Computational Engineering Building (Duncan Hall) Construction records

The Rice Board of Governors approved the construction of Duncan Hall in 1993. Ken Kennedy, the director of the Center for Research on Parallel Computation, a consortium headquartered at Rice, said, “Computational Engineering is vital to the future of Rice and the nation.” The building was designed to be a state-of-the-art facility for computation engineering. The goal was to bring together several related fields in Computational Engineering and foster collaboration between them. Rice received submissions from hundreds of firms, but ultimately selected British architect John Outram. Outram’s design and approach were unorthodox and exciting but also stirred some controversy. He imbued his design elements with a rich if esoteric symbology and meaning. Outram wrote extensively about the philosophy and symbolism behind the building’s elaborate and colorful design, and his essays can be found be found on his website. The budget for the project was set at $16.5 million. The Groundbreaking Ceremony was held on November 4th, 1994, and featured an exhibition of robots built by grade school students. Construction was completed late in 1996 and the building opened on November 4th. The building is named after Anne and Charles Duncan, Jr. Charles was a former chairman of the University’s Board. Duncan Hall is currently a flagship building for the George R. Brown School of Engineering, and houses the departments of Computational and Applied Mathematics (CAAM), Computer Science (COMP), Statistics (STAT), part of the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering (ECE), the Ken Kennedy Institute for Information Technology, and the offices of the Dean of Engineering.

For more information, visit Dr. Keith Cooper’s Unofficial Duncan Hall Website, the Computer Science Department’s facilities web page, and the website of John Outram and Associates