GILMAN HALL

As early as 1901 the need for larger facilities for the cheimistry department were reported to the Board of Trustees. In the Biennial Report for 1906-08 a new chemistry building was called “one of the imperative needs of the college.” No funds were made available until 1913 when the disastrous fire on March 25 destroyed the old Chemical and Physical Laboratory. Then an allocation of $250,000 was made for a new building. The construction contract was awarded in August 1913.¹

A story in the May 23, 1914 Iowa State Student describes the new building:

The new chemistry hall at Ames, for which the last legislature appropriated $250,000 and which is being built to replace the Chem. hall, the old landmark which went up in smoke on a night last spring when the general assembly was in session, will be completed, structurally, easily by the first of July, the time limit in the contract. If the structure is not completed by July 1, Superintendent of Buildings and Grounds Sloss will tax a $100 daily penalty on the contractor; but the contractors declare they will have the roof on the laboratory and the building ready for use a few weeks early.

The laboratory will be ready for use by student classes by the opening of the college year in September. Superintendent Sloss will put in the plumbing, desks and all interior construction, during the summer after the structural contractors are through.

The building will be three stories in height, with a basement about half to be above ground level. Through the wings, the building is 159 feet wide; and through the main body of the building, 164 feet. The wings are 57 by 76 feet. The main part of the building is 244 feet 8 inches by 149 feet including three courts.

Large Auditorium in Center

The total, useable floor space will be 110,000 square feet. An auditorium will be in the center of the building, it beginning on the ground floor at the lowest elevation of the floor and rising at the rear to the level of the first floor. The auditorium lighting will be by a top skylight, to be darkened by a curtain controlled by a motor. The seating capacity of the auditorium is to be 390, which is about that of the auditoriums of the chemistry buildings of the larger universities. The auditorium will be equipped with a reflectoscope stereoptican. A large lecture table will be arranged in triplicate so that the central portion of it can be off the stage into the preparation rooms, where the experiments may be set in place and then set up in the lecture room.

The general ventilation of the building will be controlled by two 30 horse power motors driving fans which will pump into, and force out of, the building 180,000 cubic feet of air a minute. Each floor of each wing will be under damper control so that the air may be shut off. By this ventilating system, the air comes in from the bottom of the floor and is ejected at the top, which in most of the chemistry buildings of the country, is vice versa. The ventilating system is a special one for the Ames chemistry building, and by it the building is divided into units of electrically operated ventilating machinery which controls the opening and closing hoods of the ventilating apertures. Its advantages are positive ventilation and cheapest operation.

Store Room for Each Floor

The building has a store room system. All floors have store rooms in vertically the same parts of the building connecting with each other by an elevator and dumb waiter. The administrative office, the office of Prof. W.F. Coover, the new head of the chemistry department succeeding Prof. A.A. Bennett, who went to California soon after the old Chem hall fire, will be on the second floor. The offices of the associate and assistant professors will be located throughout, and in different parts of the building, adjacent to their particular work and departments. The instructors will have offices, immediately in their sections of the various laboratories.

Room for 2500 Students

The capacity of the building is to be between 2,000 and 2,500 lockers. There were, last semester, 1500 students in the whole college, taking some form of chemistry work. Prof. Coover and the faculty planned the building with the idea in mind to have it accommodate the chemistry department for ten years. “But, at the present rate of development of the college, the building will not do more than do this,” says Prof. Coover.

The first floor of the building will be devoted to inorganic analysis, physical chemistry, food and sanitary chemistry and applied organic chemistry, and photographic chemistry. The basement will contain all the work in technical chemistry and the two year short courses in agriculture, engineering and home economics.

Rooms will be provided for graduate work in applied science, along the lines demanded by the various divisions of the college. It is the purpose of the department of chemistry to offer only that graduate work which is essential to the proper development of the institution.

Asphalt Floors Provided

One of the most important features of the new hall is that the building was planned with the idea of getting away from cement floors, which have a decided and detrimental tiring effect on the body. Asphalt floors will go down in all the working floors of the building. Asphalt flooring is elastic and is said to be much more satisfactory than hard, unelastic concrete where students work entire half days at a time always standing.

The building is of brick. It has three main entrances. It is a few hundred feet directly north of Central hall.

Although the building was opened for classes in September 1914, the conditions were not the most ideal. Two items in the current student paper explain the situation:

Classes in Chemistry will begin their work promptly at 8:00 Monday in the new building, is the latest announcement from the Chemistry department. The men have been working night and day for the past few weeks and the laboratories will be in shape to accommodate every one on schedule time. The gas and water pipes are in and will be ready. The ventilation system is complete and the temporary lockers are up. Due to the rush the equipment has not all been placed but there is plenty to keep the freshmen busy.

The Chemistry department will not have a monopoly on the building by any means. Engineers, Ags and Science each have appropriated a part of the new space. Miss Maclean will have a class in 2 year English and Professor Bowman will have a class in collegiate English in the new building. Prof. Bartholemew has dragged his bug cages up on the second floor and the usual zoology smell will battle with the fumes of gases.

The Engineering department have taken a room for their chemical and photo departments. The Agricultural Experiment Station has also shifted their Chemistry department to the third floor. The first floor looks like a section of a county fair since the poultry department moved in. Down in the basement the Home Economics girls have a sewing laboratory. In fact, chemistry hall holds a little bit of everything besides caring for the classes in chemistry. ²

Without an office, a laboratory or a class room completed, the new chemistry building is at present one of the busiest places on the campus. Laboratories, although equipped with nothing but temporary boxes as lockers and with rough boards for benches, are accomodating more than a thousand students.

The chairs in the assembly room and class rooms have been rented from a furniture company, and to be returned when permanent chairs are installed.

Fifty or more instructors are making their headquarters in offices, each of which is furnished with hardly more than a nail to hang their wraps upon. Over more than a hundred workmen are fitting doors, putting in concrete, finishing stairways and doing innumerable other things necessary to the completion of the greatest chemistry hall of the middle west. With the exception of the state capitol no other building in Iowa contains as many square feet of plastered walls as chem. hall.

But not only is the chemistry building a headquarters for the chemistry department. It contains almost everything from the offices of the agricultural and engineering experiment stations to Miss Maclean’s English class of the two year ags, and from Colburn’s photography offices to a lab in poultry 46.

Even under these adverse circumstances of an uncompleted building and a mixture of courses, every thing seems to be working as smoothly as if arranged months ago.³

The Biennial Report for 1914-16 shows total expenditures for the building at $361,905.49.

Additional laboratory equipment was acquired and various interior changes made from time to time over the next thirty years. The most obvious exterior change occured in 1942 when a new entrance was made on the south front. This is described in the Iowa State Daily Student on August 11 of that year:

Work began Saturday on a new $3,000 entrance to the Chemistry Building. The project is expected to be completed about Sept. 1.

The entryway will be 25 feet wide with cut stone balusters on each side of the approach, according to B.H. Platt, head of buildings and grounds. The platform will be of red quarry tile.

A lamp post will be placed at either side of the entryway near the curb, and six new doors will be installed in the building. The sidewalk in front of the building and extending about half way to the Agricultural Engineering Building will be lowered about 1 1/2 feet.

Platt said the approach to the chemistry building was built in 1912 and has worn more rapidly than any other spot on the campus.

Work on the project is being done by James Thompson and Sons, of Ames.

By 1947 the expansion of activities of the Institute for Atomic Research required new facilities for that work. Professor T.K. Fitzpatrick, Architectural Engineering, was authorized to prepare preliminary plans for the third and fourth wings of the building. ⁴ However, sixteen years elapsed before that addition was undertaken. A Tracer Laboratory was installed by remodeling in 1948, with A.E.C. funds and in 1950-51 the same source provided $30,000 for new laboratory equipment.

Appropriations of $70,000 for “modernizing classrooms, offices and laboratories”, $175,000 for repairing and rebuilding equipment and $9,000 for replacing heating coils were made in May 1953. Two years later an additional $250,000 was appropriated for “repairs, replacements, alterations and equipment”. Another appropriation in the same amount was made in 1959. The work under that fund was used principally for remodeling of third floor laboratories for Bio-chemistry.

A $2,000,000 appropriation in the spring of 1961 assured the construction of a major addition to the building. An additional $617,500 was received as a grant from the National Science Foundation. The addition was completed in 1965.

Modifications and replacements have continued in the old portion of the building. Chemistry Hall became “Henry Gilman Hall” by action of the Board of Regents in June 1973.