Professor Jan Tullis’ strongest impression about RI Hall was that it “was not a building for modern science”. After leaving the building, she expected to be more nostalgic for the space than she was, as the facilities in the Geo-Chem building are of a much higher standard for geology, the "unknown science".

Jan recalls “tilted floors”, and the open skylight in 201 when she was first teaching there. She described the grad students working in their offices on the balcony whilst classes were being taught below. She has memories of the attic space above the spiral staircase, mostly of cleaning out the space when they were moving out of the building. Jan recalls that “the dust was so bad that [she] got allergic reactions”. She thought there might have been “one or two ratty taxidermy specimens” up there during the cleanout. I asked her about the west door, and she said that you could enter RI Hall from the West when she was there, although most of the traffic came in from the east, from the main green. Other recollections are of the lathe that was part of their experimental lab, and that was located in the basement outside of Dick Yund’s lab (which became the Writing Fellow's Centre), and of Lon Quinn. Jan described him as “a special force” in the department, who enjoyed reminiscing. He used to stop by her office and talk with her about his work, the history of the department, and geologic field localities in RI. By the 1970s he had officially retired but still had an office upstairs.

For Jan, RI Hall was defined by the people in the building and the memories associated with them, rather than with the structure itself. She was “proud of the department, not necessarily proud of the building”, and sees RI Hall as the space where things that were and are important to her took place. From the start the Geology department was special and “demonstrated that the whole is more than the sum of the parts. It was a Geology family”.

Memories from the Department of Geological Sciences

What do people remember?

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