Northwestern University

an architectural tour by

Jay Pridmore

WITH PHOTOGR APHS BY

Peter Kiar

P R I N C E TO N A R C H I T E C T U R A L P R E S S

N e w Y o r k

THE CAMPUS GUIDE

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Published by

Princeton Architectural Press

37 East Seventh Street

New York, New York 10003

For a free catalog of books, call 1.800.722.6657.

Visit our website at www.papress.com.

© 2009 Princeton Architectural Press

All rights reserved

Printed and bound in China

12 11 10 09 4 3 2 1 First edition

No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner without

written permission from the publisher, except in the context of reviews.

Every reasonable attempt has been made to identify owners of copyright.

Errors or omissions will be corrected in subsequent editions.

Editor: Lauren Nelson Packard

Designer: Arnoud Verhaege and Bree Anne Apperley

Special thanks to: Nettie Aljian, Sara Bader, Nicola Bednarek,

Janet Behning, Becca Casbon, Carina Cha, Penny (Yuen Pik) Chu,

Carolyn Deuschle, Russell Fernandez, Pete Fitzpatrick, Wendy Fuller,

Jan Haux, Clare Jacobson, Aileen Kwun, Nancy Eklund Later,

Linda Lee, Laurie Manfra, John Myers, Katharine Myers, Dan Simon,

Jennifer Thompson, Paul Wagner, Joseph Weston, and Deb Wood of

Princeton Architectural Press

—Kevin C. Lippert, publisher

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Pridmore, Jay.

Northwestern University : an architectural tour / by Jay Pridmore ; with

photographs by Peter Kiar.

p. cm.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978-1-56898-755-2 (alk. paper)

1. Northwestern University (Evanston, Ill.)—Buildings—Guidebooks.

2. Architecture—Illinois—Evanston—Guidebooks. I. Kiar, Peter. II.

Title.

LD4051.P75 2009

378.773’1--dc22

2008047989

How to Use This Book 8

Acknowledgments 9

Introduction: Architecture and Planning 10

Walk One: “The Eyebrow of Beauty” 16

Walk Two: The Arts Circle 30

Walk Three: Middle Campus: “A Growing Community of Scholars” 44

Walk Four: Science and Technology 64

Walk Five: North Campus: Epicenters of Student Life 80

Walk Six: West of Sheridan: A Neighbor in Old Neighborhoods 98

Walk Seven: Campus on the Edge of Town 124

Walk Eight: Chicago Campus: An Enduring Urban Campus 152

Walk Nine: A Modern Complex of Modern Scholars 162

Notes 176

Bibliography 177

Index 178

C O N T E N T S

H O w T O U S E T H I S b O O k

This book will enable anyone to take a self-guided tour of the campuses of Northwestern University. The stories behind the planning of the campuses and the creation of each building will enrich any visit to this historic campus, built in many phases over nearly 160 years.

As a means of organization, the book is divided into nine walking tours, seven in Evanston and two in Chicago. Each tour covers a contiguous portion of the campus, some identified by historic name (such as “Eyebrow of Beauty”), some by their function (“Science and Technology”), and others by position (“North Campus”). In all cases, the buildings are numbered, and it will be practical and generally convenient to tour the buildings in sequence on foot.

Visitors are welcome to tour the Northwestern campus:

To arrange a tour, please contact the campus Admissions Office at 847-491-7271

For more information on Northwestern, please visit www.northwestern.edu.

Admissions tours of the Evanston campus are given every weekday, with groups

assembling at 1:15 p.m. at the Admissions Office, 1801 Hinman Ave. (From September

through April, Saturday tours are also given.) Admissions-information sessions and tours

run approximately two hours and fifteen minutes. Advance registration is required at

www.ugadm.northwestern.edu.

The Mary and Leigh Block Museum of Art has a distinguished collection of modern

art, especially drawings and prints. The museum also mounts traveling exhibitions of broad

interest in the art world. The Block Museum, 40 Arts Circle (phone: 847-491-4000), is open

from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. Tuesday; 10 a.m. to 8 p.m. Wednesday through Friday; and noon to 5

p.m. Saturday and Sunday. Admission is free.

The Dearborn Observatory is open for public viewing of the sky from its 18.5-inch

refracting telescope from 8 p.m. to 10 p.m. every Friday night. Phone 847-491-7650 for

reservations.

Beyond organized activities, the Evanston campus lakefront remains a relaxing

destination for members of the community. The lake and its richly planted peninsula

represents a calming destination for walkers, joggers, bikers, and others to escape the

neighborhoods of Evanston and the busy campus of the university.

wa l k o n e : “ t h e e y e b r o w o f b e au t y”

1 University Hall

2 Harris Hall

3 Kresge Centennial Hall

4 Crowe Hall

5 Fairchild Residence Halls

6 Annie May Swift Hall

7 Deering Library

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“The Eyebrow of Beauty”

When it was created, Northwestern stood at the edge between wilderness and the

civilized world. Town and gown both would grow steadily from that point on, but

even today the Oak Grove on the original corner of campus remains an untouchable

memory of Northwestern’s origins.

When the founders purchased the land that would become Evanston, they

platted most of it and sold lots without delay. But they reserved the wooded bluff

for their university, and its undeniable natural charms overshadowed any strong

intervention by planners, urban or otherwise. Then as now, trails meandered

through the trees. A broad arc of buildings went up through the woods and around

the adjacent meadow. A city grew up just steps away, but Northwestern remained a

distinctly rural campus for years.

The Oak Grove was the site of the university’s first true icon, the Old Oak, with

its dramatically bent branch, once an Indian trail marker. Two or three other ancient

hardwoods bent similarly suggest that this area was inhabited well before the first

white settlers arrived. Other features include a natural rise, used for decades as a

podium for ceremonies and addresses on a kind of “wooded stage.” It is now the

Marjorie Weinberg Garden, a peaceful nook with native plants overlooking Deering

Meadow.

In the last two decades, careful restorations of Northwestern’s earliest surviving

buildings and some brilliant touches of naturalized landscaping have a distinct feel

for what the university was like when the founders chose this site on the bluff, which

Native Americans called “the eyebrow of beauty.”

1. University Hall Gurdon P. Randall, 1869

University Hall serves as the enduring symbol of Northwestern, which is very likely

as the founders intended. Its High Victorian Gothic style was a pastiche, hardly

classic or influential, but its limestone walls and daring tower demonstrate the

power of the founders’ intentions.

Gurdon P. Randall was one of the few builders in Chicago who could call

himself an architect at this time, which meant that he was facile with pattern books

and could create designs in desirable styles. The Gothic profile was clearly a

favorite, particularly among church clients. Randall had other styles in his repertoire,

however, as he displayed in the classically inspired Women’s College (now the

Music Building) a few blocks away.

While later Gothic Revival buildings were more carefully modeled after

European precedents, frontier architecture this time was woven from the

The old towers of University Hall behind more recent neighbors

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imagination. Legend has it that University Hall was inspired by one of the early

professors, Daniel Bonbright, who made a drawing and consigned it to the

architect. Before Northwestern, Bonbright had been at Yale, where he was present

for a local attack on that university, which verged on violence−thus, we might say,

the thick fortresslike walls were inspired. University Hall’s tower may have been the

tallest structure in the nation for a short time, though St. Paul’s in New York topped

it a few months later.

2.Harris Hall Shepley, Rutan and Coolidge, 1915

As University Hall was built along predictable lines in Victorian America, Harris Hall

came at a time when architecture was roiled by ideology and a “battle of styles.”

Was Gothic the architecture of moral uplift? Was classical the true model for

democracy? Charles Coolidge, one of the most important architects in the nation at

the time, came to Chicago from Boston in this period and fought on both sides. He

was skilled at Gothic revival as he was with Beaux-Arts classical.

For Harris Hall there was no question of the style. Norman Waite Harris, the

banker who donated this building to house humanities and social sciences, favored

the classical. For his bank on Monroe Street and for his grand estate in Lake

Geneva, Harris gloried in colonnades, cornices, and unchallenged symmetry.

Still, Coolidge was an advanced architect, not likely to build an antiquated

building to house modern subjects such as political science and economics.

Thus, the facade is stripped of deeply carved and old-fashioned “wedding cake”

ornament. By 1915 the art of simplified exteriors and flowing, light-filled interiors

counted among the priorities of architects, and benefited function-seeking clients.

The original occupants of the Harris Hall of Political Science, as it was called,

were the departments of history, political science (recently separated from history,

triumphantly so, based on the naming of the building), and economics. Sociology

came in later. In 1950, economics and sociology went elsewhere. Today, history is

the primary occupant.

The space provides the simple luxuries that individuals of the professorial class

demanded at the time. Still, the university watched its dollars. The most expensive

finishes were reserved for the first floor, where the walls are of full-height marble

buffed to a satiny finish. A small rotunda inside the front door with carved trim and

elaborate plaster moldings has survived a variety of renovations. The most serious

threat to the interior came in 1946, when the Veterans Administration degentrified

Harris by putting a functional service counter on the first floor.

A 1990 renovation saved most of the original architectural intentions of

Coolidge, including the building’s highlight, a classically ornamented semicircular

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Harris Hall on the edge of Northwestern’s Oak Grove

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Newly renovated Kresge Hall, with changed grade and landscaping

3. kresge Centennial HallHolabird, Root and Burgee, 1953

“Centennial Hall will be one of the most efficient university buildings in the country,

as well as one of the most handsome,” the university announced as it was getting

ready to build what became known as Kresge. Today it seems stripped-down and

utilitarian, but in its day it was proudly modern and up-to-date.

Kresge was drastically needed when built, on the occasion of Northwestern’s

centennial. Fund-raising literature−used in a modern direct-mail campaign−

illustrated the dire need for the new building, with pictures of basements where

distinguished professors had been working, of Quonset huts where the School of

Commerce held classes. The proposed Centennial Hall would be spacious and as

sleek as the most modern postwar tastes could conceive. It would also be a new

focal point for the campus−albeit for a campus always lacking a proper center−with

a broad facade and two wings and a courtyard lined with roses. On a strict axis

with Hinman Avenue from the south, Kresge would provide a certain monumentality

to the southern approach. As a similar gateway was what Tech provided off

Sheridan Road at the north end of campus, the university gave the job to the same

architecture firm, Holabird and Root (at this point with Burgee, father of Philip

Johnson’s well-noted partner).

4. Crowe HallDeStefano + Partners, 2003, 2008

Kresge’s exterior did what was intended for a while. Its simplified Gothic style,

Lannon stone walls, vertical bays, and medieval touches adhered to Northwestern’s

not-too-strict architectural signature. Its nobility was impermanent, unfortunately.

The concrete block interior and enclosed corner stairwells were supposed to be

efficient and modern. It was soon tagged as cheap and unwelcoming. “A building of

four stories,” it was jokingly called, “each one a basement.”

The challenge of improving this came to the firm of DeStefano + Partners in

2003. In giving a dead or dying building new life, architects Avi Lothan and Alex

Shinewald closed the fourth side of the courtyard with a four-story addition, Crowe

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lecture hall. The elaborateness of this space, in comparison to the relative plainness

of Harris Hall’s exterior, demonstrates the interest in functional interiors that were

thoroughly modern in 1915. Happily, the 2000 renovation of the lecture hall did

not go overboard with function, and the classical charm of the room was retained

despite the addition of computer wiring and other infrastructure of a smart twenty-

first-century classroom.

What Crowe also changes is the circulation of the building. Members of

the Italian department, for example, can nod to philosophers if they walk in one

direction or run into art historians if they go the other. In a university that prides

itself on interdisciplinary “intellectual collisions,” the way in which a building directs

traffic counts.

The most obvious improvement for life at Kresge/Crowe is not what is in

the building, rather what is just outside in the newly enclosed courtyard. Crowe

included terracing and lush plants added to the hardscape, neglected for years as

dead space. Most recently a 2008 fifth floor addition reaches above the roofline of

the Sheridan Road dorms. Now a towering top floor is visible from Hinman Avenue

and restores the symmetry and monumentality that Kresge boasted when it

was new.

Fairchild Residences

Hall, featuring Lannon stone and glassy vertical bays. More of the same? They hope

not. The bays are continuous curtains of glass, bringing increased light into a more

modern interior. The architects also lowered the grade, making the ex-basement

of the old building less of a basement−with more light and fewer tenants working

“underground.”

5. Fairchild Residence Halls International Studies Residential College (West Fairchild) Communications Residential College (East Fairchild) Nagle, Hartray & Associates, 1981

Nagle Hartray avoided several unfortunate recipes common to college architects

when the Fairchild dorms were built. Mainly the firm discarded the postmodern

cookbook, with touches of context, such as Gothic arches thrown on dismal

concrete boxes. In fact, the Fairchild dorms had some tricky requirements that

made concrete boxes impossible and pseudohistory unwanted.

Among the problems to be solved, the site was hardly ideal for dorms−narrow

and close to the street. With a rationalist rigor that drives most modern architects,

Jack Hartray and partner Jim Nagle tried to create a new gateway to replace the

one that was being sacrificed by these dorms to begin with. The strip of land, on an

axis with Hinman Avenue, had been part of an open space and courtyard leading

to Kresge. An additional restriction was posed by a cellarlike storage structure

beneath much of the site.

The solution was curving buildings that snake across the site, symmetrically and

with a narrow walkway between them on line with the Kresge courtyard. To either

side of the passage, entries double as common areas−one has even housed an

in-dorm radio station (WXRU) for the Communications Residential College.

By placing the entries in garden areas behind the buildings, the design

concentrates foot traffic through the passage between the two buildings. The

architects intended this to become a social crossroads. “We were doing what

all architects try to do whether they’re modernists or not,” said Hartray. “That’s to

create an Italian hill town,” by which he means constant and unavoidable interaction

with neighbors.

6. annie May Swift Hall Charles R. Ayars, 1895

Architecturally, Annie May Swift Hall has endured obscurity for most of its career.

Its red and orange brick walls and the trees that shade it make the building

unobtrusive. Though a recent restoration has brightened Annie May Swift, restraint

was definitely among the architect’s intentions. Elsewhere in Chicago at the time,

obtrusive Roman palaces were going up−the World’s Columbian Exposition had

created a fashion for proud and showy building. But ornament-encrusted Beaux

Arts palaces were exactly what advanced or “modern” architects at the turn of the

century were avoiding.

Annie May Swift was built for the School of Oratory, the creation of Robert

McLean Cumnock, a veteran of the intellectual vaudeville of the Chautauqua circuit.

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Annie May Swift Hall’s main entrance

Initially setting up shop in Evanston, Cumnock’s nondegree training became

indispensable to many students, including incipient preachers.

While oratory and elocution were regarded as old-fashioned by many

academics at the time, the popularity of the program not just among preachers

but independent-minded women as well presaged a changing modern world. The

school attained the status of a full-fledged university program in 1892.

Cumnock and the university got funding from the meat-packing Swift family;

Annie May was a devoted oratory student when she died prematurely before

graduation. Charles R. Ayars was engaged as architect, and discussions centered

on an architecture suitable to the moral uplift that oratory could engender. In fact,

modern architects were deeply interested in similar ideals at this time, like those of

John Ruskin, who rhapsodized of the Gothic’s dignity and integrity in construction.

Ayars chose the Venetian Gothic for what he intended as a virtuoso performance.

What is modern about Annie May Swift is that the ornament of surface

expresses the structure and the forces of the engineering that keep the structure

upright. Thus the base of heavy limestone blocks. Thus the spiral-fluted columns,

vaguely Venetian, around the main entry on the building’s south end. Thus the

decorative patterns in the brick walls.

Other “Venetian” touches include arcades along the second floor, decorative

and also functional to accommodate large windows and abundant light in

classrooms. Less historical in nature, of course, was the structure framing of

the building, which used steel as well as masonry to achieve clearspan space,

especially key in the auditorium, which served the School of Oratory, later called the

School of Speech, then School of Communications, for 112 years.

A 2008 restoration of Annie May Swift freshened the surfaces and returned

some of the colorful variations of the exterior and the spacious rooms inside. Yet

no amount of restoration will revive some elements, such as the gymnasium in

the basement. The Tribune noted in an article when the building opened that the

gym was “well stocked with apparatus for the development and expansion of the

chest, and for cultivating graceful gestures.” The basement was later occupied by

the radio station WNUR, where a sign in the 1950s reminded everyone: “Proper

preproduction planning prevents pitifully poor programs.”

7. Deering library James Gamble Rogers, 1933

Deering represented the ideas of many powerful people who came together to

create the architectural centerpiece of the campus. A new library had been needed

for some time. The Orrington Lunt Library had long since reached its capacity, and

books were scattered in departmental libraries all over campus.

As planning for Deering commenced, librarian Theodore Koch offered a

veritable litany of suggestions for the ideal library. It should be similar to an

administration building, he said, in its central location; like a chapel it should

be inspirational. Koch, a leading academic librarian and Dante scholar, also

understood how a library must function−with areas for browsing and for rare books,

book exhibits, ample shelving, and other facilities.

In 1929 one million dollars became available for the purpose with a bequest in

the will of Charles Deering of the International Harvester fortune. Around the same

time, President Walter Dill Scott had hired James Gamble Rogers to design new

campus buildings, and he was put to work on the library.

Koch and Rogers were not instantly on the same wavelength. Rogers quickly

worked up a Gothic revival scheme for the library, not unlike the Sterling Library at

Yale, whose design had won Rogers wide praise. Koch believed the design looked

too much like Yale and presented Rogers with additional functional necessities,

down to the ideal location for card catalog drawers. Rogers wrote back and asked

Koch what a mess the Gettysburg Address would have been if Congress had

forced its two cents on Lincoln’s masterpiece.

Rogers then produced a Georgian design for the library, which was met with

a general lack of enthusiasm, most of all from Rogers himself, who believed that

a Gothic building “represents more freedom,” he wrote in a letter, “and does not

demand the symmetry that the Georgian has to have.”

His next and final scheme, Gothic, was based loosely on the Chapel of Kings

College, Cambridge, and it included almost all the elements for books, reading

rooms, and seminar rooms that librarian Koch had called for.

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