Princeton's Butler College Gets New Buildings—and May Lose an Old Nickname - Buildings & Grounds

The main courtyard of Princeton’s new Butler College complex features a landscaped amphitheater. (Chronicle photographs by Lawrence Biemiller)

Princeton, N.J.—Fans of Modernist architecture made no secret of their disappointment when Princeton University decided to demolish five dormitories designed by Hugh Stubbins and opened in 1964. But their replacements, set to welcome students later this month, are so attractive and clever that even diehard preservationists are likely to find themselves thinking the sacrifice was more than worthwhile.

Designed by Henry N. Cobb of Pei Cobb Freed & Partners—and with ingenious landscaping by Michael Van Valkenburgh Associates—the cheerful new buildings form the heart of Butler College, one of the university’s undergraduate residential units. The Stubbins buildings, which reimagined the university’s signature Collegiate Gothic forms in Modernist masses of brown brick, had led the college to be nicknamed “the Butt.”

The nickname, though, was the least of the challenges facing Mr. Cobb. The site is hemmed in by cross-campus walkways and by a cacophony of other buildings, including Robert Venturi’s 1983 Gordon Wu Hall, a Postmodernist landmark that houses Butler’s dining hall. And the university wanted both a lot of interior space—113,000 square feet, as it turned out—and plenty of green space as well.

Mr. Cobb responded with a multi-part composition arranged within the grid of existing walkways, which cut through the college in two directions. The new buildings form two large “C” shapes, one around a lawn and the other around a courtyard, but the buildings are linked at the basement level, where many of the common spaces are. Utilizing below-grade space minimizes the complex’s footprint and preserves greenery while leaving the above-grade stories for rooms for 283 students, arranged in four- and two-person suites. Warm-colored wood floors are a highlight of the interior, as are fluted concrete pilasters that break up the long corridors.

For the exterior, Mr. Cobb chose polychromatic brick walls with limestone bands and gently curving bay windows that echo the Collegiate Gothic architectural vocabulary. The effect is confident and pleasantly understated—a welcome change on a campus with so many high-profile buildings that they sometimes seem to be competing with one another.

To give Butler residents outdoor spaces of their own even though walkways cut through their complex, Mr. Cobb created three sunken courtyards. Two are modest—one, for instance, is filled with tables and chairs and opens off an attractive basement-level cafe with two-story windows. The third, however, is a showpiece. Opening off a handsome basement-level living area, it gave Mr. van Valkenburgh’s firm room to create rising rings of grass and trees that are set off by low stone walls to form a delightful amphitheater. The courtyard, overlooked by a bridge that carries one of the cross-campus paths, is one of the most inventive and pleasing added to a campus in recent memory.

The university is especially proud of the complex’s sustainable features, which include green roofs on several parts of the new complex and a 5,000-gallon cistern in which rainwater will be stored to irrigate the landscaping. The new buildings are illuminated by daylight wherever possible. Besides the student rooms, the complex has two double suites for graduate students and one suite for a resident faculty member.

Just two years ago the university opened a pricey new Collegiate Gothic complex—Whitman College, designed by the London architect Demetri Porphyrios—on the assumption that students come to Princeton expecting to live among pointed arches, buttresses, and the occasional moat or gated tower. And Whitman is postcard-perfect from a Gothic-architecture point of view, no doubt. But is that how students really want to live? Compared with the clean lines and bright, open spaces of Butler, Whitman seems like, well, a fortress, and one riddled with tunnels at that. Will Butler’s big windows win out over Whitman’s battlements? It will be interesting to hear what students think, and whether the old nickname will be forgotten.