Chapter two case Studies

PRINCETON UNIVERSITY

it was built in the fashionable Georgian style. Its honey-coloured local stone has since been used time and again on campus, visually harmonizing its many buildings. Unlike the three-sided courtyards of Harvard or the enclosed quadrangles of the ancient English colleges, Nassau Hall was not planned to have flanking buildings. The apparent efficiency and rationality of housing all activities under one roof soon established it as a model for the perfect collegiate building. In the later eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, its form was imitated at Harvard (Hollis Hall, 1762), Brown (University Hall, 1770), Dartmouth (Dartmouth Hall, 1784–1791), South Carolina (Rutledge Hall, 1803), and Rutgers (Old Queen’s College, 1809). Nassau Hall was set deep into its plot back from the public street, creating a spacious ‘village green’ setting in its foreground. Symbolically distanced from the town and yet still open to the world, this arrangement proved both a defining characteristic of the college’s early spatial composition and influential upon American campus development at large. It prompted the first use of the Latin word campus, meaning field, a term which has since come to embody the distinctive physical character of the American university.⁴³

In March 1802, Nassau Hall was ravaged by fire and the trustees turned to English architect, Benjamin Henry Latrobe, to rebuild it. Latrobe’s contribution to Princeton did not end there, however, and he was placed at the helm of an ambitious building project. Latrobe designed two twinned structures at the north-east and north-west corners of Nassau Hall. Stanhope Hall (1803) is the only one of these buildings to survive (its pair was razed in the 1870s). These two buildings marked Princeton’s evolution toward a symmetrical and neo-classical plan, a transition that was expediated by the arrival of amateur architect, Joseph Henry, at the college. In 1836, inspired by Latrobe’s example of organization, Henry provided the first written master plan for the university’s future development. Its growth was to be guided by the neo-classical tenets of balance, symmetry, clarity and simplicity, values that informed the siting of the subsequent buildings, Whig and Clio Halls. Built in 1838 to designs by Charles Steadman, Whig and Clio Halls bring Athens to New Jersey. The two Greek temples were built facing the south façade of Nassau Hall to define the southern perimeter of campus. They were positioned symmetrically behind Nassau Hall, so that each could be seen from the street and terminated parallel walks that skirted the sides of Nassau.

Their siting strengthened the classical order of the grounds. (In the 1890s, they were rebuilt closer together to permit an expanded sight line southwards from the street.)⁴⁴

Soon, however, the neo-classical vogue came to be displaced. Romantic landscaping ideas of the Victorian landscape architects Andrew Downing and Frederick Law Olmsted supplanted the axial formality of early-nineteenth-century planning and Princeton’s symmetrical outlines were blurred by a new enthusiasm for the spontaneous picturesque. This change was driven by Princeton’s eleventh president, James McCosh (1811–1894). Arriving at the college in 1868, McCosh transformed the campus into an English country estate, characterized by oblique lines and meandering walkways that revealed surprises at every turn. During his 20-year term, the campus was for the first time enlarged beyond the confines of the Nassau Hall precinct. Witherspoon Hall was built in 1877 to the south-west of Nassau Hall on an elevated site overlooking the train station. With its west side facing the railway line, the five-storey building was designed to be the public face of the increasingly self-assured college to those approaching by rail. Chancellor Green Library (now Chancellor Green Hall) was another of McCosh’s projects. Built in 1873 to designs by William A. Potter, its siting represented the first significant rupture of Latrobe and Henry’s symmetrical vision for the Nassau quadrangle. Latrobe’s Philosophical Hall (pair to Stanhope) was demolished to afford the library a prominent position. Facing outwards toward the street, Chancellor Green Library reveals an important characteristic of McCosh’s campus; it signalled Princeton’s reorientation to the public realm. Potter was also responsible for Alexander Hall, a great assembly hall built directly west of Nassau Hall in 1892 (Figure 2.33). Like the library, it faced directly to the street. Although subsequent changes have made it less easy to appreciate today, Alexander Hall, together with Nassau Hall, the library, Dickinson Hall (destroyed by fire in 1920) and the John C. Green School of Science (destroyed by fire in 1928) formed a streetscape looking out towards the wider world. With its residential halls hidden beyond to the south, the college was effectively planned with two personas: one private and the other public.⁴⁵

Alexander Hall’s robust, Romanesque aesthetic also marked a turning point in the campus’s history. Despite its early popularity, the building was soon subject to ridicule and it was one of the last

not to espouse the Collegiate Gothic idiom that came to dominate the campus. The style was a defining characteristic of the campus regeneration that was inaugurated in 1896, the year the College of New Jersey proclaimed itself Princeton University. Princeton acquired a heightened self-confidence, and embarked upon a momentous course of growth and construction that shaped much of what we know as Princeton today.

Its grounds were transformed into a collegiate ideal of seclusion and exclusivity, informed by the cloistered quadrangles of the English colleges. Upon visiting Cambridge in 1899, Princeton’s president, Woodrow Wilson wrote, ‘I bring away from it a very keen sense of what we lack in our democratic college, where no one has privacy or claims to have his own thoughts’.⁴⁶ The campus recoiled from the outside world, turning in upon itself to provide a Utopia of academia free from the diverting traffic of modern life. The appearance of the FitzRandolph Gate on the street facing Nassau Hall was a telling symptom of the growing division between college and community. Inspired by the secluded courts, the beauty and ostensive spirituality of Oxbridge, the university trustees mandated that the Collegiate Gothic style alone was to be used for all future construction, and they engaged the services of architectural firm Cope & Stewardson to begin the process with the building of a series of dormitories. After achieving widespread recognition for their meandering Collegiate Gothic buildings for Bryn Mawr College and the University of Pennsylvania, the pair was perceived as the natural choice to actualize Princeton’s ambitious new vision. Their first commission was Blair Hall in 1896 (Figure 2.34). A snaking dormitory building on the south-western boundary of campus, it created a fortress-like stone screen enclosing the college from the railway line. Approached from below by a steep flight of stairs, Blair Hall proffered entrance to the college through a richly vaulted archway piercing a massive, turreted tower. Although its purpose as a gateway has been weakened by the removal of the train station to the south, the building still carries a powerful resonance. One of Princeton’s chief landmarks, Blair Arch is a symbolic portal between the world outside and the elite world of higher purpose within. The quixotic passion for Collegiate Gothic was no mere aesthetic trend, but represented an intellectual and moral retreat from the squalid realities of industrializing America.

In 1906 the role of supervising architect was created to co-ordinate Princeton’s transformation into an orderly Gothic and quadrangular setting. Ralph Adams Cram undertook this responsibility, and set about preparing a master plan for the university’s future development. Cram