William Nichols originally proposed a raised basement, probably arcaded, a first floor at the piano-nobile level, and a second floor for this building. The board of trustees eliminated the basement and awarded the construction contract to carpenter Daniel Grayson. The giant shafts of the partially fluted Ionic east portico columns are brick cylinders infilled with sand, mortar, and rubble masonry and finished with cement. A grooved cavetto molding with disk is over the entrance, and flushboards form the entablature and tympanum. When the Lyceum opened in 1848, it had two front rooms astride a short center-hall, a transverse corridor beyond, then a “chemical theater for lectures” running across the full width of the building, and a laboratory of the same width; at the rear rose a tower with a cupola. On the second floor, a natural history museum and four lecture halls flanked a central corridor, and on the third were a library and lecture halls. In 1858, Chancellor Frederick A. P. Barnard had the building expanded three bays to the west and remodeled to include his offices. Theodore C. Link added the lateral wings in 1903, and in 1923, with the campus growing to the west, Link and Trueblood added the west portico and opened up a continuous first-floor center-hall running east-west, which necessitated the demolition of the tower. In 1998–2000 the university hired Eley Associates to remove the interiors from the central block, destroying what remained of Nichols’s clever spatial configuration and the internal changes that chronicled the institution’s early history.