A century of circuits and community: Purdue's Electrical Engineering building turns 100
The home of Purdue University's electrical engineers has had different names over the last century. Still, its role has stayed the same: a busy crossroads for classrooms, labs, and student life in the heart of campus.
Built in the mid-1920s as the Electrical Engineering Building, the complex is known today as the Max W & Maileen Brown Family Hall of Electrical Engineering (BHEE) after a 2021 naming approved by Purdue's Board of Trustees. The change recognized a gift from alumnus Max W Brown (BSEE '70) and his family. Purdue marked the renaming with a campus celebration in September 2022.
The Brown Family Hall's centennial traces to the university's post–World War I growth. Purdue laid the cornerstone in 1924, with construction of the building recorded in 1925. Those early moves eased crowding as engineering enrollment surged.
Electrical engineering at Purdue, however, predates the building by decades. The School of Electrical Engineering was established in 1888 and initially met in a separate facility opposite today's Stanley Coulter Hall, on the site now occupied by the Chemistry building. By the 1910s and 1920s, the program's growth and national ambitions made a modern home essential.
Additions quickly followed the original structure. In 1932, support from industrialist Thomas Duncan, owner of the nearby Duncan Electric Co., funded a significant expansion. A second Duncan-funded project in 1940 created what became known as the Duncan High Voltage Laboratory (later the Duncan Annex). These wings gave faculty and students space for large-scale power and emerging electronics work and are still part of the complex that students walk through today.
Over its first half-century, the building housed milestones that shaped engineering education and the media that many Americans enjoyed at home. Purdue operated one of the nation's early educational radio stations, WBAA, beginning in 1922, and by 1929–30, faculty member Roscoe George was demonstrating all-electronic television receivers and campus broadcasting experiments from within electrical engineering spaces. Those innovations helped cement Purdue's reputation in communications and electronics and tied the building's story to the state's airwaves.
Renovations over the years updated labs, classrooms, and student spaces while preserving the building's familiar footprint on the Engineering Fountain side of campus. Recent work has focused on modernizing interiors for today's students. In October 2024, Purdue celebrated a fully renovated first floor with new undergraduate instructional labs, graduate research spaces, collaboration areas, improved accessibility, and upgraded restrooms and energy systems. The improvements followed a 2023 fundraising campaign and continue a series of upgrades that have kept the 1920s shell current with 21st-century teaching.
The building remains a Purdue landmark. Generations of students have filed into its lecture halls, squeezed into project rooms for senior design, and met mentors during office hours along the same corridors.
As the Brown Family Hall of Electrical Engineering marks its 100th year, the arc of its history mirrors Purdue engineering itself: founded in the 19th century, scaled up in the 20th, and constantly renewing its spaces and tools for the challenges ahead. The name on the limestone has changed, but the mission inside — teaching, discovery, and collaboration — is the same one the cornerstone set in motion a century ago.