Arts and Crafts Architecture by Meister Maureen;

Author:Meister, Maureen;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: University Press of New England

In any case, Skinner Hall was built to the highest standard in terms of design, materials, and finishes. The facade overlooking the green reveals the architects’ scholarly knowledge of English Tudor architecture, with a battlemented bay that quotes a similar entrance at Compton Wynyates house in Warwickshire. Yet the English manor is asymmetrical and irregular in its massing, whereas Skinner Hall is balanced, reflecting the early twentieth-century attraction to Jacobean order. Built of brick and trimmed with sandstone, it features carved seals of American and foreign women’s colleges. Leaded casement windows sparkle with stained-glass medallions that represent the academic disciplines taught inside. Putnam and Cox would design four more collegiate Gothic buildings for Mount Holyoke, the last one erected in 1932.116

Both the craftsmen and the architects who banded together in the Society of Arts and Crafts contributed to the evolution of collegiate Gothic architecture in New England and beyond. Because ornament of the highest quality was integral to the success of these buildings, it is not surprising that craftsmen who joined the society were sought after by architects in cities besides Boston, especially architects practicing in the Northeast. For example, before the society was even founded, Evans was identified by New York’s Charles C. Haight and then hired to take charge of the stone carving on Vanderbilt Hall, an early collegiate Gothic dormitory at Yale, built in 1894.117 Connick’s workshop produced stained glass for many campuses, including Marsh Chapel at Boston University and Houghton Chapel at Wellesley College, as well as Heinz Chapel and the Cathedral of Learning at the University of Pittsburgh.118

The Boston architects were influential, too. After they had demonstrated the appeal of seam-faced granite, quarried south of Boston, the material was selected for the collegiate Gothic buildings of Yale and the University of Michigan Law School. Through their towers, Maginnis, Cram, and Sturgis inspired other academic institutions to erect skyscraping Perpendicular landmarks. The architects’ exemplars at Boston College, Princeton, and Perkins Institution were followed by Yale’s 216-foot-tall Harkness tower (1917–21) designed by New York’s James Gamble Rogers, and Wellesley’s 182-foot-tall Galen Stone tower (1929–31) designed by Philadelphia’s Charles Z. Klauder. The beauty of New England’s collegiate Gothic buildings is due in no small part to the Boston architects and their craftsmen colleagues, Arts and Crafts collaborations for which they all deserve recognition.

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