Spanish Castle Magic

Doug Treuter is one of the foremost experts on UT's roofs. "Roofing is really kind of boring," he confides, "but this is interesting. I always thought this was the interesting part of the roofing industry."

Treuter graduated from UT's business school with a degree in marketing in 1983 and for the past 35 years has supplied Spanish roof tile for 23 UT buildings as a sales representative for central and south Texas for Dallas-based The Roof Tile and Slate Co.

Those include new buildings such as San Jacinto Dormitory, the Seay Building and the Blanton Museum of Art as well as a full roof replacement for the Etter-Harbin Alumni Center. Half of his UT jobs have been restorations such as on the Main Building's President's Office, the Texas Union, Gregory Gym and Sutton Hall, the other Cass Gilbert creation. The roofs have been as big as Anna Hiss Gymnasium's and as small as the guard stand's at 24th Street and Whitis Avenue.

For a century, the leading name in Spanish roof tile has been Ludowici, and most UT tiles have come from their factories, first in Chicago, then, after fire destroyed that facility, in New Lexington, Ohio, says Treuter.

The tiled roofs on the Forty Acres that are not Ludowici are those of the Main Building, Painter Hall and Hogg Memorial Auditorium, which were made in Texas by the now-closed Mineral Wells Tile Company. UT keeps a stockpile of the Mineral Wells tile at the J.J. Pickle Research Campus. The tiles covering the Biomedical Engineering Building and William C. Powers Jr. Student Activities Center came from Gladding, McBean in California.

The only tile actually from Spain is what is on the Etter-Harbin Alumni Center, which, to add to the confusion, is known as French style. That tile, called Tejas Borja, was made in the town of Lliria.

Like most everything, what may seem in your memory or your mind's eye to be a fairly straight-forward thing - a red-tile roof - contains a great deal of variety once you dig into the details: varieties in shape, color and texture.

To start with, there are two basic shapes of tiles: Spanish and Mission. Spanish tiles have an S-shaped profile, in which one part of the S forms the ridge and the other forms the pan between that ridge and the next. Mission tiles are simpler and are shaped like a half barrel, with half of them being placed like a rainbow and the other half being placed like a smile.

Then, within the Mission tile category, you've got Cubana, Greek, Italia, Palm Beach and others. The tile on the Main Building, which covers some 30,000 square feet including the President's Office, is Cubana.