I’ll bet you thought I’d forgotten about the library additions, didn’t you? Wrong!
Here’s the first—and I think the weirder—one. When Rayzor Hall was built in 1962, they decided it needed to be connected to Fondren by a cloister in order to reflect Anderson Hall on the other side. Here’s a picture of the newly completed Rayzor with the cloister sticking off the side:
The problem, though, is that while Anderson and Fondren were built at roughly the same time and were made to fit neatly together, Rayzor was built over a decade later and it seemed that no thought had been given to how a building there would relate to the library. Maddeningly, I cannot find a single photo of the new cloisters being built. The best I can do is this shot of Rayzor itself under construction that gives us one last look at the original building. (You can just make out here five reliefs over the four windows on the left. Four of them have been moved over to the front where the door is, but I don’t know where the fifth is.)
And here is the result. It’s just ungainly–the windows on the south front disappear as does the sense of back and forth that the original design produced.
Bonus: Here’s some crazy talk from 1957.
Extra Bonus: An alert and very sharp-eyed reader sends this from the sidewalk in front of the BRC.
What is that? Let’s have a closer look.
That strange sound you hear is me, working hard to suppress a smart remark.