New UT building needs a new name
Downtown Austin is transmogrifying before our eyes as it turns into (Caution: columnist exaggeration ahead) Manhattan-on-the-Colorado.
The signs are everywhere, helping us sort out which building will be what. There are hotels, office buildings, condos and all kinds of stuff that rich real estate investors think will make them even richer real estate investors.
Eager to get in on the downtown crane craze, the University of Texas System is pretty far along on the 19-story building that will replace several downtown office buildings that long have housed system officials. Move-in at the new building begins Aug. 1. Congrats to UT Systemites and best wishes on your new home.
The sign in front of that new building identifies the replacement office building as the “Replacement Office Building.” Heckuva name. I like it. “Hey, you going to the meeting at the ROB?”
The name also seems to have caught on with DPR Construction, the folks building it. Its website identifies the 330,000-square-foot building as “The University of Texas System, Replacement Office Building.”
So that’s it. Now and forever it’s the Replacement Office Building, just like the sign says. Done. Finito.
Nope, insists UT System spokeswoman Jenny LaCoste-Caputo.
“The building itself actually has this inscribed on it: The University of Texas System Administration,” she told me.
Not trying to get picky here, but the inscription actually says “The University of Texas System.” Either way, is that the name of the building or the name of the agency in it? Shouldn’t the building have a distinctive name — maybe a famous person’s name — as do the buildings the Replacement Office Building is replacing?
“To my knowledge,” LaCoste-Caputo reported, “there have not been discussions about a different name for the building.”
Karen Adler of the system’s Office of External Relations told me Replacement Office Building is “sort of internal speak” and not the building’s name.
“It’s simply an identifier. It’s who we are,” she said. “We are the University of Texas System.”
And she joked that it could be the Ken Herman University of Texas System Building for a $100 million donation. I told her it takes me three years to earn that kind of money. (And I’m aware some readers would be willing to contribute if it would be the Ken Herman Memorial University of Texas
System Building.)
Perhaps the UT System needs a “Your Name Here” campaign aimed at wealthy donors.
At the new building, UT will be on six floors; others include parking and leased space. It replaces two buildings knocked down at the site on West Seventh Street, between Lavaca and Colorado streets. Those buildings unimaginatively were known as the Lavaca Building and the Colorado Building.
The three other nearby UT System buildings that are being replaced have people’s names on them, though only one of the three is readily recognizable and another is a Confederate guy.
You know the story about for whom the O. Henry Building is named. (It’s a short story.) That structure was sold by the UT System to the Texas State University System. And the UT folks have signed a ground lease with Dallas-based Trammell Crow Co. for the site of the system’s current Ashbel Smith Hall and Claudia Taylor Johnson Hall.
That latter one is a building named for someone everybody knows but not under the name by which everybody knew her. Claudia Taylor Johnson was Lady Bird Johnson. What if we had rechristened Town Lake as Claudia Taylor Lake? Just not the same.
And by getting out of Ashbel Smith Hall, the UT System is cutting ties with the Confederacy. In addition to other stuff (Republic of Texas secretary of state and ambassador to the United Kingdom and France, first UT System Board president), Smith (180586) was a celebrated physician and a colonel in the army of the Confederacy.
Even his name is kind of “Gone with the Wind”-ish. “Oh, Ashbel!” (Not to be confused with O. Henry.)
Post-Civil War, Smith did lots of good stuff for our state, serving in the Texas House and becoming a major advocate for education, including helping to establish Prairie View A&M University for African-Americans.
Trammell Crow will develop the property on which Smith and Johnson halls now stand. The lease requires preservation of the southern and western facades of Johnson Hall.
So who has ideas for a good name for the new UT System administration building, something UT appropriate? FYI, there was a time when I thought if he had led the Horns to another national title or two we might have renamed our Capitol as the Vince Young Statehouse. Alas, all we got was a steakhouse.
How about we name the new UT System building for former state senator and Texas Supreme Court Justice James Wallace?
Yeah, I know he’s a University of Arkansas alum, but I like the idea of the UT System housed in something named Wallace Hall, reminding all in perpetuity of the recent regent who spent a lot of time investigating, suing and being a general nuisance to the system.