BY KATHARINE SHILCUTT

A striking new structure now greets all who enter the Rice campus at Stockton Dr. and University Blvd.: Susan and Fayez Sarofim Hall, the long-awaited home of the Department of Art and the final jewel in the university’s arts district, which includes the Moody Center for the Arts and Shepherd School of Music’s Alice Pratt Brown Hall and Brockman Hall for Opera.

“Sarofim Hall is a bold realization of Rice’s enduring commitment to the arts — a space that invites imagination, fosters collaboration and opens new doors for creative expression,” said Robert T. Ladd ’78, chair of Rice’s Board of Trustees. “This remarkable facility honors the vision and generosity of Susan and Fayez Sarofim and so many others whose dedication has made it possible.”

From the words “letters, science and art” carved into Lovett Hall more than a century ago to today’s dedication, the arts have always been central to Rice’s mission, Ladd told a massive crowd at Sarofim Hall’s grand opening celebration on a sunny September day in 2025.

“An elegant and innovative university art building is necessarily one that serves the creative and programmatic mission of arts education,” said John Sparagana, the Grace Christian Vietti Chair in Visual Arts. “Charles Renfro’s design for Sarofim Hall is an ingenious response to our program’s history, context and curricular structure. My experience is of a grounded, iconic space for making and teaching art, but I’m transported by Sarofim Hall’s hallucinatory grandeur — in either case it’s the realization of a dream.”

For Renfro ’87 ’89, partner at Diller Scofidio + Renfro and a Rice graduate in both art and architecture, the project was personal.

“As a double major in art and architecture, nothing could be more satisfying and humbling than having the opportunity to design a new building for Rice’s art department, a new space which will unite my chosen disciplines,” Renfro said. “Sarofim Hall will bring these disparate media together under one roof and, in so doing, allow each of them to blossom.”

Sarofim Hall facts:

• 94,000 square feet of studios, workshops, galleries, performance spaces and flexible studios for film, media, photography, printmaking, drawing, painting and sculpture
  
• 215 seats in the cinema — equipped to screen even 3D films — and which will house the popular, long-running Rice Cinema program
  
• 800 students take arts classes at Rice every year
  
• 2 intersecting glass planes across 3 floors that reinterpret the iconic “Butler Building,” recalling the much-loved “tin house” Art Barn and Rice Media Center that occupied the site from the late 1960s until construction began on the new Sarofim Hall
  
• 11th building on campus to receive LEED Gold certification, indicating a high standard of sustainability and energy efficiency