Prichard Hall (Huntington, West Virginia)

 office building, classrooms

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Current use: Offices of Student Support Services, Career Counseling, the Technology Institute, the Women's Center, and the offices and class rooms of the School of Nursing.

Location: Eastern mid part of the inner campus.

Designers:C. E. Sillings, from Charleston, WV.

Completed: 1955, renovated 1973

Name: In honor of Lucy Prichard, a distinguished professor of classics and faculty leader during the 1920s and 30s.

This building is a four-story structure, and is a clear example of Modern architecture in its best, triumphal moment, when American architects were almost unanimously influenced by the Bauhaus great masters that immigrated to the US in the late 1930’s, and only few were following other conceptions. The plan is extremely rational and foreseeable, symmetrical and extended in length, with two lightly protruding blocks at each side of the main entrance. Originally, the function of this building was only residential. This is expressed in a one story high symmetrical extension, roofed by a horizontal slab, rendered as a soft-stone surface, which covers the lobby and entrance facilities. The rest of the building is flat roofed, and has brick work rendering, without any construction details as lintels, ledgers, or parapets. It appears as the Van der Rohe’s motto “Less is more” was thoroughly followed by the designers. The rear façade has an auxiliary entrance with a centered, high shaft which houses an elevator that expresses a strong vertical impetus due to thin, slender rectangular shaped ties that reminds the typical curtain wall finishing of the first Miesian buildings of Chicago.