A floor to ceiling metal screen built in the 1950s by a local artisan was brought back to life and will soon greet faculty and staff at the ground entrance of the University of the Incarnate Word’s newly restored Founders Hall.
The relic came as an unexpected find that had been buried in the walls of what was once the headquarters of telecommunications giants Southwestern Bell and AT&T.
“That’s from the 1955 building, Theodore Voss built those and we thought they were lost,” said architect Ryan Yaden pointing at the second portion of the metal structure that now sits atop a stairwell in the new events hall.
“When they were doing the demolition of the building, they were found buried in one of the walls,” he said.
Yaden and his team at Lake Flato, an architecture design firm based out of San Antonio, Austin and Portland, Oregon, led the design and restoration project of Founders Hall, a historic building that will expand by 20% an otherwise landlocked University of the Incarnate Word main campus’ footprint along Broadway and Hildebrand.
UIW purchased the nine-story, 380,000 square-foot building with an attached 500-space parking garage in the spring of 2019, and AT&T remained a tenant of the building until the end of that year, according to Bexar County records.
The building sits on 10 acres of land and is located right across the street from the main campus at 4119 Broadway. It was the answer to the university’s otherwise inability to add classroom, office and parking space to its main campus, said UIW President Thomas Evans.
The university has expanded some of its programs outside of its main campus with the School of Osteopathic Medicine located in South San Antonio and the Schools of Rehabilitation Sciences and Optometry located on the Northwest Side.
“It’s great to have all that territory covered all over San Antonio, but the reason we have [these schools] elsewhere instead of our campus is there was no room,” Evans said. “So this was really a generational opportunity for us.”
University officials have not disclosed how much it’s spent on the purchase of the building and renovation of the first four floors. But Evans says this is a “multi-million dollar project” and since 2019, the private university has announced a handful of large gifts for the project.
“The gifts that we received to make this happen, it was I think a testament to the work that we’re doing and the momentum that we’ve built and where we’re going,” Evans said. “And it’s what others hope to see for San Antonio. It is for the UIW learning community for certain, but it’s also much bigger than that.”
Starting this fall, the first four floors of Founders Hall will house the School of Media and Design, the School of Math, Science and Engineering, the International Affairs Department, the Liza and Jack Lewis Center of the Americas, the University Police Department and the Student Health Center.
Yaden and his team were tasked with turning a traditional office space into more than 50 classrooms and labs, over a dozen specialty rooms such as film, television and audio recording studios, conference rooms and gathering spaces including the main events hall and an auditorium.
Each floor is connected by a grand staircase, and at each level the stairwell is surrounded by sitting and study areas where students, faculty and staff can both work and be around people.
“There’s this idea we call it the ‘irresistible stair’ where everyone comes together, people who are on the third floor or the second floor or the first floor that might not normally interact, get to interact there,” Yaden said. “So we wanted to put a lot of energy into that space and make sure everyone is kind of rubbing shoulders in that space.”
Preserving history
The university also had to adhere to the requirements of the Texas Historic Commission when renovating the building, which is among San Antonio’s registered historic buildings.
The mid-century modern building was originally built in 1956 and designed by architect Atlee Ayres as the headquarters for USAA. It later housed Southwestern Bell, before multiple consolidations that led to the telecommunications giant AT&T taking over the building.
The building was known for having a bank of escalators that ran across the full length of the building. These could not be renovated to be used by students, Yaden said, but some of the structure will eventually be featured in the not-yet renovated upper levels.
“There was a long conversation with the Texas Historic Commission,” Yaden said. “They ended up being great partners in this and collaborating and trying to work with us to determine what were those items that were historically significant and how we could preserve them. We did actually preserve some of the escalators.”
Founders Hall’s name and design also pays homage to the history of UIW and its mission. The building is named after the Sisters of Charity of the Incarnate Word, who founded the university in the late 1800s after arriving to San Antonio from France in 1869 with a mission to care for people during a cholera epidemic and to establish the city’s first hospital, the Santa Rosa Infirmary.
With this history in mind, the main entrance to Founders Hall is flanked by the offices of International Affairs, the Liza and Jack Lewis Center of the Americas, and Student Health Services.
“The Sisters of Charity of the Incarnate Word have always been international and they were rooted in health professions,” Evans said. “So that first floor as you walk in to the right, you have our health clinic, which serves everyone. And then on the other side you have international [affairs]… because every program has an opportunity to do something internationally.”
The Lewis Center for the Americas was the first program announced to be headquartered at Founders Hall. In Dec. 2019, the university received an anonymous contribution of $5 million to establish the center, as well as a separate $1 million anonymous donation to support the acquisition and restoration of the former AT&T building.
The third seven-figure gift came in October 2024, when the Elma Dill Russell Spencer Foundation, managed by the family of UIW’s former board chair Jack Lewis III, pledged $5 million to support the work at Founders Hall.
In 2025 Gary Joeris, CEO of Joeris General Contractors, also donated $500,000 to the project. His company had already been contracted to work on the project, starting with the pre-construction and demolition, Joeris said, a process he described as a big undertaking upfront versus projects where you start construction from scratch.
“All that up front work took about a year,” Joeris said. “All the planning, all the demolition, prepping it to take on the new construction project, evaluating all the old mechanical and electrical equipment, seeing what could be used, what couldn’t be used.”
To bring the building up to code, many of its walls had to be stripped down and most of these mechanical and electrical components had to be replaced, Yaden said. And every step of the way, they had to consider what aspects of the building should remain to preserve the historical architecture.
That process led to keeping the building’s original precast terrazzo flooring at its main entrance and a diamond seal that once read USAA and was modified to read UIW. In the main events room, which is now named the Col. Charles E. Cheever Legacy Event Center, they preserved a tiered, 3D, ceiling structure that is now lined with soft lighting.
The architects not only worked to restore these aspects of the building, but to also highlight them. That’s how the once buried metal screen found two new homes, one at the ground-level entrance and another at the top of the event center’s staircase.
“We got Ted Voss to come out, take his grandfather’s screens apart, strip them down, repaint them, and then reinstall them,” Yaden said. “Ted is a third-generation San Antonio craftsperson. And we then worked with Ted to do a new updated metal screen.”
This new metal screen is the focal point of the grand staircase connecting each level of the building. And soon they will also add murals at each level and a sitting area, intended to be a meditative space that will feature a glass installation.
While there was a lot of change happening on the inside of this building, officials said the outside of the structure was in good enough condition to keep with minimal changes, other than the UIW sign that went up in December 2020.
The San Antonio Report partners with Open Campus on higher education coverage.
