Robert A.M. Stern Architects has designed a new Charles Z. Klauder building for Franklin & Marshall College. (Jeff Stikeman for Robert A.M. Stern Architects)
Let me be clear: I’ve got nothing against Charles Z. Klauder. Nothing at all, except that the guy’s been dead since 1938 and my college, Franklin & Marshall, is still putting up Klauder buildings.
Like many alumni, I take an interest in affairs at my alma mater, so I hope you’ll forgive me a few paragraphs about its Klauder obsession. Klauder—a multitalented architect who worked on a number of campuses—did a master plan for Franklin & Marshall, as well as a number of very attractive buildings, in the 1920s. But now, 80-plus years later, new Klauder buildings continue to appear.
To be sure, the college is doing well by Klauder. Einhorn Yaffee Prescott put up a big new Klauder-inspired building for the life-sciences and philosophy departments a few years ago, and you’d be hard pressed to look at its handsome exterior and guess it was new construction. The college broke ground for the latest Klauder building, a $27-million, 190-bed residence hall, just 10 days ago. Robert A.M. Stern Associates is the architect—or maybe “architect of record” is the right term. It too promises to be a good-looking building.
There’s no question that Franklin & Marshall has an attractive campus. Many of the buildings are appealing, and the ones that aren’t—mostly on the residential quadrangle—are at least well landscaped. Klauder and his imitators get a fair portion of the credit for everything I like about the place. What nags at me, though, is the sense that the college is entrenching itself in the architectural past. The only truly modern building on the campus—the College Center, by Minoru Yamasaki—was completed just before my freshman year, and that was 1976. No academic department at a college of Franklin & Marshall’s calibre would think of cutting itself off from advances in its field the way the college has cut itself off from advances in architecture.
And Franklin & Marshall is hardly the only college clinging to the architectural past. Many institutions with strong Georgian and Collegiate Gothic traditions seem to have become trapped by them—Johns Hopkins and Southern Methodist Universities come to mind, as does Rhodes College. Over the decades the results have been uneven. Good new Collegiate Gothic buildings seem to be a little harder to come by than good new Georgian buildings, but that’s probably because what makes Collegiate Gothic interesting are small quirky spaces and tiny details. The former are out of place in buildings as large as those many colleges put up now, and the latter are just too expensive.
I’d like to see my college take some chances and contribute to the advance of architecture. Institutions like the University of California at Irvine, the University of Cincinnati, Swarthmore College, and Yale University—to name just a few—have put up buildings that were important design landmarks, and in consequence have campuses that are worth visiting again and again. Franklin & Marshall did that once upon a time—in the 1850s, when Franklin College and Marshall College merged and moved to a new campus. Dixon, Balbirnie & Dixon designed three striking buildings in the then-stylish Gothic Revival mode, two small debating-society halls and a central academic structure. That daring trio—Goethean, Old Main, and Diagnothean—remains iconic today. Isn’t it time they met their match?
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14 Responses to At Franklin & Marshall, Another New Building by Charles Z. Klauder
d_f_b - October 19, 2009 at 3:51 pm
So what should happen? Colleges should follow the latest architectural trends, no matter whether they’re a good idea? (And we all saw how well that worked with brutalism, didn’t we?) Campuses should become architectural hodgepodges of building styles that don’t work with each other?No, sorry, I’d rather see campuses with some sort of architectural consistency. You may find it boring, but there are a lot of us out there who find it attractive.
calfrye - October 19, 2009 at 4:07 pm
Hey, d_f_b, that’s my brutalist Library you’re talking about! Although certain individual buildings don’t seem to gather many compliments, we seem to get our share of “beautiful campus” comments, even with the mix of periods and styles. A hodgepodge isn’t necessarily ugly…
diehl - October 20, 2009 at 6:50 am
Visiting FandM on Parents Weekends always stimulates the same thoughts and feelings: I want to go to school here. What is there not to love about FandM?
elie_antoine - October 20, 2009 at 8:58 am
You all are missing the point. Campuses are like Disney Land nothhing is real!Can you imagine this conversation if it was a science project rather than architecture! Oh no let’s not dig into DNA, yesterday’s science is good enough!!!!
elie_antoine - October 20, 2009 at 9:00 am
Let’s be clear, F&M president obsession with R Stern is totally stunning!
sibyl - October 20, 2009 at 9:15 am
The comments point to the nettle of the argument: is a beautiful campus beautiful because it has interesting buildings, or because it has a unity or harmony of pattern and design? I took students from the unified campus of our college on a trip to Cincinnati a few years ago and they agreed that, as a whole, the campus was a chaotic mishmash: seven different central axes, difficult footpaths and flow, virtually no repetition of themes, and no sense of common place. They found the Design, Architecture, and Planning School building in particular to be confusing and sterile. They liked some individual buildings but found the overall effect to be a disaster. Obviously this is a self-selecting group — they chose our college because they liked its unified aesthetic and so it would be surprising if they liked Cincinnati — but I was surprised by the force and unanimity with which they opined that Cincinnati would be a terrible place to live and study.Since the strength of American higher education is the diversity of institutions and missions, I say that the strength of its architecture ought to be diversity as well. Let some institutions try to find beauty in developing interesting buildings and having them speak to each other — I think that Yale does this most effectively among the institutions Mr. Biemiller mentions, though I’ve never been to Irvine — and let others retain their “boring” unifying character, and find beauty in that consistency.
lillybelle - October 20, 2009 at 9:28 am
As someone whose alma mater didn’t stick to one style, be grateful for what you have. 95% of the time, trying new styles results in what Sibyl reports above – an unattractive mish-mish with “no sense of common place.” Very few campuses can afford what are actually daring, iconic buildings; most get imitations of whatever is trendy. Gothic and Georgian at least are human-friendly, even when mediocre. Modernist architecture is only comfortable when done well, as many a student at a campus that expanded mid-century can attest.
quare - October 20, 2009 at 10:54 am
“Did anyone ever think about how unappealing an enormous slab of exposed concrete looks in February?”That’s the crux, for me. Brutalist buildings and my undergrad campus looked good only 5 days out of the year, in late spring, where the, well, brutal nature of the stark lines jutted out dramatically against the natural landscape. But let’s face it; though no phsyical structure may be “aere perennius,” some are given gravitas by their age, whereas others plead to be unplugged.
jlalbee - October 20, 2009 at 3:25 pm
I rather like the traditional concept of architectural uniformity in campus planning. It makes me happy to see that the beaux-arts have not been completely replaced by modernist schlock – today’s trend and tomorrow’s eyesore.Franklin & Marshall is tame compared to such reactionary campus plans as those for Washington University in St. Louis and the University of Virginia.
kneedler - October 20, 2009 at 3:25 pm
I was president of Franklin & Marshall when we rediscovered our connection with Charles Klauder. It was an exciting time because it helped us to understand how an important section of our campus came to be the way it was and informed future planning.Klauder is quite a special figure. I really became enthralled with his life’s work when we discovered his involvement with F&M. He touched so many campuses and worked in so many different styles, depending on where he was.That piece in the Chronicle disappointed me because I don’t think it sufficiently recognizes that Klauder’s work in different places was highly contextual, so one would never guess (at least I wouldn’t have) that the same architect was responsible for, say, the Cathedral of Learning at the University of Pittsburgh, major parts of the Penn State campus, F&M’s buildings from the 20s and the 30s, and a big slice of Yale’s buildings, among many others (I believe that’s all correct – I’m working from memory here).So, I wouldn’t say, as Lawrence Bieiller did, that the Klauder buildings were principally “Georgian” as much as they were a reaction to what he found in Lancaster and on campus and an effort to create a (for the time) contemporary residential college campus with sensitivity to its historic surroundings. Lancaster is a “brick city” and Klauder envisioned a symphony in brick for F&M’s campus – and why shouldn’t he have? Architecture often bridges past and future, connecting us with long-held values and enriching future lives.F&M didn’t have Thomas Jefferson around to design a residential quad in the 18th century, but does that mean it can’t try to achieve some of the same value over time, as it acquires the resources to do so? Klauder’s materials and quality of construction are extremely good and durable – meaning that over time they are conservationist and eco-friendly – adapting well to new uses (new wine in old bottles). Thus the majority of campus building in recent years has been adaptive reuse – often of Klauder buildings – this past year the retasking of a Klauder science lab as a stunning interdisciplinary center. The two new Klauder-inspired buildings take the vision further than the College could have done 80 years ago. They are not in thrall to Klauder, but inspired by him.While I’ve been retired for over seven years and have had nothing to do with the recent (and dramatic) building work on the campus, I think it is both excellent and appropriate. As an F&M alumnus, I’m proud to see the College’s energetic commitment to making its campus an exciting embodiment of the liberal arts spirit and a learning laboratory for students.Richard Kneedler
sigmar - October 20, 2009 at 4:04 pm
Guys, I realize that brutalism isn’t to everyone’s taste, but some of the reflexive bashing in the comments here seems sort of over-the-top and lazy. I wouldn’t be too psyched about a whole campus that looks like Boston City Hall either, I’m sure. But it’s silly to paint w/ such a broad brush that you end up indicting Rudolph’s Art and Architecture Building at Yale, say, or Breuer’s stuff at St. John’s. And it’s not at all instructive to treat brutalism as a trend we can all agree to look back on and be embarrassed by.More to the point, it’s not like the only two options facing a college are stylistic unity v. dystopian trend-hopping hodgepodge. You can have a core architectural identity and build variety into that, as plenty of campuses have done.
quare - October 21, 2009 at 12:30 pm
“And it’s not at all instructive to treat brutalism as a trend we can all agree to look back on and be embarrassed by.”Perhaps I’d argue that proper context is crucial for brutalist buildings. I can’t speak on Breuer at St. John’s, but it’s notable that Rudolph’s building at Yale sits in the midst of an urban landscape. At UMass Amherst, however, concrete structures poured in the 1960s pierce the idyllic valley landscape like so many towers of Saruman. (Import appropriate symbolic values to the metaphor.)Given that a good many college towns lie nestled in similar locales, I’d simply wager that embarrassment has *monumental* instructive potential as a potential corrective against future error.
architecture81 - October 22, 2009 at 1:44 pm
Frankly, not all colleges can be reptitions of a “beloved” model. The University of Cincinnati has made great strides in creating a dynamic, urban environment using the existing elements of the past and adding new landscapes and buildings to enrich the experience of the campus. While some may enjoy the reassurance of a repetitive theme, I agree with the author that it can become a monotonous environment. Some would say UC is difficult to navigate through the “noise” of the various buildings, I would advance that when each building has a distinct character it is easier to get around. I find campuses of similar buildings to be beautiful in a way, but it is difficult to tell one building from another.
archcmt - October 23, 2009 at 12:18 pm
Ironically, Yale’s newest design for 2 residential colleges by Stern are proudly pointing out that they are Collegiate Gothic.