LaFortune Student Center

Built as the Science Hall in 1883 under the direction of Fr. John Zahm, the head of the college of science, and architect Willoughby J. Edbrooke. The cornerstone, which was laid on June 20, 1883, by Rev. John Ambrose Watterson, was donated by Dr. John Cassidy, Notre Dame's first science graduate in 1865, and contained “lucid and colored quartz pebbles, and was procured in northern Michigan”.[6][7] President Thomas E. Walsh formally opened the building on December 14, 1884.[8]

The original building was 80 by 100 feet and was made up by two stories plus a basement. Architecturally, it was designed in an eclectic mixture of French Second Empire style and Neo Romanesque with some neoclassical elements such as Ionic columns of the little portico and a somewhat classical cornice with a dentil course below the soffit.[6][9][10][11] The basement housed the engine-room, the department of mechanical engineering, storage chemicals storage, and the metallurgical laboratory. The first floor housed the department of Physics and Chemistry, and a part of a museum. In the back of the museum was the grand staircase leading to the second floor, where the rest of the museum was housed, containing showcase cabinets of natural history, geology, mineralogy, botany, antiquities, and more. The rest of the second floor contained lecture rooms for the geology and mineralogy on the south side and of those for botany, physiology, and zoology on the north.[10]

In 1924 architecture professors Vincent Fagan and Francis Kervick designed an addition to the east side of the building and construction started in June, with the project completed in time for the opening of classes in the fall.[12] The addition contained 24 classrooms and laboratories and was designed to fit into the architectural style of the original building.[13]

In the mid-1930s, Notre Dame built its first particle accelerator in the basement of Cushing Hall, but this instrument was not powerful enough and the university contracted to purchase an eight-million-volt machine in 1940. A vault in the basement of the Science Hall to host such machine and was completed in 1941. When installed, it was the largest particle accelerator built to date and it was on-line by the time the United States entered World War II. In 1924, the Manhattan Project took over the operation of Notre Dame's accelerator, nicknamed the "atom smasher".[14][15]

When the new and larger Nieuwland Hall of Science was completed in 1952, the building was converted to a student union building and named LaFortune Center, after Joseph LaFortune, an oil executive from Tulsa, Oklahoma, who donated $135,000. The renovation was directed by architecture professors Frank Montana and Robert Schultz. The new student center featured a main ball room upstairs, a lower lounge, ten meeting rooms, a television room, a movie theatre, the manager ' s office, offices for the Student Senate and offices for the Vice President in Charge of Student Affairs, game rooms, and offices for Campus Clubs. The official opening took place at 1953 homecoming weekend and featured the Sophomore cotillion September 23.[16][17]

The 1924 addition continued to be used by the science department until 1956. The LaFortune family gave an additional $125,000 for the additional renovation, which featured offices for Scholastic and Dome offices, a second-floor lounge, basement recreation rooms and the new Huddle, which previously was located in Washington Hall annex and opened in its new location on Tuesday, February 26, 1957.

Thanks to an additional gift of $450,000 from the LaFortune estate, the Student Center underwent renovations between 1973 and 1977, which included additional space for food services, and remodeling of the basement and other social areas, and the addition of air conditioning. In 1986, another gift from the LaFortunes permitted the addition of the east wing of the building, facing Nieuwland Hall.[18]