The exterior is a confused jumble of brick patterns and ornament, seemingly absent of any logic and shamelessly devoted to the glorification of colored precast concrete. Rooflines are ruptured, balustrades are bestowed upon roofs and columns corrupted for the sole purpose of featuring these Outram hallmarks. The brick patterns, taken from Greek, Indian, Mayan and European cultures are so stylized and symbolic as to be untelligible and the connections to the earth/water/air/fire program are more than a little strained. Add to that poor choices in reflective glass, dinky concrete window mullions, and oddly colored plaster vaults and you have a building that is outwardly disjointed and confusing.
The interior fares better, with bold colors, a simplified theme and dramatic spaces. Here the "canyon" of the program is evident, with cascading stairs feeding the ground floor "river", which in turn reaches the broad expanse of the main hall's "delta." The canyon is the building's great architectural success, with the light of the western balcony shimmering down the "river" and the great hall of the "delta" drawing the eyes to the grand mural above. The hall itself is a spectacular place, certain to be the site of countless fundraisers in the years to come.
Once pulled away from the drama and back into the workaday world, Duncan's disappointments return. Much was made of the "robot columns" transporting building services and so forth, but Outram denies them time and time again by penetrating them with hallways, showing that the "robots" are but empty shells. Painting the exposed concrete of these columns to match the walls so that they vanish only increases their "so what" factor. The cramped tunnels leading back into the offices on every floor couldn't be more oppressive, which figures, since their dimensions were dictated by the "robots" and their deep colors by the "elemental" program. The structure has an abundance of hard surfaces and a whole floor of roofless offices, which may boost the noise level within the structure to annoying, if not disruptive levels. Even the stately ascension to the best outdoor balconies (west and southwest) ends disappointingly, with cramped porches, flanked by offices, a massive chin-high concrete balustrade and the teasingly inaccesable roofs above (with their own inexplicable balustrades.)
Duncan Hall had a challenging program, to incorporate huge amounts of office space into a reasonably sized structure while following all of Rice's architectural restrictions. However, the solution acheives it's goal while denying its context, with only the token gesture of aligning the main entrance with the axis of Lovett Hall's arcade recognizing the many older structures around it. (I chalk the view of Butcher Hall's tower through the western clerestory up to chance, not design, given the introverted nature of the building.) In many ways Duncan Hall has repeated some of the sins of the George R. Brown Biosciences building, anwering context with materials and token gestures, then ignoring everything else. Though the building completes the engineering quadrangle, it does so by creating a mean space between itself and Abercrombie lab, where the towering bulk of the structure and some electrical service boxes offer scant improvement over the parking lot that preceded it. Entrances at the West end of the building have little or nothing to do with their surroundings, missing an opportunity to create a focal point for the quadrangle or suggest a sense of unity with the surrounding collection of structures.
Rice's commitment to challenging architecture is to be applauded. Despite its flaws, Duncan Hall is a building that makes you work to understand it, strive to see Outram's vision within it and pause to appreciate the elements which work. It is a dramatic statement which all may not agree with, but few will miss. Rather than being hindered by Rice's trademark St. Joe brick, it pushes the boundaries of the vocabulary, much as Sterling's addition to Anderson Hall and Pelli's Herring Hall did, opening new opportunities for future buildings at Rice.