Renovated Keck represents campus collaboration

Renovated Keck represents campus collaboration

BY DANA BENSON
Rice News Staff

Members of the
Rice community beamed with pride as they showed off Rice’s
newly renovated, state-of-the-art Howard Keck Hall and talked
about the interdisciplinary teaching and research that goes
on there.

Formerly known
as the Old Chemistry Building and later as Dell Butcher
Hall, the building was rededicated Sept. 21. Renamed for
Howard B. Keck, former chairman and president of the W.M.
Keck Foundation, it houses programs and centers of the Wiess
School of Natural Sciences and the George R. Brown School
of Engineering.

To represent
the interdisciplinary and collaborative nature of the building,
Kathy Matthews, dean of natural sciences, and Sidney Burrus,
dean of engineering, jointly addressed the audience at the
rededication.

“The edifice
of Keck Hall physically connects engineering and science
on campus, and its occupancy by faculty and students from
both schools and from the Institute of Biosciences and Bioengineering
reflects the extent of the collaborative environment at
Rice,” Matthews said. “Exceptionally rich possibilities
emerge from the interfaces between disciplines. Indeed this
forms the major impetus for the centers and institutes on
this campus.”

“The past
few decades and perhaps even the century have seen the spectacular
success in the disciplines of both science and engineering,”
Burrus continued. “The coming decades and perhaps the
whole century will see the explosive success of interdisciplinary
research. This recreated building is precisely that future”

While new traditions will be built at Keck Hall, the building
itself carries on Rice’s architectural tradition while
providing the best in educational facilities.

“Nearly
the entire inside of the building is new. However, great
care was taken in preserving some of the original woodwork
and brickwork,” Rice President Malcolm Gillis explained.

“Everything
about Keck Hall is state-of-the-art,” he added. “For
many decades to come, Keck Hall will be the venue for leading-edge
research and teaching in bioscience and biochemistry.”

The three-story,
54,000-square-foot Keck Hall contains three state-of-the-art
classrooms with a total seating capacity of 70 people, a
75-seat seminar room with video teleconferencing capabilities
and a teaching wing with undergraduate labs. Research
spaces include the nuclear magnetic resonance suite and
12 modern research laboratories.

It houses the
John W. Cox Laboratory for Biomedical Engineering, the Department
of Biochemistry and Cell Biology’s programs in X-ray
crystallography and molecular biophysics, the W.M. Keck
Center for Computational Biology, the Center for Excellence
in Cellular and Tissue Engineering and the Laboratory for
Molecular Biophysics.

Other speakers
at the rededication included William E. “Bill” Barnett, chairman of the Rice Board of Trustees, Larry McIntire,
the E.D. Butcher Professor of Bioengineering, and Howard
Keck Jr., director of the Howard Keck Foundation and son
of Howard B. Keck.