How big is the UT Austin campus? It's all relative

A graphic study in size

By Cindy Widner@CurbedAustin Apr 17, 2017, 6:51pm CDT

wide shot of UT campus, Main tower on right, football stadium on left, at sunset — UT Austin Campus

In early March, thanks to locally run lawn-care site (“and improbably prodigious fount of city stats,” as we noted then) Lawnstarter, we had some fun with graphics and maps, comparing Austin’s population density to that of major cities around the world.

This time, the conceit is perhaps more frivolous, which of course gives it the potential to be even more fun. Lawnstarter did the same thing with the University of Texas at Austin campus, this time comparing its size to that of a couple of cities, other state universities, and landmarks far and wide—including Mar-a-Lago, the current U.S. president’s golf club and retreat in Florida.

As Lawnstarter’s John Egan notes, UT was nicknamed “the Forty Acres” around the 1839, when a 40-acre parcel of land called College Hill was designated to be the future campus. Its square footage has grown to more than 10 times that size by now, to 431 acres.