Introduction

I would like to talk about the history of the architecture of St. Paul's School and in particular about how it influenced my work, that of my partner Graham Wyatt, and the others who together shaped the Ohrstrom Library which we are here to dedicate this weekend.[1] In undertaking this subject I draw upon the scholarship of August Heckscher, whose wonderful history of the school includes a great deal about its buildings, though it naturally enough does not concentrate on them.[2]

In focusing on the buildings of St. Paul's School I can not pretend to be offering any more than what can most charitably be described as informal architectural history; but this history was necessary for me to formulate as I undertook to design the Ohrstrom Library in a way that would convincingly locate the new building within the school's physical and cultural milieu. For me, architecture is a conversation across time; for me, new structures must have a firm foundation in the past.

St. Paul's did not evolve; it was not only created by the will of a single man, Dr. George Shattuck, and by his hand-picked choice for rector, Henry A. Coit, but located in a near wilderness so that it could make its own history in its own environment. Ultimately it would reshape the found forms of architectural history to articulate its own self-image. In this it was prototypically American. From the first, ours has been a nation that makes its own environment over and over again as new requirements emerge, not so much innovating as amalgamating, cobbling together a new culture by continually modify ing things from elsewhere and especially from the past. In architecture, though we have not forged the unique architectural language so many have wished for, we have developed distinct modes of expression. In much the same way we have forged our political and cultural ideals out of our English colonial experience and our idealization of the democracy of the ancient Greeks: we build our buildings on the shoulders of a real and mythologized past.

That is the example set for us by Jefferson who, in rejecting English politics, also rejected English culture and set out in the design of the state capitol at Richmond, of his own house at Monticello, and of the university he founded at Charlottesville, to create an architecture rooted in that of the Ancient world and Revolutionary France, taking elements from each as he saw fit, in order to find physical expression for his idealistic concept of American life.

Though, to my knowledge, Dr. Shattuck exhibited no particular affinity to Thomas Jefferson or his ideas, they in fact shared a number of beliefs that have influenced St. Paul's. Like Jefferson, Dr. Shattuck believed in the restorative values of nature: "Green fields and trees, streams and ponds, beautiful scenery, flowers and minerals, are educators. The things which are seen are very valuable and may be used to tell. . .of the things unseen." [3] And like Jefferson, Shattuck deemed the town an undesirable distraction for the goals of education. Jefferson broke with the model of William and Mary because it was in Williamsburg and established a new university a mile outside a tiny, remote, upland settlement called Charlottesville; Shattuck also chose a remote site in the country, near a town but not in it; a place "exempt from the annoyances and temptations" of urban life.[4] Dr. Shattuck set out to solve a functional problem and represent an ideal. Concerned that New England's increasing industrialization was threatening the traditional social and cultural values which he believed were the fabric of American life, Shattuck saw to it that St. Paul's students would be educated not only in the classroom but also in the environment as a whole: this school would be an ideal community based on the model of the traditional New England village.

It is significant that Shattuck did not choose to build a school along the institutional lines of the day, preferring instead to establish a village rather than create an institutional entity, be it a single monumental building or a campus. Shattuck mirrored his interests in educational reform in his ideals about school architecture and planning by not turning for inspiration to either of the two leading colleges of the day: Harvard and Yale. Had he looked to Harvard or to Yale, he would have surely found them wanting. Both were being engulfed by cities around them, with Yale the more threatened of the two. From the time of its relocation from Saybrook to New Haven in 1717, Yale had occupied a quadrant of its own within New Haven's famous nine-square town plan, facing the green, the central open space where citizens of the town and of the college could gather together. But with the passage of time, the relationship between "town" and "gown" had become problematic. Student rioting had been fairly regular even in the eighteenth century, and by the 1850s the situation began to grow serious as anger increased among working class New Havenites, who resented the costs they had to bear in order to make repairs after the outbursts; in 1854 and 1856, just as Shattuck was finalizing plans for St. Paul's establishment, two mob scenes in New Haven resulted in deaths. In principle, the University of Virginia should have appealed to Shattuck as a model, but in the 1850s Jefferson's "academical village" was not yet widely known in the north and, given the grand, classically-inspired character of Jefferson's design, it was probably not the kind of village Shattuck had in mind. Jefferson's collage of Classical planning and architectural precedent that owed as much to Revolutionary France as it did to Ancient Rome was not anything like the casual conglomeration of buildings that Shattuck idealized for St. Paul's. Millville as it was, a few houses and outbuildings, and little else, seemed right: a place protected from the reality of day-to-day urban life, yet near enough to a city so as not to be artificially cut off from worldly conveniences and culture.

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1 I would like to thank the following people for their assistance with this essay: Rosemarie Cassels-Brown, St. Paul's School librarian, and especially Ann Louise Locke, assistant librarian, who so smilingly consulted the school's archives in search of answers to my almost endless stream of questions. Also I want to thank Elizabeth Kraft of my staff, who so ably assisted in the preparation of the talk and its subsequent publication.

2 August Heckscher, St. Paul's: The Life of a New England School (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1980).

3 George Cheyne Shattuck in Joseph Howland Coit and George Cheyne Shattuck, Memorials of St. Paul's School (New York: D. Appleton, 1891), 15, quoted in Heckscher, 8.

4 St. Paul's School Annual Statement 1858, quoted in Heckscher, 8.