Austin City Hall is the seat of Austin municipal government, located at 301 W 2nd St in
downtown
''Downtown'' is a term primarily used in American and Canadian English to refer to a city's sometimes commercial, cultural and often the historical, political, and geographic heart. It is often synonymous with its central business district ( ...
Austin, Texas
Austin ( ) is the List of capitals in the United States, capital city of the U.S. state of Texas. It is the county seat and most populous city of Travis County, Texas, Travis County, with portions extending into Hays County, Texas, Hays and W ...
(
USA). The current building was completed in 2004. It is the meeting place for the
Austin City Council.
Description
The current building was designed by
Antoine Predock and Cotera + Reed Architects, which was intended to reflect what ''
The Dallas Morning News
''The Dallas Morning News'' is a daily newspaper serving the Dallas–Fort Worth area of Texas, with an average print circulation in 2022 of 65,369. It was founded on October 1, 1885, by Alfred Horatio Belo as a satellite publication of the ' ...
'' referred to as a "crazy-quilt vitality, that embraces everything from country music to environmental protests and high-tech swagger." The new city hall, built from recycled materials, has solar panels in its garage.
History
Austin formerly operated its City Hall at 124 West 8th Street. In the 1980s, the City of Austin proposed a 60-acre
urban renewal
Urban renewal (sometimes called urban regeneration in the United Kingdom and urban redevelopment in the United States) is a program of land redevelopment often used to address real or perceived urban decay. Urban renewal involves the clearing ...
project for Austin's Warehouse District,
which would have included a new city hall complex designed by urban planner
Denise Scott Brown, along with a new location for the
Laguna Gloria art museum, designed by architect
Robert Venturi. In 1987, partially in response to the
Savings and Loan Crisis, the plans were shelved when the property was foreclosed upon.
In 1999, Mayor
Kirk Watson
Kirk Preston Watson (born March 18, 1958) is an American attorney and politician who has served as the 59th mayor of Austin since 2023, previously holding the office as the 54th mayor from 1997 to 2001. A member of the Democratic Party (United S ...
and the Austin City Council approved a $10.4 million tax incentive for the
Computer Sciences Corporation (CSC) to construct a three-building complex on the same site slated for the failed city hall complex, under the stipulation that CSC funded the construction of a new city hall. The first two buildings (now home to
Silicon Labs) were constructed before CSC vacated the premises before following through with the construction of the city hall building.
In November 2004, the Austin City Hall officially opened in its current building at 301 W 2nd St.
See also
*
Austin City Council
*
Mayor of Austin
References
External links
*
Buildings and structures in Austin, Texas
City halls in Texas
Government buildings completed in 2004
Government of Austin, Texas
Modernist architecture in Texas
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