Museum of Fine Arts
Writing
When New York architect Ralph Adams Cram first visited the site assigned him for Rice University just south of Houston in 1909 he found a "level and stupid" site – 277 acres of bare prairie land broken only by a few scrub oaks in one corner. A scant forty-five years later, when Chicago architect Mies van der Rohe first visited a site virtually across the street from Cram's which had been assigned…