Haworth Hall

State Architect James Canole and Peters, Harrison & Associates of Lawrence designed the eight-story, $3.5 million building of dark buff brick and cottonwood limestone for the newly created Division of Biological Sciences. It opened in 1969; a major addition designed by Peters, Kubota & Glenn of Lawrence was dedicated April 12, 1986.



A reorganization in 2008 dissolved the division and retained these departments in the College of Liberal Arts & Sciences: molecular biosciences (biochemistry; microbiology; molecular, cellular and developmental biology; neurobiology; and genetics) and ecology and evolutionary biology (programs in ecology and population biology, entomology, plant biology and systematics, macroevolution and biodiversity); and the undergraduate biology program.

Haworth houses the departments’ administrative and staff offices; a greenhouse and electron microscope; laboratories, classrooms and an auditorium; the Genetics Program; and the Beach Center on Disability.

The John T. Stewart Children’s Center, dedicated in September 1970, adjoins Haworth on the east; it is named for a 1911 alumnus and Wellington banker and was the gift of his son and daughter-in-law, John T. III and Linda Bliss Stewart, also alumni. It houses offices for the Sunnyside Infant-Toddler Center and the Schiefelbusch Institute for Life Span Studies, laboratories, graduate-student offices and research rooms.

The first Haworth Hall opened in fall 1909 and housed the departments of geology and mineralogy, whose chair 1892-1920 was Erasmus Haworth. An 1881 and 1884 alumnus who founded the Kansas Geological Survey in 1894, Haworth who was known to his students as “Daddy.” 

After the 1943 opening of Lindley Hall, Haworth was remodeled for the departments of anatomy, biochemistry and physiology. When the medical programs moved to Kansas City, Kan., biology and other sciences remained. In the late 1960s, when a humanities building was planned on the site, Haworth and its neighbor Robinson Gymnasium — both outdated and outgrown — were razed and new buildings retaining their names were built on the south slope of the Hill.