The University of Idaho’s Life Science South Building is one of the state’s preeminent specimens of the Collegiate Gothic style. The university constructed the building, initially known simply as the Science Hall, to facilitate increasing enrollment in science programs that had rendered their existing facilities obsolete by the early 1920s. Registration in botany, chemistry, physics, zoology, bacteriology, and other science fields more than tripled at the institution between 1914 and 1922, crowding the laboratories beyond their intended capacity and leading administrators to threaten an enrollment halt [1]. To accommodate this crowding, Regents requested an appropriation from the State Legislature for a new building, only to see the proposal stalled in the Senate. This setback prompted students and other interested parties to send over two hundred telegram letters to the Legislature in protest. The Senate ultimately relented and granted the university its requested appropriation. Author Rafe Gibbs quipped that this made the Science Hall a monument to S.F.B. Morse, inventor of the telegraph, as the building would never have been built without the ability to overwhelm the Legislature with telegrams [2].
The university broke ground on the building in 1924 and completed construction in 1925. The new edifice added over 64,000 square feet of much-needed laboratories, classrooms, and offices to the expanding Science Department that would facilitate science education throughout the 20th century and beyond. In addition to expanding the university’s learning space, extending the campus’s Collegiate Gothic character was foremost on university administrators’ minds when it came time to design the new Science Hall. They employed university professor and campus architect Rudolph Weaver to accomplish this task efficiently, competently, and economically. Weaver’s design, which incorporated Gothic-inspired cast-stone trimmings, prominent and high gables, and a robust slate roof, produced one of the University of Idaho campus’s most notable Collegiate Gothic buildings. The Science Hall was renamed the Life Science Building in 1964. It suffered a laboratory fire in 1997 that was largely contained to a single room. Nevertheless, the fire caused damages of roughly $500,000. Restoration work was completed later that year.
The building’s construction is steel-reinforced concrete set upon a concrete foundation that simulates smooth-dressed, cut and coursed sandstone. It consists of three stories above grade and a full basement. The exterior is faced with a veneer of red pressed brick laid in stretcher bonds and decorative cast stone that emphasizes horseshoe arch shapes. The roof forms gable ends at its west, south, and north façades. Additionally, two styles of dormers—high gable and hipped—accent the roofline. The primary roof material is slate and was part of a 2011 restoration project that also recast several of the building’s cast-stone decorative elements. This restoration earned the University of Idaho the Moscow Preservation Commission’s Orchid Award in recognition of “outstanding historic preservation and stewardship” [3].
The south (primary) elevation distinctly conveys the building’s Collegiate Gothic character. Beginning at the façade’s east, the elevation features a two-stepped parapet-gabled projection with quoining that extends down its vertical edges and surrounds the window openings. Moving west, the façade’s eastern entrance features a center-pointed arched entry accented by Gothic cast-stone decorative elements. The elevation’s western entrance is within a cast-stone projection with Gothic decoration and a crenelated head. These entrances feature rib-vaulted, open vestibules with brick stairs that access dual, four-panel wooden doors with windows separated by a flush-light panel and accented by decoratively carved wooden side panels and a Tudor-arched light transom with mullions. Window openings are trimmed with cast stone, simulating a broken course, and the predominance of windows are wooden, double-hung, two-sash, with mullions. A crenelated 2-story polygonal projection dominates the north elevation’s center, which is supported by decorative Gothic brick buttresses with cast-stone caps.
Edited from: Nathan J. Moody, “National Register of Historic Places—Registration Form: The University of Idaho Historic District,” initial submission to Idaho SHPO, unpublished, University of Idaho, Moscow, Idaho, May 7, 2025, 21-2.
Contemporary Photos Source: Nathan J. Moody.
Historical Photos Source: University of Idaho Campus Photographs, PG 1, University of Idaho Library Special Collections and Archives.
1. “Is the New Science Hall a Necessity?” U.I.V.F., University Campus and Buildings Box 4, University of Idaho Special Collections and Archives, Moscow, ID.
2. Rafe Gibbs, Beacon for Mountain and Plain: Story of the University of Idaho (Moscow: University of Idaho, 1962), 165.
3. “Orchid Awards,” City of Moscow-Historic Preservation Commission, accessed January 26, 2025, https://www.ci.moscow.id.us/436/Orchid-Awards.