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 Dyche Hall - Lawrence, Kansas Posted by:  iconions
N 38° 57.508 W 095° 14.611
15S E 305605 N 4314561
Dyche Hall is the home of the Kansas University Natural History Museum. It is located at 14th and Jayhawk Boulevard on the KU campus. It is a four-story stone Romanesque style building.
Waymark Code: WMYFMH
Location: Kansas, United States
Date Posted: 06/10/2018
Views: 0
Dyche Hall, on the campus of the University of Kansas, is a four-story building with a full basement. The building faces east and features a tower on the east side.
The exterior, which is basically a Romanesque style, is of rough hewn limestone laid in irregular courses. The individual stones vary in size. Belt lines are featured at the floor lines plus a very decorative corbel belt along the fourth floor line. One of the building's highlights is the combination of column and arched roof detailing on the facades to give the impression of massive window units. These large false windows are very ornate and detailed in trim, including two carved stone gargoyles on each false window. On the front are double towers, an octagonal one of three stories and a square one rising three stories above the roof line. The top floor is all columns and windows reaching to the detailed cornice with an arcade directly above the arched main entry. The main entrance was said to have been modeled after one of the world's most beautiful portals that of St. Trophime at Aries, in southern France.
The roof form is in a hipped style and covered with red clay tile shingles. A detailed cornice provides a break between the walls and the roof. The main tower extends well above the roof to enhance the roofing structure. The tower's roof itself is a steeply pitched octagonal form with smaller roof elements on each of the tower's four sides.
The windows vary considerably from floor to floor. Few windows are placed on the first and second floors, except in the towers. Third floor windows are mainly thin rectangles with arched heads. The fourth floor windows sit behind the arcade and are basically rectangular in shape.
An addition was built to the north in 1963 to provide more classroom space.
Dyche Hall is regarded as one of the most distinctive buildings on the university campus. Together with nearby Green Hall and Spooner Hall, it forms a small core of architectural tradition on the campus.
- National Register Application
The University of Kansas Natural History Museum is part of the University of Kansas Biodiversity Institute, a KU designated research center dedicated to the study of the life of the planet.
The museum's galleries are in Dyche Hall on the university's main campus in Lawrence, Kansas. The galleries are open from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. Tuesday through Saturday and noon to 4 p.m. on Sundays. Dyche Hall has been listed on the National Register of Historic Places since July 14, 1974; it was listed for its connection with Lewis Lindsay Dyche and for its distinctive Romanesque style of architecture. Dyche Hall is also the site of one of only three Victory Eagle statues in Kansas, once used as markers on the Victory Highway.
Among its more than 350 separate exhibits, the museum is famous for its Panorama of North American Wildlife, part of which represented Kansas in the 1893 World's Colombian Exposition in Chicago, and was the impetus for the funding and construction of Dyche Hall and its Natural History Museum between 1901–1903. Modeled after a church in France, Dyche Hall was designed to house the Panorama in the "apse" of the entrance gallery. The museum is also renowned for Comanche (horse), the only survivor on the U.S. Cavalry side of the Battle of the Little Bighorn; for its extensive exhibits of plesiosaurs, mosasaurs, pterosaurs, and other fossils from the Kansas Chalk; and most recently for its newest displays of mammalian skulls, the parasites of sharks and rays, and the pre-Columbian archaeology of Costa Rica.
The Biodiversity Institute, with more than 10 million specimens of plants, animals, fossils, and archaeological artifacts, is one of the world's leaders in collection-based studies of systematics, evolution, phylogenetics, paleobiology, past cultures, biodiversity modeling, and in providing digital access to collection-based biodiversity data biodiversity informatics, including deploying these data for forecasting environmental phenomena. The Institute's collections, faculty-curators, staff and students are housed in six buildings across the KU campus, with the most recent expansion occurring in 2006–2007, when the Division of Entomology, along with parts of the ornithological and mammal collection, were moved to a new facility on the university's West Campus.
- University of Kansas Natural History Museum Wikipedia Entry
Public/Private: Public
Tours Available?: it's a museum - donations suggested and accepted
Year Built: 1901-1902
Web Address: Not listed
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