reports on Antoine Predock's new Austin City Hall
Getting the city groove
Civic spirit has plenty of attitude in Austin's newest hall of government
04:28 PM CST on Tuesday, February 1, 2005
By DAVID DILLON / The Dallas Morning News
AUSTIN – Antoine Predock's new City Hall manages to be about Austin, real and imagined, while simultaneously giving its government an open and appealing face.
That's quite a trick given the city's sorry history with star architects. Robert Venturi, Steven Holl, Richard Gluckman and Herzog & de Meuron have all crashed and burned here. But not this time, and not by taking the easy way out. This is a challenging building that requires study. Instead of columns, arches and other traditional bits of classical monumentality, there is rugged limestone, gleaming copper and slashing diagonals, all laid out like an abstraction of a fault line. Civicness with attitude. And if the design occasionally goes over the top, it is also packed with enough strong ideas to compensate for its excesses.
Located between Second Street and Cesar Chavez at Town Lake, the $57 million structure is the centerpiece of the city's efforts to revitalize its pockmarked downtown. It is a contemporary sculpture set between a pair of refined but staid office buildings finished in the same pale yellow Lueders limestone.
But the similarities end there. Rather than foursquare and rectilinear, the City Hall is asymmetrical and acrobatic; while its neighbors exude corporate propriety, it reflects Austin's crazy-quilt vitality that embraces everything from country music to environmental protests and high-tech swagger.
Mr. Predock, working with Cotera + Reed Architects of Austin, approaches architecture archaeologically, stripping away cultural detritus to get down to bedrock. So he set the foundation of City Hall on a massive limestone outcropping and incorporated a seeping limestone wall into the underground parking garage. Weathered stone benches dot numerous outdoor spaces, along with pools and shallow streams that recall the ancient sink holes and acequias in the region. And all of the vegetation is native to the site.
The main facade, overlooking Town Lake, is a bit of a head-scratcher, as though Mr. Predock couldn't quite decide what he wanted to do so he tried to do everything. Visitors enter across a broad paved plaza framed by an outdoor amphitheater, a series of terraces and balconies reminiscent of geological strata and a sloping metal canopy decorated with photovoltaic energy cells. Although the individual pieces are intriguing, the overall composition needed more editing.
But things really snap together inside. The lobby is a tall narrow canyon, with limestone and copper rising four stories to a gleaming faceted ceiling that becomes a kind of indoor sky. Council chamber, auditorium and other important public spaces open onto this area, as do the glass-walled conference rooms where much of the city's serious business gets done.
Austinites take pride in the transparency and interactivity of their city government, and the entire building is an expression of those values, from the numerous terraces and overlooks to the "protest window" in the city council chamber, through which members can glare at their irate constituents during deliberations.
The design went through a long and elaborate vetting process that included dozens of meetings between architects and various community groups and citizen advisory boards. Residents also submitted comment cards and thousands of e-mails, prompting Mr. Predock to complain at one point that the city was suffering from "terminal democracy."
But he listened, learned and frequently compromised. When an idea bombed, he went back to Albuquerque, N.M., rethought, refined and then re-presented.
"The public process had a huge impact on the final design," says project architect Paul Fehlau. "People kept encouraging us to push things as far as we could. They didn't want us to hold back because it was a public building. "Keep it weird,' they said."
Some residents still long for columns and pediments; or worry about how the copper panels will look 10 years from now (Fantastic!); or ponder the meaning of the odd metal spike that sails out over Second Street. Spear, stinger, bowsprit, male member, take you pick.
Yet thanks to all the public jousting, Austin ended up with a far better building than history gave it any reason to expect. With a few exceptions, its downtown has become a dumping ground for second-rate commercial architecture, particularly along Congress Avenue, where the ongoing replication of bad precedents inspires a kind of awe.
Such a dreary architectural landscape for a capital city with a major university and a lofty place in the high-tech pantheon. The new Austin City Hall proves that it doesn't have to be that way.
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1 Comment
Yeah, look no further than the Dallas Morning News for great architectural criticism. That building is awful. It's unfortunate that Austin has no good civic architecture.
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