Located in the Montrose area of Houston, the campus of the University of St. Thomas (a Catholic liberal arts university) originally consisted of the 1912 Link-Lee mansion (now listed in the National Register of Historic Places). When John and Dominique de Menil, the renowned Houston philanthropists, turned their attention to creating a permanent campus for the university in the early 1950s, they instinctively thought of Philip Johnson, who had just completed their San Felipe Road residence, to design a campus master plan. After interviewing several architects, the selection committee chose Johnson.

Johnson based his design on Thomas Jefferson’s “Academical Village” for the University of Virginia, but expressed in the language of Mies van der Rohe’s Illinois Institute of Technology, begun over a decade before the plan for the University of St. Thomas. The master plan called for a campus stretching three-blocks long from north to south with a central green or “mall.” Buildings connected by a continuous colonnade would enclose the mall, with a chapel completing the southern end. The linear configuration of the campus would allow the university to add new buildings as funds allowed. The Chapel of St. Basil, for example, was not completed until 1995. The two-story, exposed steel-column-and-beam structure buildings, only three of which were started in 1958, are Miesian in appearance but with a Johnsonian twist. The campus, dedicated in 1958, is a strong example of International Style modernism in Houston.