Academic Buildings of the 1960s: Science and Engineering

By the mid-1950s, Princeton's rapidly growing engineering programs had outgrown the cramped Collegiate Gothic quarters of Green Hall
built in 1928. Princeton's solution was to construct the E-Quad
-- a large complex of five buildings on the former grounds of University FieldF at the eastern edge of the campus.

The E-Quad -- formally known as the School of Engineering and Applied Science -- went through several mutations on its way to its current site and form. When the University first announced its plans for a new group of engineering buildings in 1956, the proposed site was the area on William Street behind Tiger Inn and Elm Club. The estimated cost was $8 million, and the only delay in breaking ground, the University noted, was fundraising.

Three years later, though, the site jumped east across Olden Street and onto University Field, the location of Princeton's venerable baseball stadium. Planners for the University had decided that the William Street site was too small to handle the kind of long-term growth envisioned for the sciences, and the only realistic option was to expand further east.

The decision to raze the site of so many memorable contests brought predictable grumbles from the alumni. (They complained again in 1995, when the University announced plans to replace Palmer Stadium with a smaller and more modern facility.) The change in new site also caused the architect, Stephen Voorhees '00, to reconfigure the complex into its final shape.

Voorhees, a former university trustee, devised a quadrangle of four-story brick halls, with a fifth hall extending south, parallel to the Olden Street. Functional, unornamented buildings with limestone trim and aluminum windows, the five halls of E-Quad provided 275,000 square feet of classroom, laboratory, and office space. The scale was impressive: half a million bricks and 400 windows went into the exterior; the interior walls required 15,000 cinder blocks and the building had 4,000 feet of corridors. Construction began in October 1960 and it was dedicated two years later.

Princeton next turned to the physics and math departments, as strapped for space in Palmer and Jones Halls as their engineering colleagues had been in Green. In 1965, the University sent an open letter to the Princeton community announcing a major new building program for the southeastern corner of the campus around Palmer Stadium. Among the main elements of this program were plans for a 13-story tower
for the math department and large attached physics complex.

Undergraduates -- including one group called Students for Architectural Responsibility -- and townspeople objected strenuously to the plans, particularly to the size of the tower -- some 170 feet which was higher than the cupola of Nassau Hall or the vault of the chapel. The University responded that because of the topography of the site, far down Washington Road near Lake Carnegie, Fine Tower would not dominate the skyline.

According to the University, the tower design was also the most effective solution to the academic requirements of the building and the desire to maintain the largest amount of green space as possible. (It was built on the former site of Fitzpatrick Field.) As architect Arthur Keyes '39 wrote, "a complex this size could become a very dull lump without the contrasting vertical element."

Designed by the firm of Warner, Burns, Toan, and Lunde, Fine Hall is actually two buildings: a 10-story tower that rises from the western end of a longer, three-story base, and is sheathed in plain dark granite, with no exterior ornamentation. Fine Hall, nonetheless, echoes the proportions and visual impact of the earlier Collegiate Gothic towers elsewhere on the campus.

The corresponding Jadwin Hall,
home of the physics department, was designed by Hugh Stubbins, also the architect of the "New New Quad" dormitories. A six-level, granite and brick structure, Jadwin Hall forms a quadrangle immediately to the south of Fine Tower. Aboveground, it is connected by a plaza to Fine, and underground by a library shared by the math and physics departments. Together, these structures totaled 357,000 square feet and cost $17.2 million.

Both Fine and Jadwin Halls were long in the making: first proposed in 1965, they were not completed until 1970. A third science facility, announced in the open letter of 1965, Peyton Hall,
home of the astrophysics department, was designed by Minoru Yamasaki, who had just finished the plans for the new Woodrow Wilson School building. The similarities between the two are evident. Although Peyton is much smaller, it shares the distinctive tapered pillars, exterior materials, and temple-like appearance of Robertson Hall. It was built in 1966 along Ivy Lane near the northern end of Palmer Stadium.

The grounds of Fitzgerald Field will undergo at least one more change. In the summer of 1996, the construction of a new physics building, designed by Gwathmey Siegel & Associates, along the western side of the Jadwing/Fine plaza will create a second fully-enclosed quadrangle. This site also anchors the eastern end of an important new east-west axis on the campus: the path that starts at Butler College and passes between the new Schultz and Thomas Laboratories.

With the completion of the E-Quad, Fine, Jadwin, and Peyton, the University had in a single decade utterly overhauled its facilities in every area but the life sciences. To remedy this need, in 1959-60, as part of the original "University Campaign," Princeton made a significant addition to Guyot Hall - Moffett Laboratory.
Extending south from the eastern wing of Guyot, parallel to Washington Road, Moffett added 45,000 square feet of space for the biology department. Even so, it was not until the 1980s, with the construction of the Thomas
and Schultz Laboratories,
that Princeton was able to invest heavily in improving its facilities in the life sciences.