There have been more construction projects on campus this summer than I can ever remember before, with yet more to begin soon. One of these might seem mundane or even homely but fills me with joy: the renovation of Anderson Biology. Until now the undergraduate teaching labs were down in the basement. They had serious accessibility issues and then once you got there conditions were . . . less than optimal. Similarly, the labs across the front of the building had seen some seriously hard use in the almost sixty years since the building was completed. (I’m not even going to show you the “before” pictures.) So they fixed it! Those old labs have been redone as the new UG teaching labs, finished just in time for the beginning of classes this week, and they are just beautiful. Here’s a peek of move-in overlapping with punch list:
And here’s roughly the same space at move-in day in 1958. Apparently if you hang around long enough you will see everything twice.
Bonus: I have it on good authority that the marble panels that didn’t get used here are being saved for future projects.
Extra Bonus: Eclipse mania. I was more interested in the people watching it than in the thing itself. Some of the photography rigs were amazing.
Melissa, Hi.
As an old timer I am often disoriented by the names of things, like buildings.
E.G., I would in this posting have liked to know, for sure, to which building you were referring and perhaps its position on the campus map.
Thanks, Gene. I will endeavor to do this in the future.
And for those others of us, more recent, but still out of touch, all those buildings which had different names when we were around…Bio was just Bio back when…
As a Rice undergraduate, I attended Math 100, Biology 100, Chemistry 100 and 120, English 4__ (“Cowboys and Indians”), in the “Chemistry Lecture Hall”.
Many years later, I then took CE courses in that same building, then called Butcher Hall.
(I later player Senior Softball with his grson or grgrandson, here in Baytown.)
I believe the building has a new name now.
P.S. Personally, I liked it best as Butcher Hall, because Valhalla was then in the basement, and my bride and I could drink beer there before the CE courses, as well as bring beer up to the lecture.
I won’t say that fact prompted me to select courses in Butcher Hall, but it did NOT hurt.
P.P.S., In 1952-56, the basement was storage for the lawn mowing equipment. But there could have been other things therein of which I was unaware.