The Southwestern Historical Quarterly, Volume 98, July 1994 - April, 1995 Page: 3
682 p. : ill. (some col.), maps, ports. ; 23 cm.View a full description of this periodical.
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The Texas State Building
in the state to solicit designs for the Texas State Building.6 Members of
the association under president Thomas J. Hurley considered modeling
the structure after the Texas State Capitol in Austin (1888), but they
abandoned the idea in favor of recreating San Antonio's Mission San
Jose y San Miguel de Aguayo (1768-1782).7 At least one of the solicited
architects, James Riely Gordon, had something more "modern" in mind.
Gordon's successful San Antonio practice was distinguished by a series
of Texas county courthouses. Typical of his times, Gordon was an eclec-
tic architect capable of working in a variety of historically derived styles.
A definite stylistic evolution can be traced through his public commis-
sions that was comparable to shifts in national tastes, however. His de-
signs for the Texas State Building (referred to here as the
"competition," "revised," and "final" designs to minimize confusion) an-
ticipated an eventual shift in his work. It is helpful to review Gordon's
career up to this point in order to appreciate the role of this building in
his stylistic evolution.
Gordon was born in Winchester, Virginia, in 1863. After a period in
Washington, D.C., he moved with his family to San Antonio in the
187os. There he went to work for the architect W. K. Dobson at the age
of eighteen.8 Eventually he started his own practice and in 1887 he se-
cured the prestigious position as superintendent for the construction of
the United States Courthouse and Post Office in San Antonio
(1888-1889, destroyed). The responsibilities of that position usually
were restricted to drawing up the detail plans and supervising construc-
tion according to the design created by the Office of the Supervising Ar-
chitect of the United States Treasury, in this case Mifflin E. Bell. Gordon
caught the attention of the San Antonio press by having the boldness to
suggest revisions to the layout of the building, which Bell approved.9
In independent practice, Gordon experimented with picturesque his-
toricism for one of his early county courthouses. The architect created a
Moorish-inspired temple of justice for Aransas County (Rockport, 1889,
destroyed) in an apparent allusion to the area's Spanish colonial her-
itage. For later commissions Gordon, along with many other architects,
picked up the standard of the recently deceased Boston architect, Henry
Hobson Richardson (1838-1886). Richardson appropriated pic-
turesque elements from Byzantine, Romanesque, and other architectur-
al vocabularies, fused them into a highly personalized style, and applied
6 Galveston Dazly News, Oct. 3o, 1891.
SIbid.,July 24, 1891; San Francisco Chronicle, Aug. 5, 1891.
a Houston Daily Post, Dec. 2, 1891. It is possible that the name W. K. Dobson was a misprinting
of the name of architect W. C. Dodson.
9 San Antonio Daily Express, July 23, 1887.1994
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Texas State Historical Association. The Southwestern Historical Quarterly, Volume 98, July 1994 - April, 1995, periodical, 1995; Austin, Texas. (https://texashistory.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metapth101216/m1/31/: accessed May 1, 2024), University of North Texas Libraries, The Portal to Texas History, https://texashistory.unt.edu; crediting Texas State Historical Association.