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Chapter four THE LAUNCHING OF THE NEW UNIVERSITY When the Rice trustees engaged Edgar Odell Lovett as president of the Rice Institute for the Advancement of Literature, Science, and Art, they fully expected him personally to plan and lead the development of all phases of the new university, and that is precisely how Lovett understood his role. So when, at his initial board meeting following the round-the-world trip, he in his own words “laid before them a tentative programme of what I thought was the next thing to do,” and they gave him “a free hand,” Lovett began to take action on an interrelated series of initiatives. He understood that an architect had to be chosen and a general design plan for the university agreed upon. He knew that he had to seek and gain commitments from a range of faculty members that covered the fields initially to be taught. And he knew that qualified students had to be recruited to be in place when the buildings were ready and the faculty on hand. At the culmination of these three efforts would be the beginning of classes, but Lovett was soon planning a grandiose opening ceremony quickly to follow that would announce to the world the birth of an infant university that he was confident would one day be an academic giant. These were large tasks, and with public pressure in Houston mounting to see the fruition of William Marsh Rice’s dream, Lovett well knew in the spring and summer of 1909 that it would take equal measures of hard work, creativity, and good luck to bring to life the vision of a university he had begun to fashion during those months of tiring travel. The idea most firmly in Lovett’s mind from the beginning about planning the new university was its architecture—but the consistency of architectural vocabulary, not any particular design. Lovett’s insistence on unity of architectural style was probably a result of his having studied at the Thomas Jefferson–designed University of Virginia, with its exquisite Lawn and two Ranges of secondary buildings, all of the same color 90 University Builder brick, connected (on the Lawn) by white-columned porticos and (on the Ranges) by brick cloisters. In 1892 the whole effect must have been stunning to young Lovett, whose prior collegiate experience had been at two small colleges without such an architectural heritage. Afterward he had spent a summer at the University of Chicago with its impressive and handsomely designed plant underway, and in 1907, before Lovett left Princeton, it had signed an agreement with a prominent American architect, Ralph Adams Cram, to develop a long-range master plan for campus construction. And of course during his world trip Lovett had been much taken with the architectural unity being proposed for a new series of building at the University of Rome. So this much was set in Lovett’s mind from the moment he began thinking about the construction of facilities for the new Rice Institute. By now the Rice Institute had offices on the eleventh floor of Houston’s new tallest skyscraper, the Scanlan Building, at 405 Main Street between Preston and Prairie. Shortly before embarking on the world tour, Lovett had written a letter to several architectural firms (only the draft of his letter is extant ), dangling before them the prospect of a spectacular commission that they would no doubt be glad to know about; he obviously expected that the firms would reply, as they did. This letter, in draft form at least, pointed out that “this institution starts with an endowment of seven million dollars, and should rank eventually with the representative universities of the country. We hope to have an equipment as conspicuous for its beauty as for its utility, in an architecture adapted to the climatic conditions of its environment as well as to the educational ends of its foundation.” It was the responses to this letter announcing what in essence became an informal architectural competition that the board laid before Lovett on his first meeting with them after the world trip, and on the basis of these replies the board asked him to travel to the Northeast to meet with several of the firms. The location of the new university was finally established at the same time. For several years the board had been discussing the optimal size of a campus, having quickly determined that the existing downtown location was too small. Lovett had even...

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