RTC Office Building

Location: Riviera, Texas

The Riviera Telephone Company (RTC) was founded in 1934 with a single switchboard operating out of the general store in the small community of Riviera, Texas. In 1937, the Colston family purchased the phone company for $1500 and a cow. The business is now operated by the fourth generation of the Colston family and has expanded to include Gulf Coast Broadband.

By 2016, RTC had outgrown their early 1970s brick office building. After programming and concept design work, renovation plans for the original building were abandoned in favor of moving forward wit ha new ‘corporate’ office building and utilizing the existing 1970s building as a field office.

The site for the new office building (directly across the street from the original building) had immense significance to the Owners as the original family homestead site.

Along with a rigorous program, design elements include:

• Working within the tight footprint of the site’s many mature existing oak trees.

• Design for access to quality daylighting.

• A suspended slab foundation to keep building loads off of the mature tree root structures.

• Design for stringent security protocols.

• Concrete primary structural walls within hollow core concrete plank floor and roof decking for resilience, durability, and energy efficiency.

Design cues are taken from historic Riviera Telephone Company imagery:

• Drooping lines between telephone poles inspire the open office ceiling cloud.

• Reception area décor is a direct metaphor to glass insulated telephone pole cross arms.

• The original vintage oak switchboard displayed in the lobby inspires the exterior brick patterns and motifs at both the building and the generator enclosure.