Somewhere beside the concrete tiers of Tuttle Parking Garage and the steady traffic of Woodruff Avenue sat a dark brick building, whose squat, two stories seemed to issue a daily visual war against its modern surroundings.

Ives Hall clashed with its up-scale campus neighbors. It was a small building at odds with the clean lines and efficiency of younger university structures.

On July 2, after 77 years of residence on Neil Avenue, Ives Hall said good-bye to its auditorium wing. The rest of the building will be demolished throughout the summer.

After the hall is razed, new construction will begin on the site. A multi-level facility, Knowlton Hall, will be built to house the entire Knowlton School of Architecture, said Robert Livesey, KSA’s director, in an e-mail.

“Ives Hall had surpassed its useful life. All the infrastructure needed to be replaced.

If you have ever seen the movie ‘The Money Pit,’ Ives was the institutional equivalent. Ives was old, but it was not remarkable. It was patched together over time,” Livesey said.

Ives Hall was indeed “patched together,” according to University Archives.

The hall was completed in 1925 by connecting two separate buildings – a horse barn, erected in 1907, and an implement barn used for tool storage, circa 1912.

Ives Hall was constructed for the Department of Agricultural Engineering and named for Professor Frederick W. Ives, who served as head of the department from 1918 to 1924, when he was killed in a railroad accident. The building was formally dedicated on Feb. 3, 1926.

The Ohio State University Monthly, the alumni magazine, published its February 1926 issue with a full-page article on Ives Hall and the growing department of agricultural engineering.

When the Ives Hall opened, the agriculture engineering program offered dozens of courses on farm power and farm machinery.

The building’s space and equipment was “the largest and the best in the country,” said J.E. McClintok, an editor for Agriculture Extension Service.

In the article, McClintok wrote about the individual laboratories used for work specialization and an auditorium with amphitheater seating, which featured a 15-foot turntable for viewing “any side” of a machine during class.

Ives Hall, while “up-to-date” in 1926, experienced progressive decline throughout several decades.

The Agricultural Engineering Capital Improvement Committee was formed in 1975 to push for either the renovation of Ives Hall or a new departmental building.

Agriculture engineering left the site in 1987 and relocated to a new facility on the Agricultural Campus.

The School of Architecture took up the reins in 1988, and Ives underwent a $1.4 million renovation, which created 14 design studios and a center space for reviewing student work.

“Ives had a great center space (the new building will also have a center space) for the architecture program. It established a sense of place for the program, around which all the studios were located,” Livesey said.

Ellen Wallace, the graduate programs administrator for Knowlton School of Architecture, is looking forward to the move.

“I’ve worked here for 31 years, and we’ve been waiting for this move for a while,” Wallace said. “I remember when Ives was an extension building. They used to show cows.”

Knowlton Hall is tentatively scheduled to open in spring quarter 2004.

Architectural students will use studio space in Vivian Hall, 2121 Fyffe Rd., until the new facility is complete.