U.S. Post Office and Federal Building

The Old (old) Post Office and Federal Building in Austin is of national significance because it is an architectural sport. It is easily overlooked even by local architectural historians because in style it seems to be an adequate but not especially outstanding modified Renaissance revival building from any time from about 1910 on. In fact the building was designed at the height of the Second Empire style, in 1877, and construction was begun the following year. There is no corner-stone and no mention of the name of the architect in the local press, beyond the statement that it would be designed in Washington, At this date the use of the Italian High Renaissance palace as a prototype was not very common and probably unique in Texas, but it is the utter simplicity of the detail that makes it possibly unique nationally.

In London the clubs of Sir Charles Barry were built from 1829 to about 1860 using Renaissance palaces as models. The London Foreign Office and hundreds of British colonial buildings all were more closely related to the Italian High Renaissance than to any other style, although again with the vertical squeeze of the nineteenth century. The Bibliotheque Sainte-Genevive in Paris, 1845-50, came externally from this same source. New York had imitations of the London clubs and many the New York commercial buildings chose the arches, applied columns, and detail of sixteenth century Italy. The Peabody Institute in Baltimore, 1861, by E.G. Lind had a full High Renaissance facade. McKim, Mead, and White would turn with growing frequency to Italian palaces for inspiration in the last decades of the century, and had had one competition plan in this style published in the American Architect and Building News in the late seventies, Duban's Ecole des Beaux Arts had been built in 1860, and in the lower portion of the facade it shows some of the simplicity of the Austin building. But in comparison with most architecture of the late seventies, these are rarities. Many elevations of Federal Courthouses were published in this period but they were highly decorated buildings usually in the most extreme form of either High Victorian or Second Empire-General Grant styles.

In 1877, therefore, the Austin Federal Building is exceptional in that it has the horizontal lines and exact symmetrical massing of an Italian palace. But it is most unusual in its details. With the exception of molding strips, the only applied ornament on the whole large building is to be found in the simplified cornices and balustrades.