Rice University

My good friend Dr. Mike Gustafson was down in Houston to do the radio broadcast of this past weekend's Texas Tech at Rice baseball series. While there, he very kindly took a bunch of photos of the tree-lined Rice campus. They appear below. 

Rice University is an elite academic institution, nestled alongside Hermann Park and the city's art-museum and medical districts. 

Rice has many unique features. One is its small enrollment -- 2,600 undergrads as of 1987 -- although that will be changing. Another is the system of residential colleges, like Oxford, Cambridge, Harvard, and Yale.* Anyway, with no further ado, let's get to the photos!

At the heart of the campus is the main quad. Filling in the two ends of the quad are Lovett Hall (Administration)...

... and Fondren Library.

Behind Fondren Library is the Rice Memorial Chapel and Campanile.

Rice also features various amenities, from the Welcome Center for prospective students and their families (below, left) to the Faculty Club in Cohen House (right).

According to the website Historic Houston, "In the early years the school’s strongest majors were science and engineering." Rice has expanded its profile in many other disciplines, however. Just in the past decade, the university has introduced many unique facilities in the arts, for example. These include the Moody Center for the Arts (opened 2017)...

...Brockman Hall for Opera (2020)...

and the James Turrell Skyspace (sometimes referred to as the Skyscape; 2012), a distinctive looking structure for exhibitions linking light, space, and music...

The roof is 72 X 72 feet and, as shown in this video, can be illuminated in different colors for different shows, with musical accompaniment.

Rice also hosts the Baker Institute for Public Policy, named after Bush-family associate and former U.S. Secretary of State James Baker (left), and the Jones Graduate School of Business (right).

Finally, we have a couple of the athletic facilities. Back around 1950, someone had the great idea to build a 70,000-seat football stadium for a school that enrolled only a few thousand students (and thus did not have a large alumni base, either). Thus is the origin of Rice Stadium. Other than its vast seas of empty seats on game day, it is a nice facility. As seen in the following photo (and in this aerial shot), long sections of stands run from end to end, ensuring that most seats are between the goal lines.

Rice's baseball program, while experiencing a surge of success in the late 1990s and early 2000s (including the 2003 College World Series championship), heavily revamped the old Cameron Field into the new Reckling Park. The following photo presents part of Reckling's exterior.

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*I lived in Houston from 1989-1991 while on a postdoctoral fellowship at the University of Houston. I spent a lot of time at Rice during those days, attending talks and sporting events and just walking around. I never took any pictures on campus because (a) people didn't carry around phones back then with built-in cameras, and (b) I didn't know that, within several years, there would be the Internet and something called "blogs." Hence, I am grateful to Mike for taking these photos.