Quote:
Originally Posted by KevinFromTexas
One American Center is actually limestone, at least the white part is. I'm not sure what the brown accents are. But I do know for sure that the white part is limestone. If the One American Center is made out of stucco than so are Austin's hills.
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Ha! Hills of stucco.
The brown accents are granite, btw. The lobby and common areas are all clad in granite as well. Granite and limestone were the defacto go-to finishes in the 1980s and 1990s. That is why you see so many buildings with those finishes.
Also, there are no office buildings taller than a couple of stories made out of stucco. Stucco is a very labor & time intensive process that requires hand-application. Even the spray-on kind of stucco would be impossible for a highrise. It's very finicky and will crack, chip and fade. Most buildings that have the "look" of stucco are made out of GFRC, which is a type of engineered concrete panel that contains fiberglass for strength and has texture to it. The material can be dyed any color during fabrication, and the panels can be shaped to any form. It's much easier and cheaper to use these lightweight panels to skin a building. They don't crack or chip because of the fiberglass, they don't fade, they resist stains and if one of them fails it can be replaced like a giant tile. GFRC can also be engineered to look like limestone (or any stone for that matter), and many of our suburban buildings have real limestone on the ground floor and as you go up it is GFRC 'limestone". Mostly because of cost. You can't really tell the difference unless you get up close enough to see all the little shell fossils in the stone.