Foundations of Higher Learning

The sight of Rice’s first building standing alone on a muddy Texas prairie in 1912 prompted Rice faculty member Julian Huxley to comment, “The building before us . . . seemed as new and real as a new species of Bird-of-Paradise. . . . Here it stood, brilliant, astounding, enduring.” Huxley had seen the great architecture of Europe, so his opinion of the Administration Building, now known as Lovett Hall, was solidly grounded.

By 1920, Rice University consisted of fewer than 10 structures, but its architecture had already exerted a major influence on the development of Houston at a time when the city was little more than an adolescent town struggling to become a world-class metropolis. Today, Rice is an outstanding architectural gem of the nation’s fourth-largest city. The evolution of the campus has been treated in several books, but never so thoroughly as in Rice University: An Architectural Tour (Princeton Architectural Press, 2001) by noted Texas architectural historian Stephen Fox ’73, with photographs by Paul Hester and a foreword by Rice architecture dean Lars Lerup.

“The architecture of Rice University represents an extraordinary assertion of will,” Fox writes in his introduction. “It was designed to represent the identity of a cultural institution that, because it was newly created, had no identity, and to situate this institution in a historical tradition of high culture that was largely invented. Architect Ralph Adams Cram and first president Edgar Odell Lovett ‘socially constructed’ an identity for this new university by using space to shape consensus on what was distinctive about Rice as a community of learning, scholarship, and culture.” The introductory chapter goes on to give a brief but thorough chronicle of Rice and its physical growth from Ralph Adams Cram’s General Plan of 1910, through César Pelli’s Master Plan of 1983, to well into the beginning of the building boom that is now taking place.

The book is arranged as a series of eight walking tours. Each tour description begins with a three-dimensional overview map of that area of the campus and then goes into detail about the spaces and buildings there. Fox’s text and Hester’s photos stress the underlying continuity of the campus, both structural and visual, while not overlooking—or remaining uncritical of—the occasional departures from Cram’s General Plan, such as the science buildings constructed in 1960s. Along the way, Fox revels in the details but also reveals why Cram’s buildings and spaces have had such a powerful effect on the imaginations of the generations of students and faculty who have called Rice home. Despite the way Cram’s original plan has been expanded and revised into several series and groupings of courts, the campus continues to be intensely evocative of learning and scholarship—as visitors often comment, the Rice campus is how a university should look.

This may well be the definitive book on the Rice campus and architecture, at least until the current phase of construction is completed a few years from now. We can only hope that Fox will then revise this excellent volume to take in the new additions.

—Christopher Dow