With Samsung Austin Semiconductor on the literal horizon these days, Taylor is poised for dramatic growth. And the municipality is preparing to grow along with it.
At the regular City Council Meeting April 13, 2023, city leaders approved awarding Randall Scott Architects, a Dallas-based firm with decades of experience designing 35 municipal buildings across the state, the bid to do the programming, planning, design and construction of a new City Hall and Justice Center to provide space for city administration, the police department and municipal court.
“Our promise to you is that we will provide you with a Taylor Made facility that is very much centric to the body of Taylor, the downtown character, and a sustainable building that retains the small-town atmosphere that’s listed in the Envision Taylor Master Plan,” said Randall Scott, the firm’s CEO, at the meeting. “We believe that a building needs to be timeless in design, which means that a hundred years from now when the building is looked at by your residents it’s still as relevant design wise as the day that it was built.”
Once a contract is negotiated and approved, the entire process will take approximately a year and a half, from start to finish, said Dan Brantner, the senior project manager and senior vice president.
“It’s a collaborative process we go through,” Brantner said. “We start with benchmarking tours where you get to visit facilities similar to what you are considering, you get to talk to your peers about what would you do differently after they have lived in the facility and it lets us interact with the stakeholders,” Brantner said.
Possible features of the new facility could include collaborative spaces, outdoor meeting environments, separate “acoustically tight” rooms for Zoom meetings, as well as sustainability elements, such as rainwater collections or other innovations, while also incorporating elements of the city’s historic architecture.
Scott said “contextualism” is a key component of their design process, and he cited certain prominent structures in Taylor’s historic downtown, including the city’s former City Hall, which was used from 1905-1935, as possible inspiration for the design.
“We are looking at the DNA of the cities and making sure that that DNA is incorporated in the architecture of that City Hall,” Scott said.
District 4 Councilman Robert Garcia said he liked this idea.
“Taylor is very proud of its history,” Garcia said. “Unfortunately, our (former) City Hall, we don’t have it any longer. I would like, and this is just me, to recreate that but make it modern because 100 years from now, 300 years from now, people are going to go to Georgetown and Lockhart, and go ‘Wow, I’m glad they have that historic-looking building, and that is what Taylor is all about. It’s all about our rich history.”
District 1 Councilman Gerald Anderson said he liked the emphasis on innovation and history. But he also made a plug for an abundance of natural lighting, which the current municipal structures lack. “I am sure everybody that has worked at City Hall, or the Police Department, can appreciate windows and natural light,” Anderson said. “I also liked the way you talked about being innovative and looking forward in the way people have meetings now, but also making sure the structure on the outside has a historical look, so this is a legacy building project that we will be able to take with us far beyond when we are here. So, I’m honored to have y’all working with us.”
Scott and Brantner said they were also delighted to play a role in shaping Taylor’s future.
“City halls are what we do, and we design more city halls than anywhere else in Texas,” Scott said. “But this one is particularly exciting for us.”
