Edward Stephen Harkness and James Gamble Rogers: 1930s

The Schoolhouse in the Thirties from Dunbarton Road. Photo courtesy of St. Paul's School Archives

In the early 1930s, amidst severe economic depression, St. Paul's realized one last monument to the Gothic ideal. One day in July 1934, Charles Cockburn Monie, the vice rector, spied two gentlemen walking around the school grounds, looking prosperous and important, as indeed they were. One was the financier Edward Stephen Harkness (1874-1940),[51] a graduate of the school; the other, James Gamble Rogers (1867-1947),[52] an architect, whose two children attended the school. These two men constituted one of the great teams in the history of architectural patronage: Harkness, who funded most of the buildings built at Yale between 1919 and 1940; and Rogers, who was the architect for almost all of them.

The team began their collaboration at Yale with the Memorial Quadrangle (1919-1921), which initiated the so-called college system that Harkness' largesse made possible, a collection of residential quadrangles that helped the expanding university maintain some of its traditional intimacy.[53]

Rogers' contribution to St. Paul's was as significant as Vaughan's or Flagg's, each producing at least one building of outstanding character. Just as Flagg was ten years Vaughan's junior, James Gamble Rogers was ten years younger than Flagg. Where Flagg was Vaughan's opposite, in many ways Rogers' approach was something of a synthesis between the two. Vaughan saw a revived medieval architecture as a moral corrective to the materialism of his day; Flagg, on the other hand, who relished the very logical positivism that Vaughan despised, sought to celebrate that materialism. Rogers, like Flagg, a graduate of the Ecole de Beaux Arts, was completely at home in the modern world of technology and big business, yet he sought to soften the blows of industrialization and capitalism with stylistic gestures from the past. Lambasted by modernist critics as "girder Gothic," Rogers' buildings were undoubtedly scenographic, but brilliantly so, and based on serious historical scholarship. They were also rigorously thought out and logically planned.

Harkness and Rogers politely declined Monie's luncheon invitation; they had seen enough. The School, without its outmoded Schoolhouse torn down five years before, needed a proper academic center which Harkness' gift made possible, incorporating administrative offices into the new School House's program.[54] Dedicated in 1936 and occupied in 1937, the School House (now the Schoolhouse) was a capstone to the architect's career, a beautifully composed and meticulously detailed addition to the Millville scene, one that culminated the line of Gothic buildings begun with the Chapel of St. Peter and St. Paul. Ironically, the rector, Samuel S. Drury, would have preferred a Georgian-style building. It is probably safe to claim that no classroom building at any American school or university is more carefully crafted or more subtly arranged. The tower with its clock, the fleche above with its weather vane, the gable denoting the principal entrance, the handling of the brick--each contributes to the splendid effect. Yet each is not a self-important feature, but rather a reflection of elements that can be found in other St. Paul's buildings. Indeed, even the basic arrangement of the building reflects St. Paul's past, echoing Young's t-shaped plan for The School with a more picturesque, spatially complex arrangement that grouped functional wings around a stair hall, thereby at last advancing toward reality of the long anticipated quadrangle facing the chapel and opening up opportunities for additional similar spaces on its other sides. It was a perfect response to the chapel, completing its mass with one of comparable scale and character.

With a new classroom building commensurate in scale, quality, and dignity to its principal chapel, the school at last began to establish a physical expression for the academic and moral values that were at the spatial core of its educational mission; only the library remained physically remote and stylistically disconnected from the village and its main street. By the late 1930s, the architecture and the urbanism of St. Paul's School had begun to achieve the synthesis between village and institution, between street and quadrangle, that is its glory. What had begun as the rough, common landscape of rural New England had been transformed into an idealized garden traversed by a quiet country road enlivened only by pedestrians, bicyclists, and slow-moving vehicles that served the school itself.

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51 A railway financier and heir to one of the country's largest fortunes (his father was a partner of John D. Rockefeller, Sr.), Harkness devoted his life to donating more than $100,000,000 to various educational institutions, welfare agencies, and arts organizations. See "Edward S. Harkness Dies at 66; Gives $100,000,000 to the Public," New York Times (January 30, 1940): 1, 5.

52 Rogers had a long and very successful career with outstanding achievement in the realm of collegiate architecture. In addition to serving as the architectural advisor to Yale University for over a decade, Rogers designed school facilities all across the map. At Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois, he designed the Deering Library and Sorority Quadrangle. See "The Alexander McKinlock Memorial Campus, Northwestern University, Chicago," American Architect 132 (July 20, 1927): 78-115. "Charles Deering Memorial Library, Evanston, Illinois," Architectural Record 71 (June 1932): 377. His collaboration with Harkness included work not only for Yale but for Columbia University, where he designed the Butler Library (1934) and the original buildings of the Columbia-Presbyterian medical center (1928). For Butler Library, see Stern, Gilmartin, and Mellins, New York 1930, 109-10. For Columbia-Presbyterian, see New York l930, 112-13.

53 "The Memorial Quad and the Harkness Memorial Tower at Yale," American Architect and the Architectural Review 120 (October 26, 1921): 299-314; "The Memorial Quad, Yale University, New Haven, Connecticut," American Architect and the Architectural Review 120 (November 9, 1921): 333-42.

54 "The School House": 9; "The New Schoolhouse," Alumni Horae 17 (December 1937): 84-88.