Dewitt C. Greer State Highway Building

The Dewitt C. Greer State Highway Building is an Art-deco skyscraper designed by Carleton Adams, and built in 1933, for a reported $455 thousand dollars, in Austin, TX.

Its precise street address is 125 E.11th Street, Austin, TX. You can also find it on the map here.

The Dewitt C. Greer State Highway Building is a structure of significant importance both for the city of Austin and the United States as a nation. The building embodies the distinctive characteristic features of the time in which it was built and the Art Deco style. Because of that, the Dewitt C. Greer State Highway Building was officially included in the National Register of Historic Places on January 7^th 1998.

The building has been restored 3 times over the years to ensure its conservation and adaptation to the pass of time. The main restoration works happened in 1975, 1981 and 1995.

Carleton Adams was the architecture firm in charge of the architectural design. But there was also one other architect involved, as far as we know. We are talking about Atlee B. Ayres.

The Dewitt C. Greer State Highway Building can be categorized as an Art-deco building.

The Dewitt C. Greer State Highway Building was completed in 1933, right when the Art Deco movement was at its peak, so it kind of went with the trend at that time.

The Dewitt C. Greer State Highway Building uses a frame structure made of steel columns and concrete slabs.

A frame structure uses a combination of beams and columns to sustain the building's weight. The walls in this case are non-load bearing, which allows for more flexibility when distributing the interior spaces.

The facade is a non-load bearing masonry facade. This type of facade became common during the period when buildings, especially taller ones, transitioned from load-bearing wall systems to frame structures.

Frame structures allowed facades to be independent from the building's frame, enabling the use of lighter materials and larger openings. However, it took some time for architects to incorporate these new posibilities into their designs, and so for a while they simply replicated the look and feel fo buildings people where used to seeing.

From an aesthetic point of view, the facade features an elaborate Art Deco styling, including decorative carved limestone panels above the front doors tracing the history of Texan transportation. The entrance is flanked by 2-story engaged fluted limestone columns, each set on a polished granite round plinth and chamfered base. A series of symmetrical setbacks gives the building its distinctive "shoulders" forms. Window bays are separated by cast stone spandrels.

Other materials found at the Dewitt C. Greer State Highway Building include, marble, used to ornate the lobby around the central elevators, stainless steel, found in elevators doors with the letters SHB and the lone star stamped, crowned with a mural of the state's counties , silver leaf, used to decorate the lobby's cornice, and pink granite, found in the entrance landing and steps.