“No violence, gentlemen — no violence, I beg of you! Consider the furniture!”
―Arthur Conan Doyle, “The Adventure of the Mazarin Stone”
Earlier this year, I discovered a gold mine. It was a collection of nearly 200 blueprints and photographs of the Tower under construction that had been uploaded to the website of UT’s Alexander Architecture Archives. And among them were numerous drawings and plans for furniture.
I suppose I knew that certain architects designed furniture, as I had occasionally seen such in museums. But in my naivete, I had no idea that the architectural team that designed the Main Building and Tower at UT also designed its furniture — a lot of it — not only drawing its lines but specifying the materials down to the smallest details. One set specified “Etched Ornament, Sand Blast or Tool” and “Note: Break all edges and sand smooth.”
The first set of plans I encountered was for chairs for the Graduate Library and the Senior Library, what we know today as the Hall of Noble Words and the Hall of Texas, respectively, within the Life Science Library on Main’s second floor. Since I work directly above the Hall of Noble Words, I sent the plans to the printer, grabbed them, then headed downstairs.
And there they were, immediately obvious, just as drawn 91 years ago in 1934, and no worse for wear.
Anyone now can scroll through page after page of furniture designs with all their specifications: “To be American Walnut…. With bronzed hinges… To be made of white oak … to be made of birch-stained white oak.” Hardware was specified as “wood screws” or “wooden pegs.”
The furniture included magnificent tables but also librarian’s desks, book trucks, standing-height stables, high swivel chairs for the loan desk librarians who worked in “the Delivery Room” — the giant space that connects the Hall of Noble Words and the Hall of Texas that is formally known as the Hall of the Six Coats of Arms. Here, students would submit their book requests and await their delivery.
A bulletin board design says, “To be of bronze-brushed finish — letters polished; door hinged and glazed with ⅛ inch plate glass. Back to be cork tackboard. To be attached to the existing marble wainscot.” Then, a handwritten note scribbled on the plan says simply “Out.”
At the Life Science Library’s historic circulation desk, I met circulation specialist and 2024 history graduate Anthony Tomasello. He showed me behind the desk, where I saw the identical book truck that I had seen in the plans, the card catalog, and even the stack elevator that once delivered books from the Tower’s upper floors to the circulation desks where students awaited them.
Kim Barker, UT’s historic preservation planner, told me these chairs and the tables that go with them are now spread around campus. She is certain much of the wooden furniture wound up in Battle Hall and says some that she has seen in Gearing Hall and Rainey Hall likely also comes from Main. “I’ve spotted the furniture as far away as UTA in Austin (an administrative building at 1616 Guadalupe St.) and the Winedale Historical Complex at Round Top.”
There is plenty of original furniture still in Main, but some jaw-dropping plans never made it off the drafting table: An entire blueprint sheet is devoted to a magnificent oak desk for the “English Collection,” sketching incredibly intricate ornamentation. It stipulated ball bearings and progressive steel slides. “All exposed hardware to be antiqued bronze.” Alas, all this painstaking work was seemingly waved away with four little penciled-in letters: “Omit.”
Although the English Collection desk shown above may have never made it out of the carpentry shop, other pieces in the English Collection certainly did. Last year at UT Surplus on the J.J. Pickle Research Campus, Barker was walking around with Mark Engelman, who runs that operation, when he lifted a blanket and said, “We have this thing. We’re not really sure what we’re doing with it.” The intensely carved wood-and-glass display case looked familiar to Barker, so she snapped a picture, and when she got back to her desk, she started digging.
“Whenever I run across something like that, or an old photograph, I put it in a file,” Barker says. “So, I was looking through Main Building photographs and Battle Hall photographs, and it shows up! It was part of the Wrenn Collection (a.k.a. the English Collection) originally installed at Battle Hall and then moved to the fourth floor of the Main Building (since the mid-1970s, the President’s Office). The Wrenn Collection once occupied the south half of the central portion of the President’s Office, a space that is now three offices.
“It’s in beautiful shape,” Barker says of the discovered case. She emailed her photo of it to President Jim Davis, whose interest in UT history is particularly keen, and asked, “Any chance you’d like it for your office? It’d be thrilling to return it to use in Main Building, particularly on the fourth floor?”
His response was an enthusiastic yes, in the right location.
Getting the massive display case back to the fourth floor could be a challenge, since it doesn’t fit in the elevator and so would have to be maneuvered up four flights of stairs.
UT Surplus has also recently repatriated a table and set of chairs that were refinished and reupholstered for use in the Littlefield House.
There are many other pieces of original furniture scattered throughout the building and within its 27-floor Tower, and not all of them require searching. Two such pieces are visible the moment one enters the main corridor on the ground floor: two standing-height tables against the walls that hearken to an age when the admissions, registrar’s and bursar’s offices, long housed there, ran on pen and paper.
So, the next time you’re in the Main Building and waiting on a bench, remember: Consider the furniture. That bench or chair you’re sitting on could well be nearly a century old.
