Norwood Tower, Gothic Revival skyscraper in Downtown Austin, United States

Norwood Tower is a 16-story Gothic Revival office building in downtown Austin, with a facade covered in finials, gargoyles, and tracery patterns made from cast concrete panels designed to look like limestone. Attached to the building is the Motoramp Garage, one of the earliest self-parking structures in the area, where drivers could navigate ramps directly to each floor without any vehicle elevator.

Financier Ollie Osborn Norwood built the tower in 1929 on a downtown parcel where he had first erected the Motoramp Garage, completed in January 1928 as the city's first ramped self-parking garage. At completion it was Austin's tallest commercial building and third tallest structure, after the Texas State Capitol and the Stephen F. Austin Hotel, and the city's first fully air-conditioned office building. Capital National Bank, a ground-floor tenant from 1934, bought the building in 1944 and renamed it; new owners restored it in 1982–83 and renamed it Norwood Tower.

From 1929 to 1964 the tower's maintenance engineer was Clarence Odie Williams, an African-American Austinite with a private office and restroom on site. He opened that restroom to the public, and before the Civil Rights Act of 1964 it was the only public restroom in downtown Austin open to "colored" guests, regularly used by African Americans with business downtown.

The tower is easy to spot from the surrounding streets in downtown Austin, and walking around the block gives good views of both the facade and the upper floors. Stepping back from the building allows you to see the roofline and the overall shape of the upper floors more clearly.

The lower 13 floors of the building follow a square floor plan, while the upper floors shift into a cross shape that changes how the building looks from above. At each corner of those upper levels, there are small rooftop gardens that give the crown of the tower a recognizable pattern when seen from a higher vantage point.