Academic Buildings of the Interwar Period

In 1912, as John Grier Hibben took office as Princeton's president, the University was nearing the end of a methodical, fifteen-year effort to replace the aging academic buildings of the McCosh era with more modern facilities. The result -- Pyne Library,
Palmer Physical Laboratory, Guyot and McCosh -- was more than enough to meet Princeton's major classroom needs for more than a decade.

This situation suddenly changed when one of the surviving McCosh buildings, Dickinson Hall,
burned to the ground in 1920 along with Marquand Chapel.
Dickinson had been an important structure, home to lecture and examination rooms for many academic departments, and its loss was immediately felt.

Around the same time, the other notable holdover from McCosh's time, the John C. Green School of Science,
was beginning to show its age. Once considered the leading science building of its time, this High Victorian Gothic building was in poor condition by the 1920s. Not only was it stylistically anomalous amidst the new Collegiate Gothic structures, but it was too old and cramped to provide adequate laboratory facilities for the rapidly expanding engineering and chemistry departments. It had already outlived its usefulness when it, too, burned to the ground in 1928.

To address these needs, Princeton built six major academic buildings in the years between the world wars. Five of them were designed by the same architect, Charles Z. Klauder, and all were in the Collegiate Gothic style. The one exception was McCormick,
designed by Ralph Adams Cram which served as the home of the new School of Architecture. Because of its location attached to the Museum of Historic Art and near the Renaissance Revival-inspired dormitories of Dod and Brown, Cram was forced to shelve his cherished Collegiate Gothic style for something more appropriate for the site. (See McCormick Hall and the Art Musuem for more detail.)

Of the Klauder buildings, only one -- the new Dickinson Hall -- was devoted to the study of liberal arts. The others were for various scientific departments: the Engineering School (now called Green),
the Frick Chemistry Laboratory
Eno,
America's first custom-built psychological laboratory building, and Fine (now called Jones),
which housed the Department of Mathematics.

Klauder's designs for these buildings were driven by both function and location. For example, Fine was attached to Palmer Physical Laboratory and was accordingly built of the same brick and limestone materials. Eno, sited at the southern edge of the campus near McCosh Infirmary and Guyot, was also brick. Dickinson, which closed off the western end of the quadrangle formed by the chapel and McCosh, mirrored the limestone construction of its two imposing neighbors.

Continuing the eastward expansion of the campus, meanwhile, the two big new science buildings, Frick and Green, were built across Washington Road. Ground was broken for both on the same day in 1927. Consistent with the directive from the Trustees mandating the use of the Collegiate Gothic style, Klauder gave these structures conventional Collegiate Gothic stone facades. Of the two, Frick
incorporated more interesting features, with modest towers at the northern and southern ends of the western facade, its distinctive double-arched main entrance, and a medieval-appearing foyer with more arches leading into the main auditorium.

The exterior details and the foyer of Frick masked what were primarily functional, unornamented interiors of a science lab.

Additionally, neither Green nor Frick had the sharply steeped slate roofs of the earlier Collegiate Gothic buildings on campus. Part of this was motivated by economy, but Klauder was also experimenting with different applications of the style. For instance, Eno (begun in January 1924) was reputedly the first Collegiate Gothic building with an entirely flat roof, and Green and Frick echoed this trend.

Given the resources and the direction, Klauder produced inspiring and elaborate Collegiate Gothic structures as impressive as his pre-war work on Holder and the Madison/Commons dining complex. In 1930-1, for example, he designed and built Fine
which housed the offices of notable mathematicians including, for a time, Albert Einstein.. Fine was probably the most luxurious academic building ever built at Princeton, combining a sophisticated, richly detailed exterior with sumptuous appointments inside. The marvelous oak paneling, leaded stained glass windows, and heavy fireplaces that grace the offices, library, and seminar rooms of Fine spoke of the generosity of the donor, Thomas D. Jones, Class of 1876. "Nothing is too good for Harry Fine," he said of the building's namesake, the first and only Dean of the Departments of Science. Jones turned down numerous opportunities for economizing and it showed in the quality of details throughout.

Klauder was financially constrained, and therefore stylistically restrained, in his design for Dickinson, the long contemplated northern extension of McCosh along Washington Road that was built in 1929-30. The new chapel,
completed only two years before, had created an imposing counterpart to McCosh and it was obvious that the new classroom building should connect the two without competing visually with either. The resulting modest limestone structure created one of Princeton's signature spaces: the handsome quadrangle centered around the Mather Sundial.

Dickinson Hall also earned an additional footnote in Princeton's architectural history. A dispute involving the University, Cram, and Klauder over the Rothschild Arch (which connects the chancel of the chapel with the northern end of Dickinson) marked the end of Cram's relationship with Princeton. Objecting to what he considered a desecration of his chapel, Cram resigned as supervising architect in 1928.

The break had been brewing for some time, as Cram's demanding schedule (and difficult personality) had gradually strained relations between the architect and the university. But there is no denying Cram's lasting impact on Princeton. The leading proponent of the Collegiate Gothic style at Princeton and the architect of such landmarks as the Graduate College and the chapel, today's campus still bears his indelible stamp.