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Web Exclusives:
Under the Ivy April 19, 2006: Great
halls of learning By Jane Chapman Martin ’89 In 1936, Ralph Adams Cram published a memoir called My Life in Architecture. Cram, the University’s head architect from 1907 to 1929, had an enormous impact on Princeton, devising the first master plan for the campus and personally overseeing the building of some 25 campus buildings, most notably the Graduate College and the University Chapel. Reflecting on his time at Princeton, Cram wrote: “At Princeton I first had to work out a general scheme for all future growth, and during the years I served as supervising architect I had the deep gratification of seeing this plan carried out in every essential particular” with the exception, he added, of Dod Hall. “I never succeeded in getting the ridiculous Dod Hall pushed back out of the main axis, but this, I think, was the only case in which I failed in my endeavors.” Dod Hall — a four-story, Romanesque dormitory finished in 1891 at a cost of $75,000 was a constant irritant to Cram, but it serves as a symbol of his passion for his work and his unwillingness to compromise. Cram’s specific problem with Dod was that it interfered with the view from Cannon Green and Nassau Hall between Whig and Clio to the south of campus. It’s hard to recognize today, with all the buildings and mature trees that blanket Princeton’s campus, but Nassau Hall actually sits on a high point. At one time it commanded a view, and likewise could be seen from a distance. As Cram wrote to President Hibben in his 1929 resignation letter, “I should have liked to stay on until Dodd [sic] was moved back or demolished, but anyway the danger of blocking the long axis by the new library has been removed, so I can wait patiently for the abolition of Dodd [sic], so freeing the long view in all its beauty.” Dod aside, Cram did indeed realize much of his dream for a campus unified around the collegiate gothic style. At the end of the 19th century, colleges were in the midst of a building boom, throwing up buildings as needed and as money came in. As Cram wrote, “When I assumed the office of supervising architect, the architectural estate of the University was parlous in the extreme though no worse than that of the other major institutions of higher learning. The principle of rugged individualism had run riot for years, and the result was confusion worse confounded. It was an established custom that when a donor offered a specific building he was allowed to pick his site, his architect, and his style. The results were seldom edifying.” For nearly 25 years, Cram labored to change that. He had a belief bordering on religious conviction that collegiate gothic was the only style suitable to a great institution of higher learning. He felt that only the gothic style uplifted the spirit properly in pursuit of both knowledge and of the divine (for Cram, the two were entwined; he was also a great designer of churches. Upon the chapel’s dedication in 1925, he wrote that gothic embodied the “great scholastic and spiritual impulse” that created the storied English halls of learning, and captured, he hoped, “something of the thrill and the ineffable rapture of the churches of the Middle Ages.” Though Cram had a significant impact on the campus surrounding Cannon Green, the Graduate College best exhibits his ideals. Whereas a number of buildings had already been built around Nassau Hall including the accursed Dod the Graduate College was a blank canvas. In his book, Cram wrote that the project was “the most spacious opportunity the office ever had for working out its, by then, fully established ideas and principles in the matter of ‘collegiate gothic’ adapted to contemporary conditions. … it is more or less English 15th century … consistent with the preservation of that sense of historic and cultural continuity that I am persuaded is fundamental in all educational and ecclesiastical work.” Highlights of the Graduate College include the imposing Cleveland Tower and the medieval Procter Hall dining hall, but Cram’s vision was not fully realized. In his book he proposed an additional Graduate College quad, including a chapel, in which services would be conducted in Latin. In this, he admitted, he had received “scant sympathy and no support whatsoever.” Cram would have been horrified at what was eventually added to his masterpiece. The New Graduate College, built in 1963, is described on the Graduate School’s Web site as “built in a style that originated at the Bauhaus and has since become synonymous with International Modernism.” Though the Princeton campus has developed radically
over the past 100 years, straying far from Cram’s vision, Cram’s
legacy the identification of gothic style with higher learning
remains strong. And upset as he might have been by the architecture
of the 1960s, he surely would have been gratified by the plan of
the new Whitman College, scheduled to open in the fall of 2007 and
designed by Demetri Porphyrios *80 in the collegiate gothic style.
For more on Cram and Princeton, see “Ralph Adams Cram: The Man, His Work, and His Legacy at Princeton University” by Stephen Warneck ’95 at http://etcweb1.princeton.edu/CampusWWW/Studentdocs/Cram.html Jane Martin ’89 is PAW's former editor-in-chief. You can reach her at paw@princeton.edu
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