In the Spring of 1988, O. Jack Mitchell was serving as Dean of the Rice University School of Architecture. That year, the Rice Design Alliance—an outreach wing of the school that Jack himself had helped establish—chose to honor him at its annual gala. As part of the celebration, architects were invited to design and donate toys, which would then be auctioned to support the RDA’s programs.

Our idea came quickly: an “O.Jack in the Box.” It was as though we asked the O.Jack in the Box what it wanted to be, and it said: “A cubic basswood abstraction of Anderson Hall with Jack’s head rocketing out of the top.” So that’s exactly what we made.

For context, Anderson Hall houses the School of Architecture. Under Jack’s leadership, the university commissioned architects James Stirling and Michael Wilford to design the building’s renovation and expansion, completed between 1979 and 1981.

To craft the toy, we started with a traditional jack-in-the-box, then clad it in basswood panels to echo the facades and rooflines of Stirling’s design. The original clown inside was replaced with a winged cube adorned with photographs of Dean Mitchell.

In the end, the O.Jack in the Box never went to auction. Instead, it was presented directly to Jack himself— where it resided happily on his family’s mantlepiece.