Don E. Carleton:
Much of the way that The Texas Book looks, comes from Larry Speck’s essay on campus architecture during its golden years in the 1930s and 1940s. Larry’s essay in The Texas Book is titled “Campus Architecture: the Heroic Decades,” and it’s accompanied by beautiful black and white and color period architectural drawings. Larry is the W. L. Moody, Jr., Centennial Professor in Architecture at UT and in addition to his service as Dean of the College for several years and his teaching, his career as a practicing architect has changed, literally changed the way Austin looks. His designs include the Bergstrom Airport, the Austin Convention Center, and the Umlauf Sculpture Garden. Please welcome Larry Speck. [applause]
Lawrence Speck:
So as stated, the chapter that I did was really accounting for this period from 1910 to 1945 when this base or core of the campus was constructed. And it’s a wonderful story. Let me just briefly tell you some highlights of it. For one thing, the campus was of course begun in the 1880s when the university was founded and a hodgepodge of buildings were built—a largish Old Main building in a collegiate Gothic style that immediately went out of fashion, and a group of other buildings in various styles, not very well planned, not very well assembled, and none of them architecturally distinguished. So by about 1905 the Regents were looking at this growing campus with a little dismay and thinking we need to get ourselves together here. If we’re going to build a great university here, we can’t do it by building this odd assembly of buildings. Now that was the number one step. Somebody had the vision to say, “You can’t make a great institution without a great crucible to have that institution in.” And that was visionary. And then it was really amazing because the Regents went to a firm in San Antonio which was one of the best firms in the state. They had them do a master plan for the campus which is a normal way to begin and they did that plan and the Regents said, “You know, that’s not good enough. That’s just not good enough.” So they went out of state. They went to one of the most renowned campus architects in the country who happened to be dean of the School of Architecture at Washington University in St. Louis, a real expert in the field. They had him do a master plan for the campus. He did a couple of buildings around. He did the University Methodist Church, a really beautiful building on the corner of 24th and Guadalupe and a couple of other buildings in town. But the master plan was not satisfactory to the regents and again they said, you know, “That’s just not good enough.” And then they went to probably the premiere architect practicing in the United States at the time, to Cass Gilbert, who was practicing in New York City. He went on to do the Woolworth Tower which was the tallest building in the world at the time, did the Supreme Court Building in Washington, D.C., a really amazing tremendous architect. And they brought that guy down from New York City and said, “Do us a campus master plan.” And he did an amazing vision for this campus. And when you imagine what Austin was like in 1910 and what the university was like in 1910, this projected a goal, a kind of outlook for what this university might be that simply wasn’t in anyone’s head at the time.
Now there were people who thought at the time, “This is way too ambitious for us.” But frankly, the regents stepped up to the plate and said, “No, that’s what we need.” So Cass Gilbert did this first master plan in 1910 and did two very seminal buildings on the campus, Battle Hall and Sutton Hall. Those became the premiere buildings. Battle Hall had the institutional character in the local limestone. Sutton Hall was a more fabric building, academic building in brick with some limestone. But it gave a character to the campus that felt right in this climate, felt right in this region, used our materials, felt right for an academic institution, gave just the right ambience. So he set not only the planning character to the campus, but also an architectural character. He was the campus architect from 1910–1920, did plans for many other buildings, but none but those two got built. In fact he did plans for a new main building about four or five different versions of it including one that looks remarkably like the tower today.
Then there was a ten-year period of using Herbert M. Greene, a Dallas architect, a very, very fine architect, certainly one of the best architects in the state at the time, really to execute the vision of Cass Gilbert at the time, applied to a series of twelve buildings that Herbert Greene did between 1920 and 1930. Then again in 1930, the regents stepped up to the plate and said, “You know, we need a new master plan. We’ve been working on this for twenty years. We’ve been consistent with it, but let’s take the next step.” And they hired Paul Cret, again probably the premiere architect in the U.S. at the time, actually a French man who was practicing in Philadelphia, winner of the A. I. A. gold medal, the highest honor that can be given to an American architect. And he did a new master plan for the campus in 1930 to 1933. And then he ended up doing it…you can count it different ways as to what role he had in it, but between sixteen and twenty-four buildings on the campus. And that really accounts for those three architects’ work—Cass Gilbert, Herbert Greene, and Paul Cret, basically the core, the old core of the campus, the Forty Acres. It is an amazing architectural assemblage. It got a lot of attention at the time. It gave us national renown in architectural circles and it was one of the most consistent, well-planned campuses in America in 1945. And it still stands today as one of the most beautiful cores of campus that I know of. It also foresaw a density that was appropriate to a campus of fifty thousand students, which they could not have been imagined back then, but which has served us extraordinarily well for the life of the university. It also just gave a feeling of real power to the campus in terms of its ambience, the way it felt to be a part of.
Now the admiration I have is for the University of Texas as a client in that period, for the ambitions they had, for the guts they had, because this was not, these buildings were controversial, many of them. Battle Hall was controversial at the time because there were people who thought, “Well, wait, we’ve got a collegiate Gothic Main building sitting over there. What is this new thing? This is new fangled, outrageous. How can we have this?” It was very controversial at the time. But it set the pace for what was to come. It didn’t talk about what was in the past. And then as mentioned already, when the tower went up, it was extremely controversial. Frank Dobie hated it. He called it the phallus of the southwest. He thought it would have been better if they built it this way [motions horizontally with his arm] rather than that way [motions vertically with his arm]. What’s the deal here? These were gutsy decisions. They were controversial decisions. But the legacy they left us was this extraordinarily progressive, distinguished ensemble of buildings. And I would say that has shaped this university. It has made us who we were. Winston Churchill said, “We shape our buildings. Thereafter our buildings shape us.” And in this case, these buildings have shaped this institution. Certainly for all of us who are citizens on this campus, it shapes our daily life, the pattern of our daily life, the interaction we have with each other and our students. I live my days on the West Mall and the West Mall is the most wonderful, social interactive way of connecting this way with the students and faculty and the people that you can imagine. It’s just a great social space.
And then the South Mall is very monumental. It connects the state capitol and the tower of the university and gives the whole ensemble of the university in relation to the government of this state and to the city. There are moments on this campus that were just so perfect for the role this university came to play. I think in part, because we had that campus to look up to. So certainly for the citizens of campus, it shapes our everyday patterns and it shapes our sense of ourselves and our work as a group, but also for the whole state. There are very few universities that have as their emblem some building on their campus. That tower shows up on t-shirts. It shows up on bill caps. It shows up all over as the symbol of the university. When we win a football game, it’s all about—up on that tower and a kind of celebration of that moment. I can remember when we won the national championship and some of you may have done like I did. I went out there three or four different nights and for three weeks, there was a crowd in front of that tower taking pictures of it lit up with the number one on it. And people flocked from all over the state because when we want to celebrate our victory as a university, we have to go to our place, which is that campus. It’s who we are. And those evenings I spent with my neighbor Aaron Rockland wandering around, taking photographs of people, taking his swiped UT helmet, a real one from the football team, and letting everyone take their picture with the helmet in front of the tower, those are great memories. It’s the campus that gives us the place to be who we are. But I think probably the most profound influence that campus has had on this university is the effect it has on a student trying to go to school. I’ve watched hundreds of these tour groups that go around and the kids are pre-freshmen and they’re trying to figure out, “Where do I want to go to school?” I went around with my kids to various schools and we walked around. Watching them think, “Does this feel right to me? Is this the kind of home I could have for four years?” You watch these kids wander around and there’s a certain kind of kid and they can come from a backwoods small town or they can come from Sugarland or Plano, or they can come from River Oaks, or wherever they come from, they walk around the campus and they look and you can see the stars in their eyes. They think, “This is the big time. If I come to this campus, I’ve reached the pinnacle. I can get what I need here to be what I want to be.” And the campus communicates that to those students.
And then there’s another kind of student who comes to our campus and wanders around in exactly the same way and thinks, “I don’t know if I can live up to this. This feels a little overwhelming to me.” And we send them to A&M. [laughter]
But our campus has become a tremendous sieve, I think, that winnows out whether or not you feel like you can live up to the kind of power and character and majesty, and history of this institution and it’s palpable for anyone who comes to the campus for the first time. Both my parents were alumnae of the university. My grandfather was an alumnus of the university. All my life as a little kid, I came to the campus and it was one of the most memorable places. I think it had something to do with me wanting to be an architect. It’s the best ensemble of buildings you could find in Texas at the time. It was truly inspiring and I always felt like, you know, there’s something powerful and majestic about that university. So we have those guys to thank for that history. [applause]