William J. Holloway Jr. United States Courthouse, Federal courthouse in Oklahoma City, United States.
The William J. Holloway Jr. United States Courthouse is a limestone and granite federal building in Oklahoma City with a central colonnade at its entrance. Inside, it holds thirteen courtrooms arranged within two flanking wings on either side of the main structure.
By the mid-1950s the federal government had outgrown the 1912 Post Office and Courthouse, and Judge Alfred P. Murrah led the effort to fund a new building directly north of it. Oklahoma architect Dow Gumerson designed the five-story structure, approved in 1959 and completed in 1961 at a cost of $7 million. It was renamed in 2016 for William Judson Holloway Jr. (1923–2014), a former chief judge of the Tenth Circuit.
Two bas-reliefs by sculptor Bernard Emerson Frazier decorate the side entrances: Unity (1966), on the east, shows a Native American man and woman with two European settlers; Destiny (1967), on the west, shows a man and a woman with an eagle behind them. Frazier first designed nude figures but made them clothed after a local protest.
The building sits in the federal complex on West Reno Avenue, directly north of the 1912 U.S. Post Office and Courthouse, with the Murrah Parking Garage and Plaza alongside. Courtrooms occupy the third and fifth floors, so expect screening at the street-level entrance before reaching them.
The fifth-floor courtroom of the Tenth Circuit has a circular lightwell set directly above the judge's bench, ringed by linear light sources. Courtroom panels use walnut veneer that Dow Gumerson chose himself at a Savannah lumber mill, book-matched so the grain forms mirror images.
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