Labor and material shortages stemming from U.S. participation in World War I complicated the construction of Memorial Quadrangle (today’s Branford and Saybrook Colleges) between 1917 and 1921. A ceremony to celebrate the laying of the cornerstone in 1917—the bicentennial anniversary of Yale’s first building in New Haven—was kept relatively simple in deference to the war. Fours years later, “The building was completed in 1921 in spite of chaotic post-war railroad and construction conditions,” we read in the pages of The Oysterbed, an early yearbook of Branford College.[1]

Memorial Quadrangle Construction, 1920. James S. Hedden, Yale Manuscripts & Archives.

So acute was the labor shortage that Yale students saw fit to contribute to the construction effort. A “group of undergraduates who came forward during the shortage of labor in the summer of 1920 and worked as day laborers on the job” was commemorated in 1938 a sculptured plaque on the south side of Branford Court above the Evarts Entry, which shows young men at work and bears the inscription, “Testimonio laborum in haec aedificia struenda ab ipsis studiosis collatorum” (In recognition of the labors contributed by the students themselves in the erection of this building).[2] The southern (Branford) half of the Quadrangle opened first, in the fall of 1920, while the northern half (Saybrook) opened the following year.

Wartime pressures did not, however, cause architect James Gamble Rogers to compromise his selection of finishing materials or ornamental details. A writer for The Oysterbed of 1941 recalled, “An idea of the care employed [in design and construction] may be gleaned from the fact that eight different sample walls were built in New York, and one in New Haven.”[3] Today, similarly, the architect and builder of the new residential colleges have created a full-scale “sample wall” or mock-up, which can be seen outside the temporary field office of Dimeo, the construction manager, on Winchester Avenue.

Golden-brown granite from Massachusetts was among the finishing materials Rogers chose for the original colleges, perhaps in part to offset the gloom of rainy weather.

James Gamble Rogers reportedly spent a long time choosing from among different stone types, aiming to select one that would be “warm and cheerful, to offset the frequent spells of gloomy weather in New Haven.”[4] He finally settled on a golden brown, seam-faced granite from Plymouth Quarries in Massachusetts, and for trim, a rust-veined sandstone from the Briar Hill Quarries of Ohio. An estimated seven million bricks were salvaged from demolished buildings, “giving a low-toned soft pink impossible in new bricks.”[5] When it came to sculptural embellishments and perhaps brick patternwork, Rogers apparently encouraged the builders to indulge their imaginations. According to the Oysterbed, “In keeping with the ideas of Ruskin, the interest of the workmen was aroused, and they were allowed to put some of their own individuality into the work.”[6]

The student laborers of 1920 would not be the last at Branford. In 1952, a group of carpentry-inclined students initiated the “construction of a wood shop in the basement of Branford near the York Street moat… a cinder and cement wall will be erected and provisions will be made for A.C. current,” according a college newsletter. The students envisioned, as an initial project, fabricating a removable stage for the Branford dining hall. Proponents of manual labor urged, “A Yale degree plus a solid grounding in cinder block walls would be a formidable preparation for the future. To the basement men!”[7]

Notes:

[1] Nimrod, “History,” The Oysterbed Vol. 1 (New Haven, Conn.: Branford College Press, 1940). Yale Manuscripts & Archives.

[2] “Two Branford Memorials,” Bulletin of Branford College, Vol. 1, No. 10 (May 10, 1938). Yale Manuscripts & Archives.

[3] H. T. M., “The Oyster’s Bed,” The Oysterbed Vol. 2 (1941). Yale Manuscripts & Archives.

[4] Ibid.

[5] Ibid.

[6] Ibid.

[7] “Bricks, Mortar Fly as Shop Materializes.” Tower Bulletin (Branford College), Vol. XIV, No. 6 (Dec. 17 1952). Yale Manuscripts & Archives.

Google maps, 2015, with overlay by author

What is the history of the site to be occupied by two new residential colleges (fig. 1), and how did it come to be constituted as a site as such? 

This post covers the nineteenth and twentieth centuries; a subsequent post will cover the changes over the past 15 years.

The triangular piece of land bordered by Prospect Street to the east, Sachem Street on the north, and Canal Street and the Farmingham Canal Trail on the southwest only recently became a cohesive “site” for campus development. For most of the past two hundred years, it was more like an in-between space, defined only in relation to what was nearby, and by a series of now-demolished buildings that were designed and built separately.

Figure 2. Doolittle Plan, 1824. Yale University Library, Map Collection, with overlay by author.

The 1824 Doolittle Plan (fig. 2) shows two notable features in relation to the present construction site. One, there is a pronounced topographic feature described by sinuous course of hashed lines. It appears to be a naturally occurring creek or depression, which no doubt became the path of the Farmington Canal, begun in 1825 and opened in 1828. And two, just to the south lies the Grove Street Cemetery, established in the 1790s as the city began to phase out burials in the New Haven Green. The cemetery’s area then was smaller than it is today; its northern boundary was Second (Trumbull) Street and its western boundary lay at a now-vanished street. The Doolittle Plan thus indicates the primacy of topography, infrastructure, and municipal planning in shaping the boundaries of the future site.

By the time of the 1851 Hartley and Whiteford map (fig. 3), the cemetery has expanded northward and westward, and the Farmington Canal has already become a railroad. The northeast tip of the expanded cemetery, lying on the other side of the canal/railway, occupies what will soon be one of the two new colleges. This parcel was not in fact used as a cemetery, but soon reverted to ordinary municipal development. Hillhouse Avenue is lined with stately houses, while Smith Avenue (Prospect Street) appears relatively undeveloped. A few hundred yards to the northeast, “Sachem’s Wood” occupies what would later become Yale’s Science Hill.

The 1868 Beers Plan (fig. 4), from the Atlas of New Haven County, shows the corner of the cemetery trimmed off, leaving the wedge-shaped parcel that is today’s construction site. Second Street has become Trumbull Street; Third Street has become Sachem’s Lane. Lock Street and Mansfield Street slice through the triangle.

The 1869 Thompson Plan (fig. 5) shows a little more detail, such as individual buildings along Prospect Street. The triangular parcel above the cemetery, however, remains apparently unoccupied.

Streuli and_Puckhafer’s 1911 Atlas of New Haven (fig. 6) shows the site occupied by scattered buildings with no apparent relation to each other. The largest of these is Hammond Laboratories, a branch of the Sheffield Scientific School. Numerous private residences and a fraternity house line the peripheral and through-streets. The color-coding of pink and yellow buildings indicate fire-proof (masonry) versus fire-prone (wood) structures, reflecting the use of such maps for insurance assessments. Also notable here is the appearance of an “electric railroad” or trolley line following Prospect Street, Sachem Street, and Winchester Ave. The parcels that compose today’s construction site appear thoroughly urbanized, if still marginal and not a cohesive ensemble.

John Russell Pope’s 1919 Plan of Existing Conditions (fig. 7) shows much the same, but strictly in relation to other Yale buildings to the south and north. Pope criticized the “haphazardly placed buildings that should have been more reasonably designed with reference to one other.” The academic buildings appear isolated from the other campus groups, and separated from the Winchester/Dixwell neighborhoods by the Farmington rail trench.

James Gamble Rogers’s 1921 “Sketch Plan for the Future Development of the University” (fig. 8) did not even bother to show any buildings on the site.

1973 Sunburn Map, Yale University Library, Maps Collection. Overlay by author.

The 1973 Sanborn map (fig. 9) reflects the addition of buildings along Prospect Street, and the marked presence of Saarinen’s Ingalls Rink across Sachem Street. Still, the provisional or “in-between” quality of the site is underscored by the cartographer’s choice to cut the map sheet just below the now-defunct Prospect Place, right through what is now “the site.” It was not at that time construed as a site, and had no unifying logic or plan for future development.

Boundaries in a city or building are not always synonymous with walls. Boundaries may be hard or soft, implied or explicit, changeable or fixed, and more or less porous.

The campus architecture of Yale offers a wide range of such boundaries: from the monumental archway over High Street to the quasi-public walkway between Morse and Stiles Colleges, to moats, signs, and changes in pavement material, as well as walls high and low.

Given that the new colleges designed by Robert A.M. Stern and his office, RAMSA, are directly inspired by their neo-Gothic predecessors designed by James Gamble Rogers in the period between the two World Wars, it is worth looking at how those buildings mediate between campus and city. I would propose a gradient of boundaries in order of most porous to most physically impermeable: These can be grouped, provisionally, into the following three categories.

Group 1: Indicators (high porosity)

Includes signage, lighting, trees, changes in pavement, and appurtenances such as call boxes (gallery 1).

Group 2: Thresholds (medium porosity)

Includes gates, bridges, bollards, steps, and changes in level (gallery 2).

Group 3: Barriers (no porosity)

Includes moats, grillwork, berms, and walls of varying heights (gallery 3).

The subject of edges and boundaries has been an important one for the university for at least 150 years, as it began to insulate itself more from an increasingly industrial and populous, proletarian New Haven in the years following the Civil War. A Yale planning prospectus from 2000 prepared by Cooper, Robertson & Partners states:

“As Yale approaches its fourth century, we believe the University should pay particular attention to places where its campus meets the City—on its streets and sidewalks, and through its landscaping, lighting and signage. That way, the University can work with the City to help weave Yale and New Haven into a more cohesive urban fabric” (Cooper, Robertson & Partners, 6).

The desire for a “cohesive urban fabric” is a little ambiguous. It could be interpreted to suggest a smoother blending and integration of the campus and city, or, quite to the contrary, to suggest a stronger delineation of the campus as a legible entity within the city.

Figure 1. “Built Form Framework” from Cooper, Robertson & Partners, “Yale University. A Framework for Campus Planning,” 2000.

Going deeper into the document, the latter meaning seems to better capture what the authors had in mind. On the one hand, the report states, “Yale is intertwined with
New Haven.
Yale overlaps city districts and neighborhoods and shares public streets with the City.” But this overlapping condition is seen as a potential flaw in need of correction: “Many of the campus edges and boundaries are porous. Planning and design decisions should clarify these physical edges and alleviate ‘gaps’ in an otherwise continuous fabric of campus and City” (9). A diagram titled, “Built Form Framework” (fig. 1) illustrates “the pattern of urban architecture with its open spaces, building mass, streetwalls and major vertical objects, which can be extended to create a continuous and cohesive built fabric.”

Stern, the longtime Dean of the Yale School of Architecture, has considered the question of Yale’s urban boundaries as closely as anyone. In his book on campus architecture, he characterizes Yale as an “embedded campus” in New Haven:

“As is the case with the various colleges and buildings that comprise Oxford and Cambridge Universities, the components of embedded campuses are readily identified by gates or walls or moats, by the size and character of the architecture of their buildings, and by planning configurations, frequently taking the form of cloisters and closed quadrangles” (Stern, 251).

Let us pause at the mention of gates, walls, and moats. As I suggested above, such boundaries and edges take many forms, and have varying effects on the interface between campus and city. It would be interesting to see a full-spectrum taxonomy of boundary types, from the porous to the impermeable, and examine in greater detail their selective deployment and effects at various sites around the city.

References:

Cooper, Robertson & Partners. “Yale University. A Framework for Campus Planning.”

Stern, Robert A.M. Robert A.M. Stern: on campus : architecture, identity, and community, edited by Peter Morris Dixon with Alexander Newman-Wise and Jonathan Grzywacz. New York: Monacelli, 2010.

How does the campus architecture of Yale relate to the surrounding city?

The university is part of the city, but does not dissolve in it. On the one hand, the buildings and courtyards of the campus defer to the logic of the public street grid and civic spaces such as the New Haven Green. On the other hand, they carve out private enclaves for living, working, and gathering in ways quite different from the non-campus buildings that line the streets.

Figure 1. Plan of Melrose Abbey, Melrose, Roxburghshire, Scotland, 12th century. Courthauld Institute of Art

Critics sometimes deride the campus architecture as fortress-like, but a more apt metaphor might be that of a series of medieval abbey cloisters (fig. 1) inserted into the regular urban fabric of New Haven (fig. 2). In this post I review some of the history and theory of Yale’s campus urbanism.

James Gamble Rogers, Plan of Development of Residential Units in the Future, 1928. Manuscripts & Archives, Yale University

French architect and theorist Florence Lipsky identifies a “fundamental ambiguity” in the spatial quality of typical Anglo-American colleges and universities: historically connected with towns and cities, they nonetheless define themselves as a place apart, “in order to lay claim to the world as a territory of intellectual investigation” (Lipsky, 19). Is the city antithetical to higher education? Thomas Jefferson thought so, which is why he established the University of Virginia in the green hills of Charlottesville. Counterexamples can be found in institutions such as the Sorbonne in Paris or New York University, which blur into their host cities and have practically no campus walls. Yale seems to lie somewhere in between.

In the case of Yale and New Haven, university leaders began to create a firmer boundary following a series of town-gown conflicts in the nineteenth century. With academics buildings “spreading somewhat haphazardly over the surrounding city blocks,” according to historian and theorist Aaron Betsky, the residential heart of Yale became more of a closed world:

A series of freestanding buildings placed in various relationships to the street were replaced gradually after the Civil War with a row of five- to six-story buildings used exclusively as dormitories. These structures surrounded the open heart of campus with a solid wall…. Yale created a bastion of brick to defend the private enclave of the students from the outside world (Betsky, 103-104).

By the early twentieth century, however, the university expanded and dispersed well beyond the Old Campus area. The architect John Russell Pope criticized the lack of a cohesive spatial order in his campus study of 1919 — “The builders were seldom mindful of a future co-ordinated impressive group,” he chided. Pope’s proposed remedy was a series of grand new squares, axes, entrances, and buildings, which would connect the main campus south of Grove Street with the newly acquired lands on today’s Science Hill (“Prospect Hill”) via Hillhouse Avenue. Most of Pope’s plan was not implemented, but a decisive new development was already underway: Harkness Memorial Quadrangle (1917-21), the first of Yale’s quintessential spaces designed by James Gamble Rogers, encompassing today’s Saybrook and Branford Colleges.

Figure 3. James Gamble Rogers, Plan for the Memorial Quadrangle at Yale University, New Haven, c. 1920.

With the design of Memorial Quadrangle, “Rogers achieved a complex balance between academic seclusion and the gritty realities of an industrialized city that would be Yale’s development template for a generation or more,” writes Robert A.M. Stern, architect of the two new residential colleges (fig. 3).

Eight more quadrangular colleges added in the 1930s similarly turned inward, Stern adds, so that Yale became “a big place made up of many small places, not a university city but a university in a city” (Stern, 290-291). In Stern’s view, Yale constitutes an “embedded campus,” as distinct from “gardenesque arcadias” or “hilltop citadels, but also unlike urban universities that are “indistinguishable” from their surroundings (Stern, 251).

Rogers seems to have imagined a kind of architectural harmony between the university and the city — but one based upon a vision of New Haven first and foremost as a university town, without respect to its other dimensions. He is reported to have asserted the “vital importance” of a shared vision between university and municipal planners, with an eye toward the models of Oxford or Cambridge, England. A revised Yale campus plan by Rogers in 1921 eliminated Pope’s proposed urban axes and connections, except for the “Cross Campus” green. Paul Goldberger writes that Rogers’s architecture “honors the streets of New Haven, even as it turns away from them to offer up its most lavish architectural pleasures to private inner courtyards, and… there is a sense of the design reaching out to its neighbors to form a larger whole”(Goldberger, xi). Betsky remarks of the quadrangles, “This strategy opened up a private Yale inside the courtyards, which were light courts and monastic retreats at the same time (Betsky, 108).

Figure 4. Aerial view of the new residential colleges currently under construction by Robert A.M. Stern Architects.

The two residential colleges built in 1962, Morse and Stiles, designed by Eero Saarinen, called into question but ultimately reaffirmed the brand of campus urbanism developed under Rogers. “Saarinen’s chief complaint about the older colleges at Yale was that they closed themselves off from the city,” writes Stern, who continues:

[Saarinen] wanted the citizens of New Haven to walk right through his colleges. After his death, his widow fought to keep the university from building gates across the entrances. Yale compromised, promising to keep the gates open during the day. Now they are always locked, a return to the realistic appraisal of the gulf between the town and the campus that had spurred Rogers to include moats in his original designs for Yale forty years before, that had led President Porter to surround the Old Campus with a continuous wall of buildings (293).

Stern’s designs for the two new residential colleges appear to accept the spirit of this “realistic appraisal,” based on published drawings and renderings (fig. 4). They will reproduce the cloister effect embodied in the campus architecture of Oxford and Cambridge, while maintaining connections with existing streets and the Farmington Canal trail.

References:

Betsky, Aaron. James Gamble Rogers and the Architecture of Pragmatism. Cambridge, Mass.: The MIT Press, 1994.

Branch, Mark Alden. “Déjà vu: Yale’s newest residential colleges will be modeled on their forebears.” Yale Alumni Magazine Mar./Apr. 2015. https://yalealumnimagazine.com/articles/4038/yale-new-residential-colleges

Carley, Rachel D. “Tomorrow is Here: New Haven and the Modern Movement.” The New Haven Preservation Trust / State of Connecticut, 2008.

Goldberger, Paul. “Foreword: James Gamble Rogers,” in Betsky, James Gamble Rogers, 1994.

Florence Lipsky, “Les campus américains: relation ville-université.” Paris: École nationale supérieure d’architecture de Paris-Belleville, 1992. In Gilles Novarina, “De l’université dans la ville à l’université hors la ville,” in Ville, architecture, université. Réalisations du schéma Université 2000. France: Ministère de l’éducation nationale, de la recherche et de la technologie, 1998.

“John Russell Pope and the Unrealized Yale Campus Plan.” Aug. 27, 2013. Manuscripts and Archives Blog, Yale University Library. http://campuspress-test.yale.edu/mssa/john-russell-pope-and-the-unrealized-yale-campus-plan/

Pope, John Russell, with Illustrations by O.R. Eggers. “Yale University: A Plan for Its Future Building.” New York: Cheltenham Press, 1919.

Scully, Vincent, Catherine Lynn, Erik Vogt, and Paul Goldberger. Yale in New Haven: Architecture and Urbanism New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2004.

Stern, Robert A.M. Robert A.M. Stern: on campus : architecture, identity, and community, edited by Peter Morris Dixon with Alexander Newman-Wise and Jonathan Grzywacz. New York: Monacelli, 2010.

“Yale and New Haven to Build Together.” The New York Times, Jan. 25, 1922, quoted in Carley, “Tomorrow is Here,” 10.