Cannady Hall, Karamuk Kuo’s recently completed, largely freestanding 2-story building at Rice University in Houston, complements and extends Rice School of Architecture’s Anderson Hall. Anderson was designed by Staub and Rather in 1947 as a simple bar building to anchor the northwest corner of the university’s central academic quadrangle, planned by Cram, Goodhue, and Ferguson in 1910. In 1981 Anderson was quietly expanded by James Stirling and Michael Wilford, who added a second, parallel bar of offices and studios linked to the original with a central jury and exhibition space. This addition suggested a courtyard that Cannady Hall finalized, giving the school a legible precinct with a clear center. The new building mostly houses maker spaces: a large, traditional fabrication shop (for creating models, prototypes, and furniture) and mechanical support space downstairs, and a digital model shop and extensive, unassigned, open work area for students and faculty upstairs, from which you can look down through two double-height voids into the fabrication shop below. Cannady Hall also contains spaces to consider the results of making, in a long 2-story, street-facing public gallery, which can be isolated but has an obvious door to the upstairs work area—and a pinup hallway built over an existing covered loggia that originally linked Anderson to Fondren Library at the ground level and now also links Anderson to Cannady above. Finally, the new building displays the work of making to the campus community. Because Cannady is raised three feet above grade for flooding, the mostly glazed fabrication shop, with workspaces extending onto exterior porches, is easily visible from the surrounding public walkways—even from the reading room of the adjacent library. Cannady Hall, seen in the foreground, has become part of Rice’s central Academic Quad. (Iwan Baan) As an entity, Cannady Hall is a marvelous enigma. You can experience it as temporary or permanent, insertion or fabric, workmanlike or exquisite, freestanding or linked, transparent or opaque, object or field, forward-looking or traditional. Each reading is carefully balanced against the other to achieve what Jeannette Kuo, the supervising partner for this project, describes as “oscillation,” a quality that enlivens the deep pragmatism of the young Swiss architecture firm’s impressive and consistent built work. Seen from a distance, Cannady Hall seems temporary, like one of those straightforward, contextually oblivious, repetitive bay lab buildings that universities occasionally—but urgently—need. Inserted against the dense, dark-green live oak canopy and limestone-and-brick building fabric of the campus, it appears as a simple, mostly enclosed, metal-panel-clad object. Karamuk Kuo designed the building in a way that makes the brick-red upper mass appear to float (Iwan Baan) As you get closer, though, your understanding of the building changes. Stainless steel cladding panels and window wall on the ground floor make the brick-red upper mass appear to float. The prominent gallery bay, visible from the university’s inner loop road, cleverly extends beyond the simple footprint, further upsetting the reading of the whole as a simple box. As you turn the gallery corner into the courtyard, two bays float above, forming a deep porch below and dropping a partly veiled open stair from a bright upstairs entry. Still, these unconventional shifts—there is one more to the bay closest to the library—balance against convention. In conspiracy with Anderson Hall and the Fondren Library, the moves clarify and concentrate public movement. The courtyard now forms a logically shaped, layered threshold to Rice’s central Beaux Arts heart. Close in, what had seemed from afar to be enameled metal panels turn out to be glazed terra-cotta battens, carefully detailed. As you move into the courtyard, the weight and opacity that material brings to the building volume is undercut by the full-height window wall at the ground floor that invites you to see in and through the big fabrication shop. The gallery and the enclosed upper loggia use the same window wall, so you assume the upper floor is also largely transparent. While you can’t see inside because of the angle, the reflection of trees and sky in the ample glass nicely activates the courtyard. The glazed terra-cotta battens were carefully detailed(Iwan Baan) When you eventually arrive inside to the second floor, which is more busily and casually used than the shop below, you realize that the sense of transparency is illusionary. The gallery is isolated from that larger workspace with a wall, and the upper exterior window wall in the courtyard is spandrel, necessary to allow for interior wall space to hang work. But the illusion of transparency is cleverly and surprisingly sustained, as diffuse north light from the repetitive monitors floods in. The interior of the upper floor is organized under the repeating sawtooth skylit bays as an insistent field of steel I-beams painted white. This column grid does not differentiate the floor area into served and service spaces; it is all usable, flowing field space, entirely without hallway. While the repeating bay width is set by the existing loggia, it turns out this dimension is perfect for worktables for individuals or small groups, while providing enough room for passersby to circulate and observe without self-consciousness. Though the column field feels open, every other bay is enclosed with floor-to-ceiling glass layers—two sheets set several inches apart, flush with the beam and columns edges—that either surround the double-height voids over the fabrication shop or isolate areas that serve as project rooms or classrooms. (The layered glass provides acoustic isolation.) These enclosure areas form transparent objects that disrupt free circulation in the field, but the net effect is that you still feel you have a panoptic sense of everything going on both upstairs and down. It’s a compelling and generous space. Interior of the upper floor is organized under the repeating sawtooth skylit bays. (Iwan Baan) So, here are two interestingly related facts: Cannady Hall adds about 22,000 square feet to the school, almost all of it usable by students. But Rice does not intend to admit a greater number of new architecture students. Initiated, developed, and constructed under the watch of three successive deans—Sarah Whiting, John Casbarian, and Igor Marjanović—Cannady Hall stands as concrete recognition by a leading architecture program that its young charges, who are fluent in virtual means, also pressingly need to study, test, and represent in real space, to think by means of material engagement, and to operate in an open, collaborative environment beyond the hermetic screen in an isolated studio. Large, detailed models, built mostly using combinations of digital and hand processes, seem to be everywhere around the school. The faculty I spoke with now expect those. If the programmatic and pedagogic agenda of the new building can be understood as a corrective measure to the consequences of the purely digital processes and representation that architectural design education has come to rely upon, what makes Karamuk Kuo’s building so interesting is its refusal to see this correction as backsliding. On the second floor of Cannady, when school is in session, you will find the motley order of work: an ever-changing scatter of desk stools, layout stands, model bases, worktables, and computer desks surrounded by stacks of model materials, backpacks, empty coffee cups, and lunch containers, all given meter by the casual temporary geometry of power cables and local foci by the temporary placement of laptops and monitors. Given this mess, the effect of the grid of white columns in even light—which, in photos of the cleaned-up space, seems overstated—is remarkable. An overarching sense of order happily prevails over the chaos. Bays were enclosed with floor-to-ceiling glass layers. (Iwan Baan) There are a few areas where the building is less successful. Most are circumstantial and outside the architect’s control. The site dictates that the building is a pavilion, with high visibility for all four elevations. Site hydrology did not allow for a basement, so mechanical spaces, masked with stainless panels, result in a relatively mute west facade facing a prominent public circulation axis across an open field. To help, a public artwork, yet to be commissioned, will be sited there. The second-floor hallway connecting Cannady and Anderson, built over the existing loggia to Fondren, is brilliant inside, but from the main quadrangle side it poses some detailing dilemmas. (The upper link is a necessity for the school to function, but elsewhere in the large quadrangle those corners are left open.) The new link seeks to appear as a preexisting extension of Anderson Hall over the loggia, but the latter cannot bear weight, posing difficult isolation-joint details. In this and a few other moments you sense perhaps the gap between the tolerance expectations of a Swiss firm detailing its first American building and the ability of even a solid American contractor like Linbeck to deliver. While the architecture of Cannady Hall goes out of its way to make clear its primary structure and assembly—and the architects and school to explain the recyclability of its major materials—my one larger complaint is that I wish the building would as clearly communicate its active environmental performance, which was a concern for Karamuk Kuo: Its target for this building was a 50 percent reduction in energy usage over standard practices. This seems low, but the achievable efficiency is skewed by the programmatic need to leave large window wall areas of the fabrication shop open to Houston’s hot and humid air and because the gallery has to work with its window wall blackout curtains drawn or fully raised. Karamuk Kuo typically integrates active and insulative systems to the point that they disappear. Here, given that it’s an educational facility for young architects, I wish they had been more didactic. Inside, the workspaces flood with light from repetitive monitors. (Iwan Baan) But that’s a minor complaint. Congratulations, Rice, and congratulations, Karamuk Kuo. As a professor up the road at the University of Texas at Austin, I’m jealous as hell. Anderson Hall, meanwhile, has been simultaneously and smartly renovated by Kwong Von Glinow to coordinate with its new addition. (The interiors commission is the firm’s first project outside its home state of Illinois.) The intervention does a remarkable job of clarifying that building’s primary entry—in part by cutting large new windows to create views of the quad—and of integrating its public spaces into the courtyard, which, though intended, had never worked as Stirling and Wilford had hoped. Anderson Hall’s new upper-floor connection to the loggia hallway provides a centralized group meeting area to balance the general work areas of Cannady and uses the exterior curve of one of Stirling’s round skylight coves for the geometry of a ramp to reach Cannady’s upper level. It all feels smart, and it works effortlessly with the new addition. A plan of the building’s second floor shows the continuity between the existing and new structures. (Courtesy Karamuk Kuo) I would be remiss to not mention that the new building is named for its lead donor, the irascible, driven, and superbly pragmatic architect William T. “Bill” Cannady, who was already a Rice professor when I was an architecture student there in the late 1970s. Bill’s career has been marked by several fundamental changes of direction, so the pedagogical shift this legacy ensures feels appropriate. With that support, Rice may be one of the few U.S. architecture schools that can afford to make more, better space these days. But the university, as a leading academic institution, seems to have committed itself, in this building and several others both finished and underway, to the critical role that design, generously and thoughtfully housed, plays in a leading university. Fingers crossed that this message makes it out beyond the hedges. David Heymann is an architect, writer, and the Harwell Hamilton Harris Regents Professor in the School of Architecture at UT Austin.