Just before I left town last week I got a phone call from former Rice trustee Raymond Brochstein, ’55. He promised that while I was gone he would bring in a packet of aerial photographs he had taken as part of a project while he was an architecture student. When I arrived this morning I made a beeline for them and was not disappointed. Only one shows the Rice campus but it is a stunner:
Look at that! Do you know what that is?! It’s the back of everything!
I’m still swooning.
I don’t believe I have ever before seen an image of the back of the mech lab and power plant, let alone the back of the Engineering Annex. And I’ve certainly never seen Abercrombie from this angle. I’ll be spending significant time with this one. I’m so happy. Sigh.
Bonus: Most of the pictures were of the city, but it’s a city with which I am not familiar. I can’t find any way to get my bearings. Here are a few to see if anyone can help me. What am I looking at?
And finally, here’s something else interesting. There was a strip of negatives in the envelope so I had to drag out a light box to have a look at them. Most of them matched the prints, but there were some that weren’t printed and there were also some prints that didn’t have a corresponding negative, including the shot of the Rice campus.
Which means that there must be another roll somewhere.
Extra bonus:
