Design Unlimited

Prison, hospital, school, library, bank, church, house, office building—you name it, and Rice professor of architecture William Cannady has probably designed and built one during the past four and a half decades.

“The only type of building I haven’t done is a funeral home,” he jokes.
Cannady’s repertoire includes work in the private and public sectors. The City of Houston, for example, hired him to design a training center for employees. His firm designed Jones Plaza—the focal point of Houston’s cultural district—across from Jones Hall and the Alley Theatre. Last February, the School of Architecture presented “45 Years: William T. Cannady, FAIA, Architect,” an exhibit of sketches, blueprints, models, and photographs from some of the 200 projects that Cannady has worked on as a college student, faculty member, and private architect.

During the 1970s, Cannady designed Lovett Square, a 36-unit project of townhouses that occupies the entire block surrounded by Brazos, Tuam, Bagby, and Anita just south of downtown. “This set an international standard for how to redevelop inner-city urban housing,” Cannady says. “It used land to create a lot of open space and includes garages to hide cars so that they don’t dominate the setting.” He still gets requests from international visitors to look at Lovett Square when they’re in Houston.

Cannady used to live in the house he built on the southwest corner of the intersection of Montrose and Bissonnet. Because it’s located across from two museums, the house had to be sympathetic to the architecture of the museum district, but Cannady also gave it urban qualities for a single-family household.

Other houses he has designed include the “palace-like” home of basketball star Hakeem Olajuwon in Sugar Land and the private residence currently under construction on Rice Boulevard across from the Owls’ football practice field.

Cannady also has lent his architectural expertise to the Rice campus. He served as the design architect for the major renovation of Keith-Wiess Geological Laboratories and M.D. Anderson Biological Laboratories as well as for renovation of the third floor of the Space Science Building, which now houses the Center for Nanoscale Science and Technology.

He was the architect for the most recent addition to Cohen House as well as for the 1975 addition. And along with being chair of the University Parking Committee, Cannady served as architect for the Rice University Parking Study 2000–2010, which provided the basis for the system of gates recently installed at parking lots around campus.

One of Cannady’s most recent projects, the design of the newly relocated Houston Area Women’s Center, couldn’t be included in the exhibit. The center is a shelter for battered women and their children, and its location is confidential. To prevent men from following their children home from school to find out where the shelter is, Cannady designed the new facility with its own schooling complex. “The new center is completely hidden,” he says. “It’s the first of its kind in the nation.” He noted that the only way to enter the center is by ambulance, police escort, or taxi.

Cannady has a bachelor of architecture degree from the University of California–Berkeley and a master’s from Harvard University. He did postgraduate study at University College London. He’s been teaching at Rice since 1964 while maintaining a general practice of his own. His former students are now “all over the place,” he says. A survey of 100 schools of architecture conducted a few years ago revealed that 10 of them—including Harvard’s—were headed by architects Cannady taught.

That makes Cannady proud. So does his election by peers to the College of Fellows of the American Institute of Architects—one of the AIA’s highest honors.

Whether he’s designing a 5,000-acre prison near Huntsville or the Northern Trust Bank near the intersection of Kirby and Westheimer, Cannady views the most challenging aspect of a job as helping the client define the problem of what to build.

“A lot of times they have preconceived something they want to do,” he says. “You have to question what they want to do and why before you start the drawing. You need to make sure you define the problem before you go out and solve it.”

Cannady has intended his buildings to be easy to construct, use, maintain, and enjoy. His teaching and architectural work are rooted in the philosophy of pragmatism, which aspires to preserve tradition while pioneering change.

—B. J. Almond