Architectural Acumen
Inside Cannady Hall, a new pair of galleries invites visitors to see the world through the eyes of architects — connecting design, art and the challenges of our time.
By Tracey Rhoades
Unique among the myriad exhibition spaces sprinkled across Rice’s campus, the Casbarian-Appel Gallery and the Hines Family Gallery inside William T. Cannady Hall provide dedicated spaces for the School of Architecture’s curatorial program, Exhibitions at Rice. Located on the first and second floors of the building, the galleries offer a double-height, naturally lit space to showcase a range of architecturally focused works, from drawings and images to design prototypes.
“Exhibitions at Rice engages the discipline of architecture as a cultural practice with a civic mandate, creating new discourses for both local and global audiences,” says Igor Marjanović, the William Ward Watkin Dean of the Rice School of Architecture. “Just as Houston is reflective of the major environmental and urban issues worldwide, our aim, too, is to work on a planetary scale, emphasizing the interconnectivity of architectural, urban and cultural issues worldwide.”
The inaugural exhibition, “The Sixth Sphere,” opened in October 2024, providing an in-depth look at how the built environment operates at a planetary scale and imagining the effects design could have on the environment. “Iwan Baan: The Notational Surface” followed this past fall, presenting photographs by the acclaimed Dutch photographer that capture Houston from both the ground and air, offering a layered view of the city’s infrastructure, environmental precarity and spatial complexity. The images are part of the Houston Archive Project, an ongoing effort to document the city’s rapid transformation and urbanization, launched by the School of Architecture in 2024 to create a wider platform for documenting Houston’s shifting urbanism.
On view now through Feb. 6, 2026, “Art in Context: Art, Architecture and the Middle Landscape” brings together drawings and photographs documenting the development of artist Donald Judd’s “100 untitled works in mill aluminum” and the repurposing of former artillery sheds in Marfa, Texas, where he installed them. Alongside these are contemporary drawings and models by associate professor Troy Schaum and a series of 20 woodcut prints by Judd, on loan from the Judd Foundation.
From the Winter 2026 issue of Rice Magazine