The William Albert Noyes Laboratory of Chemistry, located at 505 S. Mathews Avenue in Urbana, Illinois on the campus of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, was built in 1902 as the "New Chemical Laboratory", and was designed by Nelson Strong Spencer in the Richardsonian Romanesque style. The Chemistry Department had been founded in 1867, and in 1878 moved into a building of its own, the first department of the university to do so. When the department outgrew that building, department head Arthur W. Palmer convinced the state legislature to build a new lab, with 77,884 square feet of usable space, at the cost of under $100,000.