UT Austin: Cass Gilbert, Paul Cret & the Historic Campus

UT's look comes mostly from two architects: Cass Gilbert, who introduced a Spanish-Mediterranean style around 1910, and Paul Philippe Cret, whose 1930s master plan filled in the malls around the Tower. This loop focuses on the buildings from that era, with carved cattle brands, red-tile roofs, and limestone ornament. It opens at a Georgian Revival sorority house just south of campus and ends at the university's first theater. Most stops are best seen from outside.

Much of what people picture when they think of the University of Texas, from red tile roofs to carved limestone and a warm Mediterranean feel, traces back to two architects. Cass Gilbert brought a Spanish-Mediterranean style to campus around 1910, and Paul Philippe Cret's master plan of the 1930s shaped much of the central campus. This walk concentrates on buildings from that formative era and the stories carved into their walls.

At Garrison Hall, it pays to look up: 32 Spanish and Texan cattle brands run across the building roughly in order of date, alongside the surnames of Texas founders and carvings of cacti, lone stars and bluebonnets. Sutton Hall, completed in 1918, is one of only two Gilbert buildings on campus and now belongs to the School of Architecture.

Cret's own hand shows in the Texas Union, whose staggered limestone front breaks from strict symmetry and whose Cactus Cafe listening room survived a 2010 closure threat, and in Hogg Memorial Auditorium, the 1,200-seat hall that opened in 1933 as the first theater on campus. A renovation finished in 2023 modernized its interior while keeping the historic exterior.

It's a compact walk, but it reveals a side of the Forty Acres that many visitors pass right by.