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Ralph Adams Cram.

The ministry of art

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the singular charm of the ensemble.

This "Jeffersonian" style rapidly took the
place of the old Georgian, but its day was brief;
and somewhere between 1820 and 1830 oc-
curred that ominous point when the last flicker-
ing tradition of good taste and the last weak
impulse of instinctive art vanished, and the
new era began wherein the desires and predil-
ections of society as a whole were no longer for
good things and beautiful things, but explicitly
and even clamorously for bad things and ugly
things, while the uncertain offices of the archi-
tect were the only agencies that from time to
time redeemed the general chaos.

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THE MINISTRY OF ART

Fortunately, there was little collegiate build-
ing with us during this dismal second quarter
of the nineteenth century, or rather, and also
fortunately, little of it has survived ; and when
first the architect appears on the scene as the
mentor rather than the exemplar of public
opinion, it is in novel guise, nothing less, in-
deed, than as the protagonist of Gothic. He
was not very Gothic, I must admit, and in the
beginning he contented himself with a few
apologetic and quite casual buttresses, pointed
arches over his door and window openings, an
octagonal turret or two, and of course battle-
ments, usually of two-inch deal neatly painted,
and sometimes sprinkled with sand as a conces-
sion to appearances. What took place in do-
mestic and ecclesiastical architecture, I dare
not even reveal to you, but the college work was
a shade less horrific ; for sometimes, as at West
Point, it was of stone, and good stone work will
cover a multitude of sins as it still does in
our own day and generation, I believe.

Perhaps it is hardly fair to attribute this first
"Gothic" to architects; really it was the work
of the ambitious builder who, after crystallizing

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UNIVERSITY ARCHITECTURE

under the immortal Batty Langley's handbooks
on classical architecture, suddenly expanded
with almost explosive force beneath the influ-
ence of that amazing work of the same gifted
author wherein he reduces Gothic also to a sys-
tem of "orders" and demonstrates how by a
few simple rules one can easily learn to pro-
duce "genteel and appropriate Structures in the
Gothic Taste." But the Oxford Movement and
Pugin's Gothic Revival soon passed beyond the
admirable Batty Langley, and the influence of
Pugin himself entered America, largely through
a really great architect, Upjohn. I think he did
no collegiate work, but John Ruskin produced
those that did, and from the close of our War
between the States down to about 1880, the new
Gothic that expressed his really enormous influ-
ence might be said to have run riot through our
colleges. There were those like Renwick and
Congdon, and Mr. Haight (who is still living),
that held conscientiously to the grave and
archaeological type established by the Pugins;
there were others who tried to incorporate
Ruskinian doctrines in more personal, original,
and mobile work, as Blomfield and Butterfield

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were doing here in England . The results were at
least lacking in monotony, but few of them
achieved the simplicity and the dignity of Mr.
Haight's work, while many of them reached a
point of violence and anarchy hardly to be
matched in history.

It was all a "false dawn," however, and
ceased almost in a moment (though for a brief
period only, as we shall see) when that great
genius and greater personality, Richardson,
flashed like an unpredicted comet across the
sky. The later seventies were desperate, no
less ; and the group of conscientious men could
not withstand the flood of falsity and bad taste
and artificiality that involved the whole art of
architecture. Richardson alone turned the tide,
brushed away the whole card-house of artifice,
and deliberately forced a new and alien style on
a bewildered people. He did great work, some
of it immortal work, in his powerful mode ; but
he died before his mission was accomplished,
and though he killed the " French roof style "
and the futile Gothic, and all the other absurdi-
ties, he left behind no one of his own calibre to
carry on the crusade, but instead a multitude of

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UNIVERSITY ARCHITECTURE

imitators who, though at first doing fine work
under the memory and inspiration of their mas-
ter, gradually turned away into other fields,
leaving the Romanesque propaganda to the
most inadequate exponents imaginable. For a
decade we wallowed in lilliputian cyclopeanism,
and then, to change the simile, the summer
storm swept west and south, and over the deso-
lation it had left loomed, almost simultaneously,
three new tendencies, Colonial, Perpendicular
Gothic, and "Beaux Arts." Three less well-
assorted bedfellows it would be hard to find, but
with a magnanimity rare in history these three
rivals more or less succeeded in establishing a
modus vivendi, Colonial taking over part of the
new, and again triply divided, Gaul, in the shape
of domestic work; Gothic annexing, so far as it
could, all collegiate, scholastic, and ecclesiasti-
cal building; while to the Beaux Arts propa-
ganda fell all it could get of the rest par-
ticularly Carnegie libraries, town houses, and
banks. As a matter of fact, this partitioning of
architectural activity was not the result of
amity, nor was it in the least definitive: the
Colonial style claimed the patronage of our

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THE MINISTRY OF ART

nonconformist brethren (with show of reason
and propriety), Gothic tried vainly to break
into the library fold, while the Beaux Arts
architects made unavailing eyes at the Church,
and, indeed, claimed everything in sight. Their
pretensions did not go without questioning,
however, for in the mean time the old and most
classical Classic was re-born (it had never wholly
died), and at the hands of that great man,
Charles McKim, it suddenly achieved a height
of serene nobility where it could and did chal-
lenge the claims of its rivals. And there were
other claimants for the architectural crown now
so completely "in commission": there was the
Spanish pretender with its doubtful offspring,
the quaintly denominated "Mission style";
there was the secessionist Americanism of the
inspired but unguarded Mr. Sullivan; there
was a kind of neo-Byzantinism ; there was a
hidden but persistent Japanese propaganda. In
fact I was wrong when I said that the architec-
tural Gaul was divided into three parts : it is not
such a triple partition that confronts us now, it
is an omnivorous eclecticism that bears some
of the ear-marks of anarchy. To use one of our

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UNIVERSITY ARCHITECTURE

own phrases, "everything goes," and much of it
goes exceedingly well, amazingly so, in fact ; but
the result is somewhat lacking in the qualities of
unity and lucidity.

Fortunately, we have to do with few of the
varied schools, for though all of them have foot-
holds in the several colleges, only two have
established their claims, Georgian and Gothic,
and at the present time the latter has the call
and has produced the most notable results: it
may almost be said that, except where lack
of funds or climatic conditions argue against
Gothic, this has the field absolutely to itself.
The ascetic and fastidious classicism of McKim
created Columbia University and occurs spo-
radically elsewhere ; the Boulevardesque of the
Beaux Arts men appears in a single building at
Yale, and in the slow-growing University of
California and the Naval College at Annapolis ;
Spanish elements go to the making of Leland
Stanford ; and in Texas my own firm is doing "a
deed without a name " that you must judge for
yourselves and justify if you can and as we do
ourselves. Elsewhere it is, as I said, Georgian
or Gothic, and to the college trustee it is now

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the question, "under which King, Bezonian."
Harvard, after swinging the circle of every pos-
sible architectural dogma and heresy, seems to
have settled down, as she should, to Georgian,
as has Williams, and so many of the smaller and
poorer preparatory schools and colleges, par-
ticularly in the South; but Yale, West Point,
Pennsylvania, New York, Princeton, Bryn
Mawr, Washington University, St. Louis, and
Chicago, together with all the larger prepara-
tory and Church schools, and the newer Roman
Catholic institutions, are uncompromisingly
Gothic of the type made immortal in England.
Before showing you the nature of this work,
it may be well to examine a typical American
university, in its setting-out, in its component
parts, and in its organization. I will choose for
this purpose Princeton, of which I am a mem-
ber by adoption and where I have the honor
to act as supervising architect. The title itself
will indicate at once one of the many points of
divergence between the English and American
systems, for I fancy there is no university in the
United Kingdom where one man is given almost
complete authority over all matters of the

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UNIVERSITY ARCHITECTURE

choice of architects, supervision of their work
both in design and execution, acceptance or
rejection of gifts and their placing if accepted,
the development of roads and paths, and the
planting of trees and shrubs. Until recently
such an office was unknown in America, but
since Princeton took the lead, some five or six
years ago, others have followed rapidly and the
practice has now become an established cus-
tom.

It was time, too, that something should be
done : as I have already indicated, our colleges
were like Topsy they "just growed"
without rhyme or reason, subject to the most
vacillating fashion and the quaint whims of
emancipated individualism, while the results
were generally shocking. In the plan of Prince-
ton you will easily see how lawless had been the
growth, and conditions were even worse at Har-
vard and Yale. You will note at once from the
wide spacing and the lack of coordination an-
other point of difference : with us almost every
college has begun in open country, as an original
foundation. We have nothing like Oxford and
Cambridge, partly because of this fact, and

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THE MINISTRY OF ART

partly because each college is with us a unit ; we
have no gathering up of many and independent
foundations, loosely knit together for admin-
istrative purposes: we have instead self-con-
tained units, sometimes of enormous size, and
each new benefactor founds, not a new college,
but a dormitory, a library, a school of law or
medicine or forestry or journalism. Person-
ally, I think this plan must be abandoned, and
a breaking-up into more manageable units take
place. It seems to me demonstrable that in
schools that have from four to six thousand stu-
dents half the character-building qualities of
education are lost, and that the personal ele-
ment must be regained by breaking up these
unwieldy masses into working units of not
more than two hundred men each, at least for
living and social purposes. This was attempted
two years ago at Princeton, but the time was
not ripe and the reform failed ; still the leaven
is working at Harvard and Cornell and else-
where, and is, I think, within measurable dis-
tance of accomplishment.

In the new plan of Princeton, which shows
the university as it now is, and indicates its fu-

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UNIVERSITY ARCHITECTURE

ture lines of development, you will see at once
how strong the tendency is toward the standard
type: here the dormitories are assuming quad-
rangular form, and in time may become full
residential colleges, each with its common room
and great hall and, when times have still further
changed, perhaps its chapel. In the beginning
our dormitories were simply barracks, with liv-
ing rooms opening off long halls, with startling
results so far as order and discipline were con-
cerned. Now the "entry" type is almost uni-
versal, the type that holds in England, while
the old sequence of regular cells serving both as
study and bedroom for one or even two men,
with a common necessarium two or three hun-
dred yards away, has given place to the stand-
ard type of suites consisting of a study and two
bedrooms for two undergraduates, and a study
and bedroom for each graduate student. In
the former case each stairway is separated from
the next by a party wall, unbroken except in the
basement to which all staircases descend, and
here a general corridor gives access to groups of
baths and toilets, and to the box-rooms, and to
the other staircases in the quadrangle as well.

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THE MINISTRY OF ART

In the newest of our buildings for graduate stu-
dents every two suites have a private bath
between. Of course, we pride ourselves very
much on our plumbing, and I sometimes
wonder if we are not becoming almost Roman
in our luxuries for bathing: it is possible we
have gone too far, and that in time we shall
return to more Spartan arrangements; but at
present there is no denying the fact that we
give nine tenths of our students more than
they are accustomed to at home.

Another thing that will strike you is the mag-
nificence of our gymnasiums and the dominat-
ing quality of our schools of science. There is
really a rivalry amongst our colleges as to which
shall have the biggest and most perfectly
equipped gymnasium and swimming-pool, but
this is partly excused by the fact that our
winters are so severe that for three or four
months skating, snow-shoeing, and ice-boating
are about the only possible forms of out-of-door
exercise in the North. Then we have general
physical directors, as well as special trainers for
the varied forms of athletics, and in many col-
leges regular and searching examinations of the

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UNIVERSITY ARCHITECTURE

men for physical and functional weaknesses,
and as a result the health of our schools is well
above normal. As for our science buildings, you
know, as we know only too well, how almost
unbalanced we have become in our devotion to
practical and "vocational" training, and how
obsessed we have become with the mania for
natural science. Here at Princeton there is less
of this than elsewhere, but two of our newest
and most magnificent buildings are devoted,
the one to biology, the other to physics, though
as yet we have no schools of mechanical and
electrical and mining engineering, as happens so
often elsewhere.

One novelty you will not notice on the
Princeton plan, and that is the clubs and fra-
ternities. We have as many "Greek-Letter So-
cieties" (which are very awful and very secret
organizations) as we have colleges, and there
are some institutions in America where these
fraternity houses almost outnumber the aca-
demic buildings themselves. At Princeton no
Greek-letter societies are allowed, but there are
two old secret organizations, the Whig and the
Clio, whose white marble mausoleums form the

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very centre of the campus, while to the east
stretches a great street absolutely lined with the
private clubs which grew up when the fratern-
ities were taboo. These clubs take in only a cer-
tain number of new members each year ; they
are distinctly aristocratic in their tone, though
aristocratic of a sound and healthy type ; and
the buildings generally follow the lines of an old
and palatial country house.

From all these points of difference you will
see, then, that our American university is a very
different matter, in its architectural form, from
those in this country. Our newest graduate col-
leges come nearer, as you will see when I show
you the now rising buildings for Princeton which
lie half a mile to the west.

In the mean time let us examine the begin-
nings of what has been a notable Gothic renais-
sance amongst our colleges, and we need not
forsake Princeton to do this, for it was here, in
the shape of the new library, that it came into
being. Alexander Hall had just been completed
in the verbose and turgid style that followed
the memory of Richardson like a Nemesis, and
its architect was given orders to abandon this

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UNIVERSITY ARCHITECTURE

and revert to what we sometimes call "Ox-
ford Gothic." It was not a style with which
he had either sympathy or familiarity, and he
produced a work which, while acceptable in
its mass and general composition, fails sadly
through its coarse scale and its mechanical
ornamentation. Almost simultaneously, how-
ever, certain new dormitories were put in hand
Blair and Little Halls ; and here the archi-
tects were two young men of Philadelphia who
most unaccountably could think and feel in
Gothic terms. I like to record their names
whenever I can, John Stewardson and Wal-
ter Cope, for in addition to being singularly
lovable fellows, they were geniuses of no infer-
ior order; they brought into being, at Princeton,
Bryn Mawr, and the University of Pennsyl-
vania, structures that are to me singularly beau-
tiful and inspiring, and they left their mark for
all time on American architecture. Both are
dead, and at a pathetically early age, while the
profession of architecture is the poorer thereby.
About the same time a transplanted English-
man, Mr. Vaughan, sometime pupil of that
immortal master of the new Gothic, the late

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George Bodley, and still with us I am glad to
say, began the introduction of the same style
into our great preparatory schools, which you
here would call "public schools." His work at
St. Paul's marked a new era in this category
of scholastic architecture, and was continued
later in more sumptuous fashion at Groton.
My own firm has been following his leadership
in the convent school of St. Mary at Peekskill,
and theTaft School in Connecticut, while there
are innumerable examples of the same sort of
thing all over the country.

It was really Cope and Stewardson's work
at Princeton that set the pace, however, and
so beautiful was it, so convincing as to the
possibilities of adapting this perfect style to
all modern scholastic requirements, that the
Princeton authorities, with a wisdom beyond
their generation, passed a law that for the
future every building erected there should fol-
low the same general style. "Seventy-nine"
Hall, Patton, McCosh, and the Gymnasium
followed in quick succession; then came the
great Palmer Physical Laboratory, the Biolog-
ical Laboratory Guyot Hall Upper Pyne

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UNIVERSITY ARCHITECTURE

and Lower Pyne, and a little later, after I had
become supervising architect, Campbell Hall,
by my own firm, and the altogether wonderful
quadrangles of Holder and Hamilton Halls, by
Messrs. Day Brothers and Klauder, of Phila-
delphia. These latter buildings mark one of the
very high points we have achieved in Collegiate
Gothic in modern times. When the great quads
are completed, we shall, I think, confront a
masterpiece.

The most recent Princeton work is the great
Graduate College my own firm is now building
on the crest of a low hill, half a mile from the
college campus, and commanding a gently slop-
ing lawn of about eighty acres. This new col-
lege is, of course, only for graduate students;
it has an endowment of over half a million
pounds; it is conceived and organized on the
most liberal, cultural, and scholastic lines, far
away, indeed, from the popular schemes of "vo-
cational" training; and it should go far toward
restoring the balance in favour of sound learning
and noble scholarship. The plan shows only
the work now in hand, the first quad, with the
great hall and its kitchens, together with the

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Cleveland Tower, which is a national memorial
to one of our greatest Presidents, who spent his
years, after retiring from office, in Princeton, as
a trustee of the university and a devoted friend
of the new Graduate College on the lines that
had been determined by its Dean, Dr. West.
At present the placing of the great tower seems
a little too like that of the Victoria Tower at
Westminster to be wholly satisfactory, but in
some distant future a second quadrangle will be
constructed to the south and east, containing
the Chapel, the Library, and quarters for Fel-
lows, which will restore the tower itself to the
centre of the composition. Some day, also, a
third quad will be developed to the northeast,
and then the group will be complete, for the
Dean's lodgings, with their private gardens, to
the southwest of the great hall, are already
under construction.

Let us now turn from Princeton to some
others of our many colleges ; but before we take
up the Gothic tale, let us see what has been
done in other stylistic directions, for I would
not give you the idea that the restoration of
what one of your own great Gothicists, Mr.
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UNIVERSITY ARCHITECTURE

Champneys, has called so well the "Oxford
Mixture," is all plain sailing, or that splendid
work has not been done in other directions.
Columbia University in New York the old
King's College of Colonial days stands, of
course, as the noblest type of the pure Classi-
cal idea, and its majestical library will always
remain a national monument. Unfortunately,
the site is crowded and fatally restricted: the
mistake was made of fixing this when the
change was necessary a generation ago too
near the outposts of the advancing city, which
like a conquering army has already swept up to
its gates and miles beyond. For myself I can't
imagine a great centre of higher education in
the howl and war of a great city, or anywhere,
in fact, except in the quiet country or in the vil-
lage environment it has built for itself, and I
fancy another generation will see another mov-
ing on of Columbia ; .and when this happens I
venture to predict that, in spite of the grave and
scholarly mastery of McKim, Mead, and White's
work, the new housing will be on the lines that
Oxford and Cambridge have not only made
their own, but universal and eternal.

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There is little else that is purely Classical
amongst our universities, though Carrere and
Hastings have built a most engagingly Parisian
Alumni Hall at Yale, the Naval Academy at
Annapolis is strictly French, and the University
of California is growing on scrupulously ficole
des Beaux Arts lines, afar on the Pacific Coast.
Georgian, however, has established itself as a
determined rival of the "Oxford Mixture," and
some of its products are not only logical and
lovely, but genuinely scholastic as well. Har-
vard, as I have said, is beginning to follow
this line, and so is Williams, where we ourselves
are trying to show we have no hard feelings,
by building a Commencement Hall, and a new
quadrangle, in this quite characteristically
American style. In Virginia, also, we are slowly
constructing a great college for women, while
we are using the same style for another of
our oldest and most famous "preparatory
schools" at Exeter, as well as at yet another
girls' college, Wheaton, in Massachusetts.
Georgian also, with rather quaint Roman ele-
ments, has been used by McKim, Mead, and
White for the vast War College at Washing-

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UNIVERSITY ARCHITECTURE

ton, and altogether it is, as we say in our
colloquial way, giving Gothic "a run for its
money."

The University of Pennyslvania shows still
more of Cope and Stewardson's wonderful
work, though here it is couched in an extremely
rich Elizabethan vernacular; and I am sure you
will admit that the style is handled in a magnifi-
cent and competent fashion. Here it is all red
brick and yellow stone, and the same materials
are used in Mr. Day's beautifully proportioned
and very reserved Gymnasium. Bryn Mawr
again is built of the wonderful stone that un-
derlies all Pennsylvania and New Jersey, putting
a premium on good architecture. Here in Eng-
land all building stone is finely dressed, but in
America we have adopted the practice of using
"ledge stone" for our ashlar, our trimmings
only being tooled. Fortunately, we have a wide
variety of singularly beautiful stones, ranging
in colour through all shades of gray, brown, pur-
ple, and tawny, easily obtained, inexpensive
and durable. In a way I think we gain a rich-
ness in colour and texture that is obtainable in no
other way, while we also acquire something of

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that effect of age, which is, after all, so essential
a part of architecture.

Washington University, St. Louis, is later
work of this same firm of Cope and Steward-
son, after the latter had died, and good as it is,
it shows the loss of the peculiar poetry that
marked everything Stewardson touched. The
plan is exceedingly interesting and very mas-
terly, you will admit. It was laid out de novo,


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