The oldest surviving classroom building on campus, Billings is also one of few standing works commissioned by college founders Henry Fowle Durant and his wife, Pauline. During the 1860s and 1870s, Ware and Van Brunt was the leading collegiate architectural firm in Boston. Among its most important buildings was Memorial Hall (NY1) at Harvard. Billings was one of the last buildings designed by the firm before its dissolution in 1881. The picturesque exterior here, of brick and terra-cotta (a material recently revived in the Boston area), with its free classic details, turrets, and Flemish gables, echoes the firm's contemporary work elsewhere, as well as the European buildings sketched by William Ware in his student days.