About this tour
The University of Texas began on forty acres of open Austin hilltop in 1883, and the buildings that rose there over the next half century gave the school — and the city — a skyline. This short walk threads the ceremonial core of campus, from the Beaux-Arts library that set the architectural key for everything after it, to the great limestone tower that anchors the view for miles, to the Victorian mansion of the benefactor whose money helped make it all possible. Along the way you pass a humanities research center famous for its treasures and a museum whose stone-and-light building is itself a work of art. It's under a mile of walking, but it covers roughly a century of ambition set in cut limestone and Spanish-Renaissance red tile.