Because the Industrial Engineering (originally Textile Engineering) and Human Sciences (originally Home Economics) buildings of 1925 have been altered, the Administration Building alone retains its original configuration (the rear wings, intended from the beginning, were not added until 1951). Its tan brick walls, carved stone trim, and red tile roofs are generically Spanish, but as architect and historian Nolan E. Barrick, who was the son-in-law of William Ward Watkin, noted in his book Texas Tech: The Unobserved Heritage (1985), the detail is more Plateresque or Spanish Renaissance than Baroque, and the imagery is derived from the sixteenth-century University of Alcalá de Henares in Spain, which was Ralph Adams Cram’s model for the Houston Public Library.
At the intersection of Amon G. Carter Plaza and Memorial Circle is a casting of Electra Waggoner Biggs’s bronze equestrian statue of Will Rogers, Into the Sunset, installed in 1950, a gift from Amon G. Carter. On the circle’s northwest edge is the entrance pavilion to Holden Hall (1937, 1950, Wyatt C. Hedrick), which Hedrick’s office detailed with a cast-stone Spanish Renaissance frontispiece to scale the relatively small building up to its site.