This private Catholic university continued and consolidated the charters of earlier Catholic institutions in Dallas. Set in the rolling countryside ten miles northwest of Dallas, the campus has a central quadrangle, but most of the buildings are scattered in small, unrelated groups around the site. Patrick Haggerty (a founder of Texas Instruments) and his wife, Bea, donated to seven buildings on the campus that were designed by O’Neil Ford’s firm and the local partnership of Landry and Landry between 1970 and 1982. They include Haggerty Art Center, Haggar University Center, a gymnasium, a student housing complex, and the Haggerty Science Center.
Braniff Memorial Tower (1968, Ford, Powell and Carson, with Jane and Duane Landry) at the campus entrance and marking the south end of the central quadrangle is a tall, polygonal tower clad in tawny brick. Each face is pierced by repeating vertical slot windows. Corner piers flare at the bottom and at the top, and the building concludes with a low conical roof. The tower is similar to Ford’s tower at Trinity University in San Antonio. Both were constructed by building hollow brick shapes that were filled with concrete, a technique he also used at the Little Chapel in the Woods (DD9) in Denton. The same architects designed the Braniff Graduate Building (c. 1972) that terminates the north end of the quadrangle, a three-story tawny brick building with narrow windows on the long end bays. The five bays at the center of the facade are open with exposed floor slabs and round columns. Variations on these forms are found on other Ford-designed buildings on campus and are similar to his use of them at Trinity University.
The irregular, low brick form of the Church of the Incarnation (1985, Landry and Landry) opens up inside under an octagonal copper roof with clerestories over the altar. The Dominican Priory of St. Albert the Great (2005, Brown Reynolds Watford Architects) on the campus consists of a chapel and residence for the Dominican friars who serve on the faculty of the university. The building’s tawny brick core blends with other campus materials.