Sallyport - The Magazine of Rice University - Summer 2002

Foundations of Higher Learning - On the Bookshelf
Spring 2002
VOL.58, NO.4
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
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