The library is a playful remodeling of the former department store. Italian-born San Angelo artist Remo Scardigli created cast-concrete panels (depicting mainstays of Texan civic art: cattle, sheep, horses, farming tools, and pump jacks) that were installed above the entrances. Curved brick corners date the original store building shell, while Holzman Moss Bottino’s zigzag glazing and colored-tile forms both complement and contrast with the brick. The 1973 building replaced Korn and Morgan’s five-story Baker-Hemphill Building (1929).

On the same block at 36 W. Beauregard is the eight-story Wells Fargo Building (former Central National Bank) of 1967 by Ford, Powell and Carson and A. B. Swank Jr., who applied traditional Mexican brick vaults, brise soleil, louvered screens, and concrete pergolas to a modernist slab set atop a block-long podium.