Houston City Hall

The Houston City Hall is an Art-deco skyscraper designed in 1937 by Joseph Finger, and built between 1938 and 1939, for a reported $1.67 million dollars, in Houston, TX.

Its precise street address is 901 Bagby, Houston, TX. You can also find it on the map here.

The Houston City Hall is a structure of significant importance both for the city of Houston 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 Houston City Hall was officially included in the National Register of Historic Places on September 18^th 1990.

At the time of its completion in 1939 the Houston City Hall incorporated solutions that were quite advanced at the time, these included being one of the first totally air-conditioned office buildings in Houston.

Joseph Finger was the architecture firm in charge of the architectural design.

That being said, architecture is a complex discipline involving many professionals from different fields, without whom this building would have not been possible. We will surely be leaving out a lot of names here, but here is a list of the people we do know also played their part in making the Houston City Hall a reality:

• Bates Construction Company and Brown Construction Company as the Main Contractor
• Herring Coe, Raoul Jassett and Daniel MacMorris as the collaborating Artist

The Houston City Hall can be categorized as an Art-deco building.

The Houston City Hall was completed in 1939 during the last stretch of waht's officially considered to be the duration of the Art Deco movement. As a late-commer of the Art Deco movement and reflects the mature and refined characteristics of the style.

From an aesthetic point of view, the facade features an elegant light-colored limestone clad. The main door is cast in aluminum, and so are the grillwork and medallions above the entrance, which represent important moments of the founding of America.

The main tower is the only one which continues above the frieze, creating the area were the clock is located.

Other materials found at the Houston City Hall include, marble, found in the lobby's walls with lightly veined patterns, and in the stairway going from the basement o the third floor, bronze, used in the entrances to the Tax Department inlaid in combination with nickel and silver, wood, the trim and doors are made of "redgum" veneer wood, a product of Texas., walnut, used in elevator walls with concealed troughs of nickel and bronze, and aluminum, found in the stairway railing.