Cite Fall 1988 5

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Corpus Christi City Hall, 1988, Taft Architects, architects. Palm-lined walk to the western facade, service entries on lower right.

Once clear of the dense petrochemopolis This stylistic paradox is a direct that lines the entry to central Corpus consequence of the political nature of the Christi. the cityscape was dominated last building. A quick survey of city halls spring hy two monumental outcroppings: built in the last 25 years (Boston, Dallas, Corpus Christi San Bernardino, to mention a few) the new City Hall and. in the distance across the Corpus Christi Bay, reveals the inverted pyramid as the "Bullwinkle." the world's largest oil desired civic icon - the City Hall for derrick. Bullwinkle, the equivalent of a Tcmpe, Arizona is indeed a literal 100-story building, was built horizontally, realization. As visual negations of to be floated out and planted in the waters hierarchy, such designs were assigned the City Hall latent role of contradicting off the coast of Louisiana. Its tapered steel-framed structure resembled the monumentally. Since the early 1900s carcass of a prone Hancock Tower. The many American cities, including Corpus sight of such a huge and inscrutable The Ghost of the Texas Courthouse Christi, have transferred administration object - at once explicitly functional yet from corruptible elected officials to in its beached context totally mysterious - Richard Ingersoll presumably less corruptible city was thrilling. Alas, Bullwinkle was managers. According to this scheme, portable and as of July has left desolate policy is set by the City Council while the flatness behind. The new City Hall, on administration is run by paid the other hand, though slightly more professionals. This model was derived cartoonish, was firmly planted on its site from the corporate structure of and, despite the city's well-established businesses, and indeed its spatial practice of frequently moving City Hall, requirements are similar to the business will probably withstand changes in office, meaning less representational function and taste. Like a successful space and more bureaucratic area.1 political candidate, it seeks high visibility without revealing its real values. In the new City Hall in Corpus Christi the city manager's office and its Designed by Taft Architects in subsidiaries occupy the entire fifth floor, association with Kipp, Richter& while the mayor has been given a Associates of Corpus Christi, the new relatively tiny suite on the ground floor. building and its surrounding parking lots • " The program was not primarily occupy with cross-axial authority a four- concerned with creating a new symbol for block site. The generously landscaped the city but with consolidating the city parking areas that surround the building administration. The previous City Hall, act as a temenos, setting off the six-slory built by Richard S. Colley in 1952. was as structure in its own geometrically modernist in its demeanor as Taft controlled environment, where its Architects's building is postmodernist. foursquare bulk intimates a lost But it was lack of space in this building monumentality, once the prerogative of and an undesired location, not style, that Texas's county courthouses. The much led to its demise. City agencies were admired 19th-century courthouses of ...» scattered in various locations, resulting in W.C. Dodson and James Riely Gordon, difficult interoffice communication and and such classical successors as Corpus accountability. In 1983, the Houston firm Christi's former Nueces County of Lloyd Jones Brewer & Associates was Courthouse of 1914 by Gordon's protege, commissioned to design a new building Harvey L. Page, were always strictly for the same site as Colley's City Hall. symmetrical, pyramidally massed, and After this design was presented, the city freestanding in ample courthouse rejected the site. They then pursued the squares. The symmetry of Taft's project idea of a larger building, and after is by comparison redounding, more interviewing Caudill Rowlett Scott, fearless than "fearful," more like Skidmorc, Owings & Merrill, and Lloyd ectoplasm than a full-bodied Jones Brewer & Associates, chose Taft on reincarnation. It is the ghost of the Texas the strength of such projects as the Talbot courthouse, wanting to appear House, the River Crest Country Club, monumental without being so. and The Woodlands Water Treatment Ellis County Courthouse, Waxahachie, Texas, 1895, James Riely Gordon, architect. Office. 6 Cite Fall 1988

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Corpus Christi City Hall, 1952, Richard S. Colley, architect; demolished 1988.

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SITE P L A N FIRST F L O O R P L A N

Legend: R - Rcccplinn. C - Cutim.il Chamber. M Matin's Office. P — Parks/Recreation. U — Public Utililics, T - Joini Tax Office and Central Cabinet

The decision to site the building away organizes space, projecting outward to distracting attention from the whole. The thought too prepossessing by the building from the shore was part of a new city the future architecture of the area. The structure seems more like an assembly of committee. This episode exemplifies the policy to reserve that area for tourism: cross axes of the building's plan align children's building blocks than a single counter-monumental strategies developed two new high-rise hotels have recently with side streets on the north and south, corporeal mass. by Taft Architects and their clients: a been built and the Texas State Aquarium allowing certain buildings, such as place for a clock is made without has been planned to join the Bay front Richard S. Colley's Sacred Heart Church The four facades arc distinctly different, including it. Arts and Science Park district that (1941), to be integrated into the overall which again detracts from the singularity already includes Johnson/Burgee's Art matrix. of the building as a monument. The north The program called for a combination of Museum of South Texas, the Corpus facade on Leopard Street is the most office building for the administrative Christi Museum, the Bay front Plaza These grand planning moves are a visible from the nearby freeway and has lasks and more accessible public spaces Convention Center, the Harbor mandate for monumentality. Yet although the clearest geometry: terraced steps with termed "a supermarket of public Playhouse, and the newly completed the precepts of axiality and symmetry lanterns resembling the pointed cupola services." Though a longitudinal scheme Watcrgarden by Zion & Breen. The have been faithfully obeyed, lead to the recessed entry, a shaft of might have better served these latter shoreline area of downtown is set off by a monumentality has been consistently green glazing running the height of the functions, it was decided that a single natural bluff that rises 20 feet from the muffled, not by inverting the pyramid, building. To countermand this vertically, columnar volume was more energy "lower" to the "upper" city. Here there but through a process of trivialization. a rounded volute-shaped pattern has been efficient. The four entries lead to a are a few mid-rise office buildings, the The exterior mass, for example, is a added to the cladding ai its base, while a central octagonal well, 30 feet in Nueces County Courthouse by Kipp & quartered cube. But this powerful figure thick tympanum closes it at the top; it is diameter, open to the entire six floors. Winston, Smyth & Smyth, Bennett. has been undermined by the hollow further complicated by the horizontal pull Much like Labrouste's Ste. Genevieve Martin & Solka, and Wisznia & Peterson vertical shafts at the center of each side of the freestanding walls that mask the Library, the internal framing is made of (1977) and the Corpus Christi Public and by the striated cladding, with bands handicapped access ramps on either side. thin steel members that allow light to library by Morris Architects (1986). The placed at three-foot intervals. The glass The main entry on North Staples Street is radiate freely and facilitate visual new city hall actively affects these cupola, which should rise independently proceeded by a propylacum of two communication between floors. The well projects as part of a greater civic district. above the center, is visually obscured by detached porticoes serving as glorified is terminated by a false dome of crossing Its position at the intersection of Leopard the pitched roofs of the wings and jutting bus shelters. From here, two rows of members that form a pattern reminiscent and North Staples streets, the two busiest shoulders of the plenum shafts at each palms lead to a vaulted canopy similar to of the stellated designs in Guarini's streets in this run-down pari ol town. corner. The pyramidal organization of the the bus shelters, and above this "CITY strapwork domes. The crossing is paved recalls the ancient Roman practice of cube surmounted by a cupola is HALL" is blazoned in large Roman with illusionislic tiles by the Corpus siting a forum with public buildings at the contradicted by the sequence of colors: letters. The inscription is left dangling by Christi ceramicist William Wilhelmi, crossing of the city's cardo and the darkest - brown with blue banding - the inset shaft of green glazing that is whose kitsch subverts any possible decumanus. Proceeding from this are placed at the top rather than at the again terminated with a tympanum. The monumental experience of the octagon. classical precedent, a strong geometrical bottom. Together these attributes lend to rondel in the tympanum was meant by the One of the four niches of the octagon is nucleus has been established that break things down into smaller pieces. architects to carry a clock, but was cleverly occupied by the information Cite Fall 1988

Trompe I'oeil tile floor by William Wilhelmi; an information The council chamber with suspended grid ceiling mimick- East lobby serving council chamber and mayor's office, booth occupies one of the four niches of the octagonal ing coffers, Corpus Christi City Hall. Corpus Christi City Hall. atrium, Corpus Christi City Hall.

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Principal facade with portico bus shelters. Corpus Christi City Hall.

m North facade, Corpus Christi City Hall. e I

THIRD F L O O R P L A N H i \fr J -1 ' desk, across from it is a rounded niche spaces on the sixth floor, where the and two squared niches that beg to be ceiling is disproportionately high, giving filled with sculpture. The color palette of the effect of leftover space. burnt sienna, olive green, and cream is soothing and the general atmosphere is Although the classical presuppositions of unthreatcning and easy to use. But it is Taft Architects's/?«r» have led to a series never grand: the lost luxury of paneled of retractions, one feature has emerged as walls and marble halls known to public a truly noble statement: the parking lots. North facade porch; handicap ramps at either side, Corpus Christi City Hall. Lanterns recall buildings of a bygone era have been They are "parked" parking lots, with the prismatic cupola above the atrium. parodied by streamlined wooden battens numerous planted strips and tree-lined that run the length of the public corridors. paved walks, offering shade and visual The west lobby is lined with counters for relief to what is usually merciless public utilities and tax queries; the south asphalt. Taft Architects have proven that a government was criminal. strategy for an unmonumcntal monument lobby has escalators to the second floor: parking lot can be a delightful garden. has not produced a work of proleptic the north lobby has elevator banks; and In a letter to the mayor and council originality, such as Colley's City Hall, the east lobby has comfortable lounge The construction and completion of the members advocating preservation of nor a work of eccentric beauty, such as furniture, serving both the mayor's office new City Hall coincided with the Colley's building, historian Stephen Fox Dodson's and Rcily's courthouses, but and the Council Chamber. The Council demolition of both the 1912 City Hall and commended the city for its architectural one that may ultimately prove to be the Chamber seats 150 and is the most its 1952 successor. The former building patronage of the new City Hall but feared most politically resilient. • thoroughly appointed of the interiors: a served as a public library until the "the possibility that in a mere 36 years suspended grid artfully mimics the effect completion of the new library in 1986. preservationists may again have to plead Notes of a coffered ceiling. The office floors are Colley's 1952 City Hall was one of the that this extraordinary building [faffs less cramped than one might suspect best period pieces of Texas modernism by project] not be destroyed just because it 1 William L. Lebovich. America's On Haiti, from examining the plans. The client the unsung hero of that movement and the seems old, ugly, and disposable." Washington, D.C.: Preservation Press, 1984. rejected the idea of an open office plan, subject of a cover story in Progressive but agreed to spaces divided by half walls Architecture in February 1953. It was Since the opening of the new City Hall and to cells without doors which loosen praised for its sensitive response to site, righteous Corpus Christians have written the layout considerably. There are program, and climate and the part it numerous complaints to the local frequent openings and social spaces in played in the plan for the now gutted newspaper, some attacking it for its the tightly packed corridors, and very fev Civic Center. Its ice-cube-tray sun pomposity, others for its corporate work spaces are far from natural light. screens were inspired inventions, as were anonymity. This lack of consensus as to The only internal spaces that seem the undulating wood paneled walls of the interpretation is a good test of the particularly unresolved are the social Council Chamber. Its demolition by city building's desired effect. The ghostly