Kraft Hall for Social Sciences
Rice University
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On Tuesday, October 8, at 6 p.m., RDA hosts a Hard Hat Tour led by Rob Rogers (B.Arch. ’83), principal and owner of Rogers Partners, featuring Rice University's new Kraft Hall designed by New York- and Houston-based Rogers Partners.
Rogers Partners has designed the new 80,000-square-foot School of Social Sciences to accommodate Rice’s Economics and Sociology departments as well as four research institutes and centers: the Kinder Institute for Urban Research; the Houston Education Research Consortium; the Boniuk Institute for Religious Tolerance; and the Texas Policy Lab. The building will also house the Dean’s Suite and innovative classroom, collaboration, and event spaces for students, faculty, and other visitors.
With its construction now almost complete since breaking ground on September 2018, Kraft Hall is the first building on a new formal axis of the expanding Rice campus designed to enable collaboration among the departments and institutions housed within.
The structure features an inner courtyard which mixes fields of native plantings with areas for informal gatherings beneath a verdant canopy of river birch trees, transforming Rice University’s traditional formal courtyard pattern into a dynamic and productive ecological system. The building’s mass and envelope take advantage of Houston’s climate to amplify breezes and mediate the heat and sun.
Join us to find out more about Kraft Hall and to hear directly from Rob Rogers about the design and construction process leading to its opening in spring 2020.
ROGERS PARTNERS Architects+Urban Designers is a studio of forty architects, urban designers and landscape architects. Rogers Partners engages the world of design with the creativity and rigor for which Founding Partner, Rob Rogers, FAIA and his teams have been recognized, and explores broader architectural concerns in the public realm.
We believe that great design engages all disciplines and that the spaces we create are as important as its buildings and forms. We embrace the impact of small things, understand that much of what we do you don't see, and make big things happen by careful attention.
Our clients across the country include academic, cultural and civic institutions and agencies, developers, economic development entities, and planning and housing authorities. Our projects have won more than seventy-five design and industry awards from peer and client groups and have been included in exhibitions and publications internationally.