streams of migrants enter daily from the northern parts of the States, from the south (Mexico) and from places around the world, seeking the new opportunities that the natural resources of the area can offer.

The settlers of the region, coming first across the Bering Straits from Asia, later from Spanish colonies in Mexico, still later from Europe and Colonial America, matched the toughness and grandeur of the landscape in their architecture. Often third or fourth generation migrants, these settlers in the Southwest carried with them rich and diverse architectural traditions, but traditions that commonly had no single culture source. Thick earthen masonry wall techniques brought from Mexico in the seventeenth century, for example, had come from Spain earlier, where in turn they had been imported by the Moors from the Middle East. The nineteenth-century Greek Revival architecture of Austin, Texas, and the Victorian architectural styles one sees in Galveston, Texas, came indirectly from their original British sources, by way of Virginia, the South, the Midwest and even California.

Building traditions introduced to the Southwest were thus notably impure-already modified and enriched by diverse experiences and circumstances of other places. When applying these traditions in a new and alien setting, settlers often varied and combined elements inventively. The result is an intermingling of architectural forms-heavy adobe walls alongside thin Anglo-Colonial wood detail, delicate Victorian ornamentation alongside robust Germanic masonry. These stratifications of diverse human occupancy, from the earliest Indian pueblos to the most recent sunbelt towns, grew in much the same way as the geographical formations on which they rest. Elements drawn from divergent, even conflicting, sources were modified according to the climate, the availability of materials and the practicality of indigenous building techniques-as well as the region’s own sense of place.

Southwesterners have long valued utilitarian solutions in design – objects, buildings, cities – but do not seem satisfied with usefulness alone. Primitive Indian crafts, such as the coarsely woven but inventively patterned crafts of the New Mexico Indians indicate a rugged pragmatism along with a gentle spirit. The traditional cowboy boot has long been standard footwear because of its practicality and Comfort. Ornamental features, however, are generally applied to these durable shoes in a manner that fashion designers have now usurped. Less fashion than function, the Adams Extract label and packaging eschew trends and fads in favor of a simple legibility that has served its company for 75 years. Architect Mike Lance’s cowhide folding chair of 1977 also mixes down-to-earth pragmatism (it can fold flat to the thickness of the tube frame) with consciously aesthetic appeal.

THE COUNTRY
Physical isolation has always characterized the population distribution in the Southwest. Unlike most parts of the U. S., the Southwest never supported self-sufficient farming. Because of limited arability, the only economically viable agriculture available to early landholders was extensive grazing or, where soils and rainfall permitted, generally single-crop farming on a broad scale. Ranches and homesteads were large and widely dispersed. Country towns, which served as collection and distribution points, were remote and isolated. Only with the advent of railroads in the mid-nineteenth century did settlement of areas become feasible.

Buildings in the landscape become isolated objects, as can be seen by the Lotthouse of 1890, or the “Peaceable Kingdom,” an educational crafts facility in Texas designed by Taft ‘Architects (formerly “In Cahoots”) in 1972. Treated as discrete pavilions rather than space-making agglomerations, structures in the Southwest have continued to demonstrate the ability of manmade objects to dominate visually huge expanses of space. One sees this in the Choctaw Chief’s House in Swink, Oklahoma, of 1837, with its simple log construction and double porches, as well as in the austere clapboard Columbus Church built in Hempstead County, Arkansas, around 1875.

That same sense of isolation and focused energy is shown in the grain elevators of 1924 erected in Optima, Oklahoma.

The tension created between landscape and built form lends added potency to the experience of both elements, as seen in the Kitts Peak Observatory designed by Skidmore, Owings & Merrill in 1961. On the other hand, the Herb Greene House, built in Oklahoma in 1959, illustrates an example of nature being reinterpreted through the man-made artifacts.

In the Southwest a most surreal effect is often created in the relationship between architectural form, light and space, as illustrated in the Morton House, built in 1980 in San Antonio. The architectural expression emerging from the landscape’s emptiness has a severity and subtlety about it, as seen in both Fort Ben Leaton in Presidio, Texas, built around 1830, and

J.B. Jackson’s house built thirteen years ago in Sante Fe. The house that architect Judith Chafee designed in 1976 for clients living outside of Tucson convincingly occupies its powerful site. It captures the stark textures and quality of light of southern Arizona, taming them for human habitation.

Texture and detail give added dimension to prosaic objects and a palpability to structures, evoking an emotional response. Southwestern architecture appeals to the mind’s power to touch. The basic primal qualities of buildings become most appropriate in this setting, as the direct, simply constructed barn in southeast Arkansas shows. Such structures, whether conceived as shelter in a benign climate or as an assembly of constructed parts, can also become a stark symbol of human presence, exemplified by the Thorncrown Chapel designed by Evine Fay Jones in Arkansas in 1980.

THE TOWN
Even when multiple buildings were needed and towns began to spring up, the southwesterners’s predilection for buildings as single visible objects prevailed. Simple, primal forms, such as the West Eufala Burying Ground in Oklahoma, retained a sense of independence and completeness even when grouped together. At a larger scale, the three houses in Little Rock, built around 1890, similarly maintain an individual identity by their gables, porches and long rectangular “shotgun” plans.

When land was subdivided, the methods chosen were generally as unrestrictive as possible. A loose framework allowed development to take place and still accommodate the desire for independence and individuality among the settlers. While the grid plan characterized development patterns of most nineteenth-century American cities, in towns like Austin, Texas, the grid was especially neutral. Here the square, not the rectangle, formed the geometric basis for the plan. The filling out of blocks with uniform rowhouses seldom occurred in the Southwest. Even when it did, development was not necessarily systematic, as a country store in Nathan, Arkansas, illustrates. When real estate values rose and full land use required close packing of buildings on blocks, individual expression still prevailed. The main street of Houston, dating to the nineteenth century when this metropolis was a town, shows how conformity in material, cornice line or style was rejected in favor of uniqueness and distinction.

Public buildings took the meaning of the phrase “building as object” to a new level of interpretation. The most common town plan for county seats in Texas in the nineteenth century isolated an entire block in the center of town for the courthouse. The need to create a strong identity for maturing settlements is shown by the exuberant Richardsonian Romanesque forms of patterned stone in James Riely Gordon’s Ellis County (Texas) Courthouse, built in 1895.

Just as towns became amalgams of disparate elements, the architectural styles developed for individual buildings similarly acknowledged the society’s historic diversity. The Church of San Felipe de Jesus and its adjacent pueblo built in 1706 demonstrate a synthesis of Indian and Spanish building traditions. Sometimes the building methods of two cultures are juxtaposed, as seen in the typically Indian use of flat roof terraces and the overtly Spanish steeples that were added in 1808. Sometimes traditions are merged: both Indian and Spanish architecture, for instance, employ massive masonry walls with tiny pierced openings.

La Villita in old San Antonio, built around 1790, first restored in 1936 by O’Neil Ford and more recently restored and renovated by Ford, Powell & Carson, demonstrates the same sort of merging of cultural influences. But here the range is even greater, reflecting the fact that the Indian, Spanish, Mexican, German, French and Anglo-Colonial people who settled in San Antonio had not separated into ethnic communities but had intermingled. In the seven small original houses of La Villita, there are combined traces of building traditions from several different cultures: adobe, earth, half-timber, field stone and caliche, a clay-like and stone masonry block. Forms and technologies from widely divergent cultures are mixed into a new composite in response to the uniquely southwestern setting.

Similarly, in the Barrio de Analco in Santa Fe of 1810, restored and renovated in 1968, thick adobe is combined with thin porch rails; fluid earthen shapes mix with precisely milled detail. Not only are Indian, Latin and Anglo cultures merged, but eighteenth-, nineteenth- and twentieth-century elements are layered on top of each other. In these rich amalgams – such as the Wulff House in San Antonio dating to about 1870, with its plain heavy limestone and delicate Victorian trim-is found a truly American expression. In structures like these, the melting pot is given physical form. Nowhere in the United States was the appropriateness of this new composite architecture more evident than in the Southwest at the turn of the century.

Even as doctrinaire a stylist as Ralph Adams Cram noted of his commission to execute the Rice University campus in Houston (1909): “On abstract principles, we were convinced that our own type of transmuted Gothic was the right thing; but in this particular case it was manifestly out of place … as were all other styles.”

Cram and his contemporary Cass Gilbert, who designed Battle Hall at the University of Texas in Austin in 1912, strained to “regionalize” their sophisticated northeastern academic style when working in the Southwest. They found new freedom to bring together Byzantine elements with those firom other sources, including early medieval Italy, southern France and northern Spain, resulting in work that was more original if less refined than similar commissions they executed elsewhere.

THE METROPOLIS
The Southwest is today the most rapidly growing region of the United States. Eighty percent of the population lives in Cities, much of it in the vast sprawling metropolises that now typify the region. These new gargantuan urban forms also reflect the character and tradition of the Southwest. The sense of isolation and the perception of great distance between places are still dominant impressions: where once the cowboys spent long days in the saddle, urban commuters spend long hours behind the wheel.

The discrete nodes of houses, barns and churches in the country, or courthouses, schools and grange halls in the town, have their correlative in urban centers linked by freeway arteries. In Houston there are four such satellite centers that compete with the original downtown center. Individual buildings, such as Caudill Rowlett Scott’s US Homes Building of 1978, assert the independence of their small town predecessors. Isolated forms, like the Post Oak Towers in Houston designed by Philip Johnson and John Burgee, assert their autonomy as singular, precious objects.

The southwestern metropolis as an emerging form can be seen clearly on Louisiana Street in downtown Houston. Towering behemoths line a canyon that was once a broad open street. As the Pennzoil Building by Philip Johnson and John Burgee shows so well, the gigantic objects retain their own identities where other buildings by well-known architects also vie for attention. The Pennzoil in particular expresses that glamorous flashy Houston style, in which simple obvious forms can be seen at a great distance-even from the highway-until new buildings come along to block the view.

The deep urban canyon-like streets of the burgeoning southwestern cities are matched by vast urban caves inside buildings-enormous interior spaces that maintain the scale of the outdoors in perfect climate-controlled comfort. Harwell Hamilton Harris’s pioneering Trade Mart in Dallas of 1960 created a “prePortman” urban outdoor room. But the Astrodome of 1965 and the Galleria of 1973, both in Houston, took the giant step toward creating complete interior worlds. Football fields, baseball fields, nightclubs, restaurants, hotels, department stores, recreational facilities and parking are all connected under one roof or series of roofs.

The recent dynamic growth of southwestern cities has over shadowed another side of the urban environmental character of the region, which is equally compelling. Beyond the towers and highways, beyond the shops and parking lots, lie gentle enclaves of gracious urban and suburban life.

This grace is evident in the lavish suburbs of Houston of which Bayou Bend, designed by John Staub m the 1920s, is a prime example. It is also in evidence in San Antonio, Phoenix, Oklahoma City or Fort Worth, where grand houses assert the same need for individual identity that pioneer homesteads, such as the Kellum-Noble House of 1847, once displayed. The longstanding emphasis on the home is seen in all levels of the economic spectrum, as the modest but stately architecture of Frank Welch’s O’Donnell House built in Dallas in 1979 indicates.

The pleasant urban graciousness of southwestern residential sections can also be found in public places, such as San Antonio’s Pasco del Rio. This riverwalk, located on a level below the city’s grid of streets, was first designed in 1936 as a landscaped quai as part of the WPA program. Its garden-like quality has remained, but shops and cafes have been added, many since the 1960s. Today the timeless quality and captivating charm of its architectural street lamps, bridges, stairs and amphitheater make it truly unique, but still very much of its region. Shopping districts such as Dallas’s Quadrangle, designed in 1969, also create a special blend of  architecture, nature and human activity.

Institutions like Fort Worth’s Kimbell Art Museum of 1972 also create an extraordinary architectural environment. The Kimbell Museum may have an international reputation as one of Louis Kahn’s finest works, but it is also a building in harmony with its place. Its parched flatness and tawny naturalness of surface and color, as well as its response to the brutal Texas sun, all tie it strongly to the Southwest tradition.

Whole communities for living and working, such as Trinity University in San Antonio, merge simple, finely crafted buildings and sensitively scaled outdoor spaces with rugged natural terrain.