Barus and Holley Building

The Barus and Holley Building, dedicated on June 4, 1965, was named in honor of faculty member and physicist Carl Barus and alumnus and engineer Alexander Lyman Holley 1853. The speaker at the dedication ceremony was noted astrophysicist Fred Hoyle. The groundbreaking for the building had occurred on September 16, 1963, after over a year of controversy. Permission to close Manning Street was granted by the Providence City Council after opposition by East Side residents. Further protests that the proposed height of the building would lower property values were met by President Keeney’s offer to buy any property so affected in the next five years at its present evaluation and a change of plan in which the building would be built at a right angle to, rather than along, Hope Street. The seven-story building was designed by Sherwood, Mills and Smith of Stamford, and cost 4.2 million dollars, part of which was paid by the Advanced Research Projects Agency of the Department of Defense and the National Science Foundation. Its 300 rooms were planned to house 130 offices, 80 laboratories, 11 classrooms and various drafting rooms and shops, along with a lecture room for 200 and another for 120. It brought together the Physics Department from five scattered locations and the Divisioin of Engineering from six. Included in the plan for the building was the forty-foot cast metal sculpture entitled “The Heraldic Arena,” by Thomas Morin of the Rhode Island School of Design. A sculpture by Mario J. Kujawski ’66 was placed beside the building in 1966.