In 1973, the state’s architects convinced members of the Board of Trustees of the Mississippi State Institutions of Higher Learning to create a school of architecture and to place it at Mississippi State University. In 1976, founding dean William G. McMinn moved to renovate as the school’s headquarters a brick-walled livestock-judging pavilion located near Davis Wade Stadium (1938 begun). Jackson architect James F. Eley adapted the large, clear-span space, with its steel trusses and skylit wood-plank ceiling, to house ground-floor design studios and placed more studios on lateral mezzanines, with classrooms and administrative offices beneath one mezzanine and a prominent glass-walled library beneath the other. The reconfigured building had an immediate and dramatic effect on the campus during the day and during the night when the lantern-like volume confirmed the long hours put in by aspiring architects. In 1982, Eley Associates added a three-story, partially buried wing. Its long, low, panel-brick third-floor entrance front gives way to taller sawtooth-plan walls of glazing at the street level, placing the stacked library and gallery on dramatic display. To the rear, the angled walls are seen a full three stories tall, with a metal panel-sheathed basement level supporting a glazed design-studio floor with an exposed steel balcony and a third-floor terrace accessible from faculty offices. Inside, a long, wide granite stair running alongside a tall concrete retaining wall unites the floor levels functionally and spatially.