Seeley Wintersmith Mudd Hall of Philosophy, USC

The two-story red brick Mudd Hall of Philosophy is predominately pre-Renaissance Tuscan in design, combining elements of Romanesque, Byzantine, and Arab decoration. It is trimmed in cast stone, roofed in tile, and built around three sides of a courtyard containing a central fountain, with an open cloister running along the fourth side. At the junction of the north and west wings is a clock and chimes tower. Interior decoration is of dark wood, colorful tiles, and salmon-colored unglazed terra cotta. Mudd Hall was designed to house three large classrooms, a Philosophy club room (The Argonaus' Hall, which is now a classroom), a large lecture room (Borden Parker Bowne Hall), facultry offices, a library and rare book room, a book bindery and workshop, and storage rooms. The rare book and the book bindery and workshop have been converted into an additional classroom and offices.

The building was designed to conform to the Tuscan style of those University buildings in its (then) immediate vicinity--Bovard Administration Building (1921), Science Hall (1928), Student Union Building (1928), and Physical Education (1930).

Specifics

• Donors: Colonel Seeley Wintersmith Mudd, Della Mudd and Seeley Greenleaf Mudd
• Architect: Ralph Carlin Flewelling. B.S., A.I.A
• Builder: R. Westcott of the R. Westcott Company
• Cornerstone Laid: May 16, 1929
• Building dedicated: June 5, 1930
• Cost: About $300, 000, including contents
• Courtyard measurements: 48 feet wide by 62 feet long
• Tower height: 146 feet above the junction of the north and west wings
• Chimes manufacturer: Deagan
• The Argonauts Hall ceiling decoration: Jason and the search for the Golden Fleece
• Figure holding a lamp above the entrance to the south wing: Diogenes in search for an honest man

Exterior Inscriptions

• Over the east entrance: Seeley Wintersmith Mudd Memorial Hall of Philosophy
• On the east facade: He that loseth his life shall keep it unto life eternal
• On the north facade: Names of philosophers--Thales, Anaxagoras, Pythagoras, Plato, Aristotle, Plotinus, Augustine, Erigena, Abelard, Aquinas, Bruno, Bacon, Descartes, Leibiniz, Spinoza, Newton, Locke, Rousseau, Berkeley, Kant, Emerson
• On the apse facade: Truth shall make you free
• On the fountain: O stream of life run you slow or fast, all streams reach the sea at last

Interior Inscription

On The Argonauts' Hall fireplace:

The lights begin to twinkle from the rocks:
The long day wanes: the slow moon climbs: the deep
Moans around with many voices. Come, my friends,
'Tis not too late to seek a newer world.
--Tennyson

Other reliefs and sculptures and mosaics on the exterior of the building.

Art works in the Hoose Library of Philosophy.

Sources

The Personalist. Supplement (July, 1930).

Flewelling, Ralph Tyler, ed. Exercises in Dedication of George Finley Bovard Administration Auditorium, Hoose Hall of Philosophy and Stowell Hall of Education, University of Southern California, June 19 to 23, 1921. Los Angeles: University of Southern California Press, 1921?

Nethery, Wallace. Dr. Flewelling & the Hoose Library; Life and Letters of a Man and an Institution. With an Address by Heinrich Gomperz on the part of the Gomperz Collection commonly called by that name. Los Angeles: University of Southern California Press, 1976.