Official Logo of Austin, Texas

The cross (and the wings) were features of the Austin Family crest that were incorporated into the city's seal design. Austin's city seal was designed in 1916 by Ray F. Coyle of San Francisco, who won the nationwide design competition. -- Wikipedia

Unofficial Logo

According to the web site, Austin's city hall explicitly reflects these values:

• Austin’s culture

• Accessibility

• Unique to Downtown

• Playful and unconventional

• Environmental focus

• Technology focus

• Iconic, like the Capitol

• Government transparency

Copper and tone exterior

Night lighting

Outdoor roof and plaza seating

Austin city hall greenroof project, initiated in 2007

Air-conditioner Condensate Waterfall

"Musicapital Guitar" by Sharon Roy Finch

Interior foyer, stairway and passageways

A 360-degree VR panorama of the Austin city hall (click to activate)

“The form of every city hall expresses the dominant local ideas of civic power and authority at the time it was built.  All that is outside, also is inside [Was innen ist, ist außen], as Goethe observed of all forms.” — Bayard Coll

"Art was not morally neutral but worked in the service of virtue…  Ornament was not crime, but the addition of beauty and instruction to the satisfaction of material needs.  Art began precisely where utility broke off.  Form was not to follow function, but to transcend it. Any evidence of restraint, understatement, or, worst of all, parsimony, will subvert its intention."  — Donald Olsen, The City as a Work of Art

"Not utility, but cultural self-projection"  — Carl Schorske, Fin-de-Siècle Vienna

"The chief function of the city is to convert power into form, energy into culture, dead matter into the living symbols of art, biological reproduction into social creativity." -- Lewis Mumford, The City in History