If you were to construct a giant dome over the Houston campus of Rice University, you’d have a pretty good museum of architectural movements over the last century. The school, which was founded in 1912, has been a patron of ambitious architecture from the start, with its very first buildings, designed by Ralph Adams Cram, a sui generis mashup of historic styles. Recent projects by Michael Maltzan, KieranTimberlake, and Rogers Partners join a legacy of name-brand architecture.
The latest addition to this tradition comes from the German-American firm Barkow Leibinger. “Rice is kind of an incubator for architecture,” says Frank Barkow, a founding partner. The firm’s 148,000-square-foot Sid Richardson residential college, completed earlier this year, is a trio of linked structures (two, five, and 12 stories) that sits alongside the building it was commissioned to replace, a 14-story Brutalist tower designed by the Houston firm Neuhaus & Taylor, which opened in 1971. The future of this decommissioned tower is undetermined, though Barkow would like to see it repurposed. “Our building is very much in dialogue with it,” he says, noting that the new college structure wraps around it on two sides. “It would be my hope to save it.”
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