HOWARD KECK HALL
The Campanile Height: 125 feet Built: 1912 Architects: Cram, Goodhue & Ferguson
THE CAMPANILE
TOUCH
1925
THE SKY
When Cram, Goodhue & Ferguson, Rice’s founding architects, began designing the campus, they envisioned a tower that would hold water. That plan was scrapped in favor of underground tanks, but the idea of a tower so captivated then-President Edgar Odell Lovett that the architects sought a practical function to justify one. The result was the Campanile, the campus’s first and most impressive tower. Built to decoratively mask the smokestack for the Power House, it is still used to vent steam. In the beginning, the Campanile was simply described as campanilelike; it didn’t have a capital “C” until after the publication of the first edition of the “Campanile” yearbook in 1916. The hipped tile eave that originally hooded the top was removed when the tower was rebuilt in 1930 following a lightning strike. Architectural historian Stephen Fox calls the Campanile Rice’s “most ambiguous component … because it has no visible base. It is always seen from a distance.”
Rice is famous for being the modestly sized university that produces towering achievements in teaching and research. In keeping with that idea, the modestly sized Rice campus displays a few “towering achievements” of its own.
Howard Keck Hall Height: 82 feet Built: 1925 Architects: William Ward Watkin and Cram & Ferguson
Photos by Tommy LaVergne Text by Christopher Dow
1912
With thanks to: “The Campus Guide: Rice University,” by Stephen Fox (Princeton Architectural Press, 2001); “A Walking Tour of Rice University,” by James C. Morehead Jr. (Rice University Press, 1990); “A History of Rice University: The Institute Years, 1907–1963,” by Fredericka Meiners (Rice University Studies, 1982); and Susann Glenn of Rice University’s Facilities, Engineering and Planning department.
Originally known as the Chemistry Building and then as Dell Butcher Hall, Howard Keck Hall is a storehouse of scientific symbols, a number of which are located on the building’s tower. Most notable are those that use contemporary representations to depict the first part of the periodic table of elements. The tower was built to house a mechanical system for venting the laboratories.