Drury Plaza Hotel San Antonio Riverwalk

The Drury Plaza Hotel San Antonio Riverwalk is an Art-deco skyscraper designed by Graham, Anderson, Probst & White, and built between 1929 and 1930, for a reported $2.50 million dollars, in San Antonio, TX.

Drury Plaza Hotel San Antonio Riverwalk is not the only name you might know this building by though. The building is, or has also been known as Alamo National Bank Buildilng.

Its precise street address is 105 South Saint Mary`s Street, San Antonio, TX. You can also find it on the map here.

The Drury Plaza Hotel San Antonio Riverwalk is a structure of significant importance both for the city of San Antonio 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 Drury Plaza Hotel San Antonio Riverwalk was officially included in the National Register of Historic Places on March 28^th 2006.

The building has been restored 4 times over the years to ensure its conservation and adaptation to the pass of time. The main restoration works happened in 1956, 1961, 1974 and 2007.

Graham, Anderson, Probst & White 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 at the very least we know that there was one other part involved, that was McKenzie Construction as the Main Contractor.

The Drury Plaza Hotel San Antonio Riverwalk can be categorized as an Art-deco building.

The Drury Plaza Hotel San Antonio Riverwalk was completed in 1930, right when the Art Deco movement was at its peak, so it kind of went with the trend at that time.

The Drury Plaza Hotel San Antonio Riverwalk uses a frame structure made of mixed 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 a three-story Minnesota gray granite base, followed by two stories clad in beige terra cotta. The rest of the facade was finished with beige bricks and dark brown brick spandrels. The ornamental panels are made of terracotta. The building culminates in the four-story extension with a copper mansard roof.

Other materials found at the Drury Plaza Hotel San Antonio Riverwalk include, walnut, used on door panels, and marble, found on fluted columns and pilasters in the 2-story high vestibule and on the walls and floors of the building.