The core of McGraw Hall (built in 1871 as the third building on Cornell’s Arts Quad, with funds largely provided by John McGraw) was designed primarily as an exhibition space. The first two floors housed the museum of natural history—a collection assembled primarily by Prof. Burt Green Wilder that included the Silliman Collection of Mineralogy, the Newcomb Collection of Mollusks, and the famous bottled brains. The specimens are now dispersed; some subsets extant on the Cornell campus include the Vertebrate Collections, the Insect Collection and the Wilder Brain Collection.

A. D. White set aside the third tier for displaying the photographs he had purchased for the Department of Architecture. Photographs below illustrate how the photographs were exhibited.