When completed in 1910, Lee Hall contained the president’s offices on the second floor. Long relocated elsewhere, these were returned to the building’s fourth floor in a 2012–2014 rehabilitation. Hunt’s brick building is idiosyncratic, with a vigorously eclectic facade that includes a central stone entablature carried by columns of an invented order, Manneristic stone quoin-ing and voussoirs around the principal entrance, thermal windows, and syncopated bracket consoles at the eaves. A 1948 fire destroyed the mansard roof and much of the fourth floor of the central block, and the change in brick color where repairs were made by Jackson-based E. L. Malvaney is readily apparent. Inside, a thousand-seat auditorium with a balcony and wide proscenium occupies the building’s rear portion, where a rehabilitation and addition by Johnson Bailey Henderson McNeel Architects was completed in 2005. In the auditorium’s foyer, a richly iconographic mural honors the university’s World War I veterans. Painted in 1922 by William Steene, an artist from New York State then living in Columbus, it depicts a seated figure of Liberty above young men transformed from students into members of the armed forces.
Other campus buildings by Hunt include the McCain Engineering Building (1905), remodeled by Theodore C. Link after a 1920 fire, and Carpenter Hall (1911) on the east side of the Drill Field. Relatively sedate, Carpenter displays a conventional Tuscan order but still has its quirks, such as an entrance door surround with projecting roundel motifs and irregularly spaced mutules on the attic cornice. Hunt’s former Dairy Science Building (1905; 2011–2012 renovated, Shafer Associates), now Middleton Hall, is Colonial Revival with a Tudor Revival front dormer.