University of St. Thomas Campus Tour

Houston's University of St. Thomas was founded by the Basilian Fathers in 1947 and started life inside a grand 1912 Montrose mansion. In the 1950s collectors John and Dominique de Menil brought in Philip Johnson, who laid out a modernist Academic Mall of steel-framed, rose-brick halls and returned forty years later to crown it with a gold-domed chapel. This walk moves from the mansion down the mall to the library and chapel, then steps across the street to the Rothko Chapel, the Menils' most famous gift to the neighborhood. The whole loop is well under a mile on flat, shaded streets.

The University of St. Thomas was founded in Houston by the Basilian Fathers in 1947, and its look owes much to collectors John and Dominique de Menil, who brought in architect Philip Johnson and whose patronage still shapes this corner of Montrose.

Johnson's Academic Mall is the centerpiece: a three-block green that pairs the lawn-and-colonnade layout of Jefferson's University of Virginia with the black-steel-and-brick language of Mies van der Rohe, and the designed landscape is now on the National Register of Historic Places. Four decades after planning it, Johnson came back to complete it with the Chapel of St. Basil in 1997, a composition of three bold forms: a white stucco cube, a gold dome and a black granite wall slicing through both.

The Link-Lee House, a Neoclassical mansion built in 1912 for Montrose developer John Wiley Link and later owned by oilman Thomas P. Lee, became the young university's first home. Across the street from campus, the Rothko Chapel, opened in 1971, is the Menils' best-known gift to the neighborhood; out front, Barnett Newman's Broken Obelisk, dedicated to Martin Luther King Jr., rises from a reflecting pool.

It's a flat, shaded walk of under a mile that packs in a remarkable amount of architecture and art history.