Personal Data

Arthur Wallace Rice was born on July 8, 1869, in Boston, the son of George Woods Rice and his wife, Adalaide Walker (daughter of Samuel Walker).

He married on October 3, 1907, in Boston, to Martha Davis Brewer (b. 1872-1873 in Honolulu), daughter of John D. Brewer and his wife, Nannie R. Harris.

Arthur Rice died on March 24, 1938.

Career

Arthur Rice graduated from MIT and studied architecture in Paris.  In January of 1898, he joined with William York Peters in the firm of Peters and Rice.  Peters retired in January of 1904, and Rice continued to practice under the firm name of Peters and Rice.

In 1900, the firm produced what Bainbridge Bunting (in Houses of Boston’s Back Bay) calls “two of the finest” examples of High Georgian designs at 97 Bay State Road and 145-147-149 Bay State Road.  Bunting notes that “the corner house of the block, the old Weld mansion at number 149, is almost palatial in scale.”  Peters and Rice also designed the Filene’s Department Store building on Washington Street in Boston (1905; demolished).

In 1907, Rice joined J. Harleston Parker and Douglas H. Thomas, Jr., in the firm of Parker, Thomas, and Rice.

Parker, Thomas, and Rice designed a number of public, commercial, and residential buildings.  Their Boston work included the R. H. Stearns Building (1908); the Harvard Club (1912) at 374 Commonwealth; the John Hancock building (1922) on the block located bounded by Clarendon, Stuart, Berkeley, and St. James Streets (the eastern half of which was replaced in 1947 by a larger structure designed by Cram and Ferguson); the Chamber of Commerce Building (1923) at  Federal, Franklin and Congress Streets; and the 24-story Art Deco-style United Shoe Machinery Building (1929) at 138-164 Federal Street.

Their work in Baltimore included the campus plan and Academic Building for Johns Hopkins University; the Hotel Belvedere; the Baltimore & Ohio office building; the Maryland Casualty Company; the Savings Bank of Baltimore; the Metropolitan Savings Bank; and the offices of the German Lloyd Steamship line.

Thomas died in 1915 and Parker died in 1930. The firm remained Parker, Thomas, and Rice until Rice’s retirement in the mid-1930s.

Back Bay Work