The venerable and verdant campus of Rice University in Houston began in 1910 with a Beaux-Arts master plan by Cram, Goodhue and Ferguson of Boston. Over the next two decades, architect Ralph Adams Cram began to fill this axial arrangement of lawns, courtyards, and quadrangles with a series of handsome brick-and-stone buildings, distinguished by arcades and spires, in a fanciful variation on the Byzantine Revival style.
In 1947, Anderson Hall, designed by Staub and Rather of Houston, provided a new home for the School of Architecture in a prominent location on the main academic quad. John Staub had been Cram’s student at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and, even though Modernism was on the rise, he chose to emulate his teacher’s eclectic historicism, albeit with more abstract and planar detailing. In 1981, British architects James Stirling and Michael Wilford completed an addition so modest and unassuming in its adherence to this idiom that Philip Johnson, peering from the window of his limousine in mock bewilderment, quipped “I came to see Jim [Stirling]’s building but couldn’t find it.”