A $20 million gift from the estate of Cayuga County resident Ruth Price Thomas will go to the Department of Architecture in Cornell University's College of Architecture, Art and Planning, President Hunter Rawlings announced Dec. 18. The gift is the largest ever received by the department as well as one of the most substantial gifts to an architecture program anywhere.

In addition to Cornell, Wells College will receive an endowment valued at $20 million from the Thomas estate, the largest gift received by the college from a single donor. The relationship between Cornell and Wells dates back to a friendship between their founders, Ezra Cornell and Henry Wells, when they were business partners in the 1840s.

Thomas, who died Aug. 29, 2001, in the Auburn Nursing Home, Auburn, N.Y., at the age of 88, made provisions in her will to establish two endowment funds at Cornell in her name. One will establish the Ruth P. Thomas Endowment for the Department of Architecture; a second fund will establish the Ruth P. Thomas Cornell Journal of Architecture Endowment.

"We are deeply touched by the generosity of spirit displayed by Mrs. Thomas in her bequest to architecture at Cornell," said Hunter Rawlings, president of Cornell. "Her gift does no less than underwrite the future of our architecture program."

Porus Olpadwala, dean of the College of Architecture, Art and Planning, called the gift "exceptional" and said: "Mrs. Thomas' farsighted endowment caps years of support and ensures that we will continue to attract the very best students and faculty for decades to come."

Cornell's Department of Architecture, which was founded in 1871, was just named the best architecture program in the United States for the third year in a row, in an annual survey of 800 leading principals of U.S. architecture firms. The survey, on which schools graduate the best employees, is commissioned by the Almanac of Architecture and Design. Cornell's

department enrolls about 325 undergraduates and 55 graduate students and has 30 full-time faculty members. Among its alumni are such pre-eminent architects as Richard Meier, B.Arch. '56, designer of the Getty Center, in Los Angeles, and Peter Eisenman, B.Arch, '55, founder of the Institute for Architecture and Urban Studies in New York City. Recently a design was chosen for a new building to replace Rand Hall, where much of the architecture program is currently housed. The winning design by Steven Holl Architects, to be completed by about 2004, will be greatly enhanced by the gift, which will be used to invigorate architecture studies and activities, Olpadwala said.

"The new endowment gift from the estate of Mrs. Thomas comes at a critical time and will make an enormous difference in allowing us to make long-overdue changes," said Nasrine Seraji, chair of the Department of Architecture. "Ruth Thomas allows us once more to be creative and innovative, this time in our pedagogical goals and plans. We are grateful for her vision and profound understanding."

In 1975, Thomas and her husband, Leonard Brinton Thomas, a former New York City attorney, established a lecture series in architecture in memory of their son, Preston, a Cornell architecture student who died in a car accident the previous year. The prestigious annual Preston H. Thomas Memorial Lecture Series began in 1976 and has since showcased some of the best contemporary architectural theorists and practitioners in the world, among them George Baird, Rem Koolhaas and Eisenman.

In 1981 Ruth Thomas also made the first of many gifts to the Cornell Journal of Architecture . The annual publication, which is a forum for new ideas in architecture and has an international audience, is produced entirely by students in Cornell's architecture program. In addition, in 1999 Thomas established the Ruth P. Thomas Architecture Scholarship Fund, through Cornell's Scholarship Challenge Campaign.

Thomas was born in Berlin in 1913. She emigrated to Cuba and then the United States shortly before World War II, to escape the Nazi Holocaust. Trained in graphic arts and window display, she opened a display studio in New York City in 1937, specializing in three-dimensional paper window and interior displays for department stores throughout the United States. She went on to become display manager for the Loft Candy Co., which at the time had over 100 stores in eastern New York state. Thomas and her husband, who survives her, married in 1947 and moved to Cayuga County in 1948, where they bought Lime Ledge Farm, a thoroughbred horse farm in Sennett, near Auburn. Thomas was an active volunteer as well as a philanthropist in the county, and her bequest continues to support the organizations she helped when she was alive. In addition to Cornell and Wells College, beneficiaries include Cayuga County Community College; American Red Cross of Cayuga County, ASPCA of New York City, Cayuga County SPCA, Cayuga Health Association, and Schweinfurth Memorial Art Center.

For information on the Cornell gift, contact Inge Reichenbach, Cornell vice president for alumni affairs and development, (607) 255-5142; for information on the Wells gift, contact Ann Rollo, Wells vice president for external relations, (315) 364-3416.