I just saw the Mexican American Civil Rights Institute exhibit on William Merriweather Peña, the Mexican-American architect/partner of Caudill, Rowlett & Scott who designed the Texas Pavilion/Institute of Texan Cultures building for Hemisfair ’68. I blogged about him back in April, 2024, when it became apparent that the state would be demolishing the only major downtown building by a Mexican-American architect.

William Peña, Courtesy CRS Center, Texas A & M University

Texas Pavilion/Institute of Texan Cultures. Photo by author, 2018.

I learned a lot about Pena from the exhibit, including a very interesting parallel to my role as Executive Director of Villa Finale Museum & Gardens. Villa Finale was the final home of Walter Nold Mathis, who willed his home and massive collection of decorative and fine arts to the National Trust for Historic Preservation. Just as Willie Peña was finalizing the design of the Texas Pavilion, inspired in part by the firm’s recent visit to the Museo Anthropologia in Mexico City, Walter Mathis was buying and restoring Villa Finale. When Hemisfair opened in April, 1968, Villa Finale and the King William neighborhood were on their way to becoming the first historic district in Texas. But the parallels go back further.

William Merriweather Peña and Walter Nold Mathis were both born in 1919 in Texas. Peña’s family was from Laredo and Mathis’ from San Antonio. Walter went to UT Austin and Willie attended Texas A & M, and both joined the army after graduation as World War II broke out. Two and a half years later, they were both fighting in the Battle of the Bulge – Walter from the air with a B-26 and Willie as a captain on the ground. Both were war heroes. Walter flew more than twice as many missions as he had to and won three distinguished Flying Crosses, an air medal and a Presidential Citation. Willie stepped on a landmine in Schleiden, Germany, lost part of his left leg and was honored with a Purple Heart, Bronze Star and later honors from France and Belgium.

Walter Mathis in World War II courtesy Villa Finale Museum & Gardens

Walter became an investment banker with an overriding interest in historic preservation and collecting art. Willie became an architect and partner in Caudill, Rowlett Scott and by the 1960s was know as “The Father of Architectural Programming” with a book that remains in print in its fifth edition.

1968. Willie is completing the modernist Texas Pavilion at Hemisfair, the first World’s Fair in Texas and the only one to preserve historic buildings. Walter is restoring Villa Finale and is more responsible than any other individual for the creation of Texas’ first historic district. He will buy and fully or partially restore another 14 homes in King William. This is the time period when historic preservation tranforms into a community planning tool. Peña and his partners are similarly revolutionizing architectural practice, eschewing the idea of individual artistry for a group focus on process. They called it squatting, when the whole architecture team would go to the building site and develop “brown paper” programming of uses and needs before ever thinking about design. Everything was designed by the firm, not individuals. It would be a couple decades before the starchitects returned.

Stylistically, Willie and Walter are miles apart, functionalist Brutalism on the one side and ultradecorative Victorian on the other.

One of the Napoleon parlors in Villa Finale, 2025

Yet they shared a birth year, a war and its battles and both went on to transform the streetscape of San Antonio in the churn of the 1960s. There is irony in the fact that Willie’s contribution was erased this year while Walter’s has been and continues to be lovingly preserved.

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