Brown Building
Austin, Travis County, Texas
Marker Inscription
BROWN BUILDING In 1938, architects C.H. Page and Son designed the Brown Building for legendary businessman Herman Brown on a prominent site at the southwest corner of Colorado and eighth streets in downtown Austin. Built of concrete reinforced with structural steel, the eight-story office tower exemplified the tenets of Art Moderne design. Its flush piers, recessed metal spandrels, vertically arranged casement windows and stylized granite entry provide the hallmarks of the style. Additions of a ninth story in 1949 and a tenth story in 1952 matched the scale and materials of the original composition. Surviving virtually unchanged since this period of significance, the building retains a high degree of its historic integrity. The building’s interior also reflects the Art Moderne design with panels of pink tinged marble gracing the ceiling and walls, contrasting with a pink, green and yellow terrazzo floor. Elaborate geometric aluminum and glass lighting panels sweep from the center of the ceiling to the top of each elevator. The building housed many significant companies throughout the 20th century, including construction firm Brown & Root, offices for U.S. congressman and future president Lyndon Baines Johnson, and the Texas Broadcasting Corporation, which operated from the building for many years with humorist Cactus Pryor and future governor John Connally. The building was listed in the National Register of Historic Places in 1994. In the early 2000s, the building was converted to include high-end lofts. RECORDED TEXAS HISTORIC LANDMARK – 2013
Erected by Texas Historical Commission
The Story
Designed by C. H. Page and Son and completed in 1938 for businessman Herman Brown, the Brown Building rose as a sleek Art Moderne office tower in downtown Austin, later gaining ninth and tenth floors that matched its original lines. Its tenants read like a roster of mid-century Texas power: the construction giant Brown & Root, offices for Congressman and future president Lyndon B. Johnson, and the broadcasting company tied to Johnson and future governor John Connally. Listed on the National Register in 1994, it was converted to lofts in the early 2000s.
Why it matters
The building was a nerve center of the Brown & Root and Johnson political-business network that shaped Texas and national politics in the twentieth century.
The story behind this marker
AI contextThe era
By 1938, Austin was shaking off the Depression and beginning to imagine itself as a modern city, and the Brown Building announced that ambition in steel and concrete. Rising eight stories at the southwest corner of Colorado and Eighth Streets, it was designed in the sleek, streamlined idiom of Art Moderne — a style that traded the ornament of earlier decades for clean vertical lines, smooth surfaces, and a sense of forward motion that suited an age enamored of speed and machinery.
The design came from the architects C. H. Page and Son, working for Herman Brown, and the building wore its era proudly. Flush piers, recessed metal spandrels, vertically arranged casement windows, and a stylized granite entrance gave the tower the crisp, upward-reaching look that defined the moment.
Downtown Austin was then a compact grid of state government, commerce, and the first real skyscrapers Texas cities were beginning to raise. Into that setting the Brown Building brought a note of confident modernity — a private office tower built to the standards of a capital that expected to grow.
People & events
The tower was built for Herman Brown, a figure the marker calls a legendary businessman, and it grew as his enterprises did. A ninth floor was added in 1949 and a tenth in 1952, each matched so carefully to the original in scale and materials that the additions read as seamless. Inside, the Art Moderne vision continued in panels of pink-tinged marble, terrazzo floors in pink, green, and yellow, and elaborate geometric lighting of aluminum and glass sweeping toward the elevators.
But the building's fame rests as much on who worked inside it as on how it looked. It housed the construction firm Brown & Root, and it held offices used by U.S. congressman and future president Lyndon Baines Johnson. The Texas Broadcasting Corporation — a broadcasting company associated with the Johnson family — operated from the building for many years.
That broadcasting world gave the tower some of its color. The humorist Cactus Pryor worked there, as did John Connally, who would go on to become governor of Texas. For a stretch of the twentieth century, an unusual amount of Texas ambition passed through these ten floors.
Its place in the American story
The Brown Building is a physical node in one of the most consequential networks in twentieth-century American politics: the web of construction money, broadcasting, and political power that helped carry Lyndon Johnson from Texas to the White House. Brown & Root, the firm headquartered here, is widely remembered in American history as a major backer of Johnson's rise, and the pairing of a powerful contractor with an ambitious young congressman is one of the classic stories of how business and politics intertwined in the era.
Add broadcasting to the mix — a medium that was reshaping American political life — and the building becomes a kind of case study. In the mid-twentieth century, control of the airwaves, access to capital, and elected office reinforced one another, and careers built on that combination could reach the very top.
You do not have to sort out every detail to feel the significance. A single downtown office tower that sheltered a national construction firm, a future president's offices, a broadcasting company, and a future governor is a compact monument to how Texas power projected itself onto the national stage.
If you visit
Find the southwest corner of Colorado and Eighth Streets in downtown Austin and look up. Even amid the glass towers that now surround it, the Brown Building holds its own with the confident, streamlined lines of Art Moderne — the flush vertical piers, the ribbon-like runs of casement windows, the stylized stone entry meant to draw the eye upward.
Because the ninth and tenth floors were added to match the original so precisely, part of the fun is knowing they are there at all. See if you can sense where the building grew; the marker's story rewards a second, closer look at what appears to be a single unified design.
The tower was converted to high-end lofts in the early 2000s, so it lives on as a residence rather than the corridor of deal-making it once was. On a walking tour of downtown Austin's historic core, let it stand as a reminder that some of the most important rooms in Texas history were ordinary offices behind an elegant facade.
Written by AI to add context, grounded in the marker’s inscription and the historical record. The inscription above is the original, unaltered text.
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Related people
- · Herman Brown
- · Lyndon Baines Johnson
- · John Connally
Themes & tags
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