Bill Hobby, a former lieutenant governor of Texas, is still going strong at 92 years young. The downtown Austin office complex that bears his name may not even make it to middle age. Completed in 1986, the Hobby State Office Building is a masterwork of postmodern eclecticism, combining bronze-tinted glass, stucco, and concrete in a mélange that can only be described as, well, pretty damn ugly.
Unloved since the beginning, in need of $50 million in repairs, and infested by rats, the State of Texas decided to mothball the building and put the development rights up for auction. Like so many buildings in downtowns across America, it sits empty.
Unfortunately, the financial math makes it too difficult to convert many of these buildings into some other use, and so cities like Austin are stuck with the corpses of thousands of such buildings in their central business districts. The Hobby Building sits on extremely valuable downtown land that could support a much larger skyscraper, so the building is worth more dead than alive, but we unfortunately can’t tear down all of the other office buildings like it and start fresh—at least not without bankrupting a whole bunch of cities, lenders, and investors. And so they stand, monuments to some former age in which grueling commutes and casual sexism were just part of the fun of having an office job—ugly buildings for an uglier time.
Just a few blocks away from the Hobby Building stands the Littlefield Building, which opened in 1912 and stood as the tallest commercial building in Austin other than the state capitol until 1932, when Lt. Gov. Hobby was born. Designed in a neoclassical style, the handsome brick building has continuously been leased to commercial tenants, including then-future President Lyndon Johnson in 1935. As of today, it’s about 85% leased—not bad for a 112-year-old building in a city with millions of square feet of empty and often newer office space.
As cities evolve, it’s only natural that older and outdated buildings will be replaced by new ones—but the contrast between the Hobby and Littlefield buildings suggests that “outdated” is really in the eye of the beholder.
Ugly doesn’t seem to last.
Buildings of the millennial generation tended to favor huge floor plates with limited access to natural light, low ceilings, and architectural elements equivalent to then-fashionable shoulder pads. They were built in the era of the cubicle farm, a phrase that aptly captures the dehumanizing aspect of cramming workers into pigpens. The same design flaws that made these buildings uninspiring places to work have likewise made them difficult to convert—nobody wants to live in a pigpen, either.
They’re ugly, inside and out—and now they’re on the outs. But one wonders why ugly was ever in in the first place.
Writing at
, Samuel Hughes delves into the history of architectural ornament to investigate whether, as is widely claimed, modern technology explains the rise of modern architecture. Instead, he finds the reverse: modern technology in fact made architectural ornament mass-producible and cheap, which explains the proliferation of highly-decorated buildings in the industrial era spanning the 19th Century to the First World War.Hughes goes on to argue that preferences changed as cultural modernism seeped its way into the arts. This changed the trajectory of “elite” architecture largely away from ornament and toward the unadorned glass-box style that typifies much of the new builds in our cities over the past seventy years.
Unfortunately for Austin, the city hadn’t built much in the way of taller buildings before the Great Depression, and it spent much of the postwar decades bulldozing what it had built so that office commuters had somewhere to park. When Austin started building again in the late 1960s, few people lived downtown anymore, and you get the sense from what they built that the architects of that era knew there wouldn’t be a lot of people admiring their buildings from the outside.
The office buildings that have gone up here in the 21st Century are designed with less disdain for the man both in the cubicle and on the street. They have better ventilation, lots more natural light, and luxurious tenant amenities. They were also designed to “activate” the streetscape with attractive landscaping, public spaces, and retail for tenants and passersby alike. Almost all of them are built atop parking podiums, an improvement over the acres of parking lots and garages that used to define downtown, but a testament to the fact that downtown is still largely a place that most people drive into, not live in. Some are even attractively designed, and they are winning tenants from the millennial buildings
So I wonder, as we continue to build a new Austin atop the graveyard of the old, if our newly built towers will live long and prosper like the Littlefield Building, or suffer the fate of the soon-to-be toppled Hobby Building. Are we building our new buildings to last, whatever happens in the next century?
We can certainly engineer them better. Architect Luke Askwith of Gensler proposes a 600-year-office, a literal framework for an adaptive, modular building that can be repurposed to reflect work and lifestyle patterns of the unknown future. Building in adaptive reuse has the added benefit of creating less waste and destroying less wealth, while being more environmentally friendly. In Austin, the architects (also from Gensler) of a proposed new residential tower are also thinking ahead. Their design for the building’s parking podium calls for floor heights and ramp layouts that will make it possible to retrofit if future demand for parking declines, a technique they’re pioneering at other parking garage projects.
But then I look at the Littlefield Building, or the Empire State Building—one year older than Bill Hobby—and both are still going strong in their original uses as office buildings. They were designed with respect for their occupants and reverence for their work, and everything from the floor plates to the windows to the ornament reflects that. It’s those features that made them workable a century ago that keep them desirable today. And neither has on-site parking.
It wasn’t the technology of the prewar era that makes those buildings enduring—it’s the design. Helpfully, modern technology has enabled new building techniques as well as more resilient materials that altogether support more interesting and beautiful designs. Glazed terracotta, for instance, is making a comeback on the facades of mid-rise apartment buildings and supertall skyscrapers. The Fitzroy, a new apartment building in Manhattan, is championing the material and a style called Art Deco Revival.
Then there’s mass timber construction, which uses prefabricated, multilayered wood panels in place of concrete and steel. Timber is durable, renewable, and—unadorned and exposed—exceptionally beautiful.
Meanwhile, robots are making it possible to lay masonry or carve stone in a fraction of the time it takes humans. Icon, a company based here in Austin, is taking robots and advances in material science to pioneer 3D-printed construction techniques and build the homes of the future, on earth today and possibly on the moon tomorrow.
To build a better future, one in which what we build lasts longer than the people who build it, we do not need to “RETVRN” to #trad architecture or the ways of the past. Instead, seizing modern technology, drawing on modern materials, and perhaps dispensing with the dreary omnipresence and oppressive monotony of the modernist glass box, we can conceive of an architectural vernacular that speaks to our own time yet captures the timeless beauty that imbued buildings of the past.
What if all it takes to create a building that lasts is to make it beautiful?
Happy Memorial Day!