UTSA was created in 1969, ran its first offices out of the Institute of Texan Cultures at HemisFair Park, and opened its Main Campus in the Hill Country brush northwest of the city in September 1975. Architects O'Neil Ford and Milton Babbitt of Ford, Powell & Carson planned it like a hilltop village, with sand-colored concrete buildings, shaded walkways, and a central plaza. This short walk circles that original core: the plaza and fountain that give the university its favorite word, the bronze mascot, the first library, the old arena, and the test block Ford poured before any building rose.
About this site
University of Texas at San Antonio is a public college or university in San Antonio, Bexar County. It is one of 17 degree-granting colleges and universities TexasRoam maps in Bexar County.
The site sits at 29.5840, -98.6182 near San Antonio. The nearest cataloged historic site is Moos Homestead (historical marker), about 1.3 miles away. Others within a short drive include Nanez, Bacon-Beckmann, and Benko Family Cemetery.
The 61st Texas Legislature created the University of Texas at San Antonio on June 5, 1969. Its chief champion in Austin was Frank Lombardino, a legislator from northwest Bexar County who became known as the "father of UTSA," and Governor Preston Smith staged the bill signing outside the Alamo. In 1970 the UT System regents chose Arleigh B. Templeton as founding president and accepted a gift of roughly 600 acres in far northwest San Antonio as the future campus. The first class, 671 graduate students, started in June 1973 in temporary quarters at the Koger Center; academic programs moved to the new campus off Loop 1604 in 1975, and the first freshmen enrolled in 1976. Blue joined orange and white as a school color in the mid-1970s, and after a contested student vote in 1977 the roadrunner beat the armadillo in a run-off to become the mascot. The Institute of Texan Cultures was placed under UTSA in 1986, and the university opened its Downtown Campus in 1997. More than $250 million in construction between 2006 and 2009 added buildings such as the Biotechnology, Sciences and Engineering Building and the Applied Engineering and Technology Building, and Roadrunners football, founded in 2009, played its first season in 2011. UTSA now holds the Carnegie R1 research classification, and on September 1, 2025, it completed its merger with UT Health San Antonio, bringing that medical school and health-science campus into a combined university that also brands itself UT San Antonio.
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