ARCHITECTURE:
Trost’s Spanish Revival
design in Big Bend Hotels
Henry Trost (1860-1933)
The Big Bend area boasts several homes
and buildings designed by renowned and
prolific architect Henry Trost, whose main
work occurred from 1899 to 1933. His
firm, established in El Paso in 1903, de-
signed over 500 buildings throughout the
Southwest during this thirty-year period.
Trost & Trost designed the four historic
Big Bend area hotels featured here. Each
of these hotels has been beautifully preserved by their owners and are in active
use today. They all demonstrate Trost’s
utilization of the Spanish Colonial Revival style in his designs.
Characteristics of the Spanish Colonial
style include arches, courtyards, plain
wall surfaces, exterior ornamentation,
wrought iron work and tile roofs, colorful
interior tile and decorative exposed ceiling beams. Inspired by the Mission Revival style (first fully displayed with the
California Building at the Columbian Exposition in Chicago in 1893), Spanish
Colonial style designers were influenced
by architecture of the Mediterranean
world, Southwest adobe structures, late
Morrish architecture, medieval Spanish
and Italian churches, and Italian Renaissance elements. Trost was living in
Chicago in 1893 and certainly visited the
California Building.
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