Rice Building Workshop Photo BY JEFF FITLOW/RICE UNIVERSITy; Group shot with Dean Whiting in Madrid PHOTO BY TANVI SHARMA; Portrait courtesy Sarah Whiting
and Michael Wilford of London as architects. Stirling and Wilford’s alterations and additions to Anderson Hall (1981), their first building in the US, attained critical recognition, encouraging the university to hire celebrated architects to design new campus buildings. During the 1980s, alumni and faculty members John J. Casbarian and Danny Marc Samuels, practicing with their partner Robert H. Timme as Taft Architects, became Houston’s most publicized young architects. Mitchell supported a dramatic expansion of the publicly oriented programs of the Rice Design Alliance in the late 1970s and publication of RDA’s journal Cite: The Architecture and Design Review of Houston, which began in 1982 with Gordon G. Wittenberg as editor. During Mitchell’s tenure, Drexel Turner turned the Farish Gallery in Anderson Hall into one of the foremost architecture exhibition spaces in the US. A bequest from Houston philanthropist Nina J. Cullinan in 1983 resulted in endowment of the Craig Francis Cullinan Visiting Professorship in Architecture and Art, inaugurated by Kenneth Frampton in 1985. Frampton was followed by J. B. Jackson, Spiro Kostof, Colin Rowe, Robert Irwin, Leo Steinberg, and Rem Koolhaas. Jack Mitchell died suddenly in 1992, three years after stepping down as dean. His successor, Paul Kennon of CRS, had died suddenly in 1990 during the first year of his deanship, and Kennon’s successor, Alan Balfour, left Rice at the end of 1991 to become chairman of the Architectural Association in London. Paul Kennon’s family and friends endowed a biennial symposium in his memory; the first Kennon Symposium, “The City Imagined,” was held in 1992. Lars Lerup, a Swedish-born architect and professor of architecture at the University of California, Berkeley, was named dean of architecture in 1993. Lerup, whose sixteen-year tenure was second in length only to Watkin’s, energized the school with his faculty appointments, including Carlos Jiménez, Houston’s most publicized young architect of the 1990s. Lerup’s engagement in international architectural discourse was reflected in the dissemination of terminology he originated (“stim” and “dross”) to conceptualize Houston patterns of urban sprawl. Holders of the Cullinan professorship during Lerup’s tenure included Bruce Mau, Charles Waldheim, Roberto Segre, Luis Fernández-Galiano, Dave Hickey, Peter Cook, and two Rice alumni, New York architects Rob Rogers and Charles Renfro. Lerup also revived
the Architecture at Rice series, which became a vehicle for publishing both faculty and studentgenerated work. the school of architecture welcomed its first woman dean, Sarah Whiting, who came from Princeton University. Dean Whiting shares her predecessor’s intense involvement with the global context in which architectural theory is now produced. She and her husband, associate professor Ron Witte, also maintain an architectural practice, as do professors Cannady, Casbarian and Samuels, Wittenberg, Jiménez, Nonya Grenader, Douglas Oliver, and partners Dawn Finley and Mark Wamble. Cannady, Casbarian, Grenader, Samuels, Rives Taylor, and Anderson Todd are all fellows of the AIA. Jiménez served as a juror for the Pritzker Prize in Architecture from 2001 to 2011. Dean Whiting’s faculty appointments — Grant Alford, Neeraj Bhatia, Scott Colman, Reto Geiser, Andrea Manning, Bryony Roberts, Troy Schaum, Jesús Vassallo — renew Rice students’ access to the latest trends in critical thinking. Recent books by Lerup (One Million Acres and No Zoning), Christopher Hight (Architectural Principles in the Age of Cybernetics), Witte (Counting), Farès el-Dahdah (Lúcio Costa: Brasília’s Superquadras), and Albert Pope (Ladders)
In 2010
Below Rice
Building Workshop students around a model of the Menil Collection café, with Nonya Grenader (all in black), Workshop co-director, and Danny Samuels (green shirt), director. Dean Sarah Whiting (below left and also center of group, with Carlos Jiménez) poses with students in the Plaza Mayor, Madrid, Spring 2012.
9/10 2012
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