Austin City Hall | |
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General information | |
Type | Municipal government |
Location | 301 W 2nd St, Austin, TX 78701 |
Coordinates | 30°15′54″N 97°44′50″W / 30.2649°N 97.7472°W |
Completed | 2004 |
Design and construction | |
Architect(s) |
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Austin City Hall is the seat of Austin municipal government, located at 301 W 2nd St in downtown Austin, Texas ( USA). The current building was completed in 2004. It is the meeting place for the Austin City Council.
The current building was designed by Antoine Predock and Cotera + Reed Architects, which was intended to reflect what The Dallas Morning News referred to as a “crazy-quilt vitality, that embraces everything from country music to environmental protests and high-tech swagger.” [1] The new city hall, built from recycled materials, has solar panels in its garage. [2]
Austin formerly operated its City Hall at 124 West 8th Street. [3] In the 1980s, the City of Austin proposed a 60-acre urban renewal project for Austin's Warehouse District, [4] which would have included a new city hall complex designed by urban planner Denise Scott Brown, along with a new location for the Laguna Gloria art museum, designed by architect Robert Venturi. [5] In 1987, partially in response to the Savings and Loan Crisis, the plans were shelved when the property was foreclosed upon. [6]
In 1999, Mayor Kirk Watson and the Austin City Council approved a $10.4 million tax incentive for the Computer Sciences Corporation (CSC) to construct a three-building complex on the same site slated for the failed city hall complex, under the stipulation that CSC funded the construction of a new city hall. [7] The first two buildings (now home to Silicon Labs) were constructed before CSC vacated the premises before following through with the construction of the city hall building. [8]
In November 2004, the Austin City Hall officially opened in its current building at 301 W 2nd St. [9]