The building has been restored and is now the 1940 Air Terminal Museum. It is open Tuesday to Saturday from 10 to 5 and Sunday from 1 to 5. Admission is $5 for adults and $2 for children. Featured are many items from the early days of passenger aviation.
Visit their Website for more information.
From the PDF File Houston Municipal Airport Terminal - National Register of Historic Places Registration Form
Art Deco and Streamline Moderne
"The Houston Municipal Terminal is a rare surviving example of Streamline Moderne airport architecture, rarer still that it remains in its original site, facing active taxiways and runways on an operating airport serving commercial airline traffic, as it was intended. Many contemporary modernistic airport terminals around the United States have either been demolished (Meacham Field, Ft. Worth, Texas; Washington Airport, Wash., D.C.; Imeson Field, Jacksonville, Florida; Baltimore Airport, Baltimore, Maryland; Great Falls International, Great Falls, Montana; Greater Pittsburgh Airport, Allegheny, Pennsylvania; Nashville International, Nashville, Tennessee, etc.), moved to another site at the airport (Newark Liberty Airport, Newark, New Jersey; Manchester Airport, Manchester, New Hampshire), or the building has survived but the airport that the terminal served has ceased to exist (Grand Central Terminal, Glendale Airport, Los Angeles; Wichita Municipal Airport, Wichita, Kansas; Pan American flying boat terminal, Miami, Florida), or the airport still exists, but the context of scheduled commercial airline service and its passengers has moved to another airport (Lunken Field, Cincinnati, Ohio; Shushan (Lakefront) Airport, New Orleans, Louisiana). The terminal is completely authentic in its context, and has a high degree of integrity of location, feeling, setting and association."
"The integrity of setting is enhanced by the presence nearby of aircraft hangars and maintenance workspaces that were present during the terminal’s heyday. Among these, the original art deco hangar designed by Joseph Finger and constructed at the same time to accompany the terminal is near the building and still occupied by the successor to the airline to whom it was originally leased in the 1940s. The integrity of association has been maintained by the utilization of the renovated Terminal as an aviation museum featuring the history and artifacts of the airlines that used the building from 1940 to 1954, and by the continued hosting of aeronautical aids to navigation in the form of the ADS-B antenna and transmitters. The high level of integrity of feeling, workmanship, design and materials has been maintained by the careful series of interior and exterior restoration efforts undertaken by the city and by HAHS."
"Professionals in a variety of disciplines believe the terminal to be nationally significant and the best extant example of its type. Oliver James, a student of the flow of people through physical space, says, “The best surviving early airport terminal is the 1940 Houston Municipal Airport.” David Gebhard, writing in his book, The National Trust Guide to Art Deco in America, says, “One of the few that have survived…this terminal offers a rare glimpse of what a late 1930s airport was like.” Architect Howard Hill puts it succinctly: “This is the best example of 1930s air terminal architecture left in the United States.”
"The term “Art Deco” did not come into use until the 1960s, deriving from a retrospective of design and architecture of the 1920s and 1930s that owe their origin to the 1925 Paris Exposition Internationale des Arts Décoratifs et Industriels Modernes. The exposition was widely publicized and the taste for Art Deco style in the arts and architecture spread throughout the United States. Art Deco is the antecedent of Streamline Moderne. The event that separates high Art Deco from Streamline Moderne is the Wall Street Crash of 1929. Prior to that, the exuberance of the Jazz Age was exemplified in high Art Deco architecture by vertical skyscrapers with ziggurat motifs, setbacks, geometric ornamentation, sunrise patterns, the use of expensive materials, and the rich use of ornament in public interiors with accompanying murals. Afterward, the excesses of the 1920s gave way to the austerity of the 1930s, during which the City of Houston at least briefly turned off its street lights due to the lack of public funds to pay for the electricity. Streamline Moderne architecture in the 1930s began to emphasize “simpler, aerodynamic lines and forms” and the use of “smooth surfaces, curved corners” and horizontal lines that mimicked movement, the flow of air, and symbolized industrial progress. Rich ornamentation with expensive materials was replaced with the use of simpler, less expensive and utilitarian machine-made materials such as aluminum and linoleum. Joseph Finger’s career spanned both decades, and he produced both high Art Deco and Streamline Moderne civic and corporate structures in Houston and the region."
Architect Joseph Finger (1887-1953)
"Born in Austria, Joseph Finger was educated in Bielitz, immigrated to the U.S in 1905, and settled in Houston in 1908. He arrived in Houston in 1908 “with a cancelled railway ticket, $10 in his purse and looking for a job.” A versatile and prolific architect, Finger is perhaps best known for his design of office, hotel, retail, and industrial buildings. Early in his career. Finger had designed the Panama Hotel (1912-13), the 11-story American National Insurance Company Building (1912-1913; demolished), and the Model Laundry Building (1913; Galveston Central Business District, National Register, 1984), all in Galveston. The American National Building was designed for W.L. Moody, Jr., the brother-in-law of Sealy Hutchings. In 1923, Finger also designed the Broadmoor Apartments in Galveston for Moody. By 1929 Finger’s Houston commissions included the Bender Hotel, South Texas Commercial National Bank, First Church of Christ, Scientist, the Plaza Hotel, Auditorium Hotel, and William Penn Hotel. Other notable works include the American National Insurance Building of Galveston, the 10-story Charleston Hotel in Lake Charles, LA, and the Vaughan Hotel in Port Arthur. His residential work included the James Marion West mansion in Clear Lake, about 25 miles south of downtown Houston."
"Finger was one of the first architects in Houston to experiment with the stark, abstracted, and stylized forms of modernistic architecture, beginning with his Congregation Beth Israel Temple (1924; NRHP 1984). During the 1920s, he produced Houston masterpieces of what the historian David Gebhard has termed the zig-zag phase of modemistic design with the Houston Turn-Verein clubhouse (1929; NRHP 1978; demolished), the A.C. Burton Company auto agency (1929, demolished), and the interiors of the West Ranch House at Clear Lake (1930; NRHP 1994). Beginning in 1930 with the design of the Houston Paper Company Building (1930, demolished). Finger began to produce a more restrained version of modemistic design that Gebhard designates as stripped classical. The Temple of Rest at Beth Israel Cemetery (1935), the Montgomery County Courthouse in Conroe (1936; extensively altered), Houston City Hall (1939, National Register, 1990), and the Houston Municipal Airport Terminal (1940) are examples by Finger of this phase. Finger died on February 6, 1953. At the time of his death the Harris County Courthouse was under construction, a building he designed with George W. Rustay, his business partner since 1944."