Located on the west side of Lawrence Hall is a short brick wall that contains a granite stone piece that reads:
| SCHOOL OF ARCHITECTURE AND ALLIED ARTS A SCHOOL OF ARCHITECTURE
SHOULD BE "_A HAPPY HOME
WHERE STUDENTS ARE HELPED TO EDUCATE
THEMSELVES." Saarinen HERE, LIKE THE KIND OF
DEMOCRACY WE SHOULD STRIVE FOR, IS THE
MINIMUM OF RESTRAINT AND THE MAXIMUM
SENSE OF RESPONSIBILITY." Prince Campbell |
The first quote is by Eero Saarinen, a Finnish American architect and industrial designer of the 20th century famous for shaping his neofuturistic style according to the demands of the project: simple, sweeping, arching structural curves or machine-like rationalism. His most famous U.S. work is the Gateway Arch located in St. Louis, MO.
The second quote is by Prince Lucien Campbell, a former president of the University of Oregon. I located a wonderful background on Campbell here that reads:
Prince Lucien Campbell (1861-1925) was born in Newmarket, Missouri. In 1869, his family moved to Oregon when when his father Thomas Franklin Campbell became president of Christian College in Monmouth, Oregon. Campbell graduated from Christian College and later Harvard.
Campbell was first employed by the Kansas City Star, and in 1889, he became president of the Christian college that had become Oregon Normal School (ONS), which is now Western Oregon University. He was president of ONS until 1902 when he left to become president of the University of Oregon. He served as president of UO until 1925.
At the time of President Campbell's arrival at the UO, student enrollment stood at about 250 and an annual appropriation of $47,500 satisfied its fiscal needs. When he died in 1925, enrollment had grown to 3,000 students and the annual budget was $966,000. Leading with great personal charm and skills as an orator, Campbell focused his time and energy on building harmony between faculty members and students as well as on increasing the stature of the faculty. One of his key hires was Ellis F. Lawrence, who founded the School of Architecture and Allied Arts and radically changed the look of the campus through his design of dozens of university buildings. Campbell also used his considerable abilities of persuasion to gain legislative and popular support for increased state funding for the university.
In doing some research on Ellis Fuller Lawrence, for whom Lawrence Hall is named after, I discovered that the current Lawrence Hall replaced the previous Architecture and Art Building of 1923, in which Ellis Lawrence had designed. Lawrence was a prolific architect for the University of Oregon and designed over 500 projects including churches, residences, commercial and industrial buildings, funerary buildings, multi-family residences, and public buildings.
This stone piece obviously is the only remaining remnant of the previous building that once stood on this site and was replaced by the current building and renamed in Lawrence' honor in 1956.