Edward Larrabee Barnes and the Early 1960s

In the early 1960s the school's building program took on a new momentum, inspired and inspirited by August Heckscher, an alumnus and a trustee, who brought the young architect Edward Larrabee Barnes (1915-)[58] to Millville to design a dormitory group, Conover, Twenty, and Corner (1961).[59] After teaching English for a bit at Milton Academy, Barnes went on to Harvard's Graduate School of Design to study architecture under the two leading modernist architect-educators of the day, Walter Gropius and Marcel Breuer. Unlike many of his classmates, Barnes endeavored to adapt the minimalism of the then dominant International Style modernism with the local context, by abstracting traditional building shapes and executing his designs in traditional materials unconventionally detailed. The publication of Barnes' St. Paul's buildings in 1963 struck the architectural profession with nothing less than the force of lightning, making an impact as great as Vaughan's chapel had in 1890. Here were modestly scaled buildings that, though true to the modernists' canon of detail-free, non-historicizing minimalist geometry, nonetheless seemed comfortable in, and sympathetic to, the physical context in which they were built. The complex consisted of two continuous buildings articulated into different elements that defined courtyards. True, there were the stylistically obligatory and climatologically problematic flat roofs. But here, perhaps for one of the first times in postwar American modernist architecture, were new buildings that had some of the qualities of old buildings induding fine brick work and careful, if quirky, proportions. As the editors of Architectural Record observed: ". . .the atmosphere is country, with no overtones of expensive suburbia. The gentle scale and materials of the new buildings suit the school's concept of what it is. It would have been easy to overplay the rustic theme, but St. Paul's is no farm." [60]

Barnes, who had been asked to build in an apple orchard at the western end of the school grounds, convinced the trustees to let him build at its center, advancing towards realization that chapel quadrangle originally proposed by Vaughan and supported by the architect's committee and reinforced by Rogers' Schoolhouse. "By this scheme," Heckscher points out, "the school was saved the universal plight of mid-century towns and cities-- proliferation at the extremes while the center became progressively more vacant. Barnes reemphasized the main street of the school's earliest years.''[61] The sense of the complex is that of a composition of garden walls connecting new and old. And, as importantly, the wood frame houses and small scale buildings of the school's early years, such as the old cylindrical gas house (1880) now used as a post office and the wood framed rectory (1872), were not eliminated from the picture. With Conover Twenty, it would appear that Jefferson's University of Virginia plan had at last found its way into the St. Paul's story: adapting the prototype to the rigors of the north, Barnes created an all-weather equivalent to the colonnaded ranges that line the lawn of Jefferson's Charlottesville campus in the form of wide hallways treated as "interior streets," a feature that is the bane of faculty to this day, but much beloved by students who can take particular and noisy advantage of them in winter when weather cuts down on the opportunity for outdoor mayhem. In a later and much less successful effort, Barnes was to carry the Jefferson approach further at the Purchase campus of the State University of New York (1967).[62]

Barnes' work at St. Paul's School came at a time when many universities and secondary schools were engaged in extensive programs for expansion, such as they had not undertaken since the 1920s. Some of them, most notably Yale, were patronizing a new generation of architects who, though trained as modernists, had begun to question modernism's emphasis on stylistic discontinuity. Not surprisingly, Barnes was among those called to New Haven, where the new historicizing modernism first flourished. His most interesting project for Yale, a house for the Dean of Freshmen (1962), intended for a sliver-like site on the old campus, was never built.[63]

Sadly, the banalities of Memorial Hall and the Payson group were only one part of the school's foundering post war architectural vision. In 1952 the trustees, seeking to reduce costs, voted to demolish the old chapel, a decision which was reversed later in the year after protests from masters and, as Heckscher chidingly puts it, "comparatively few alumni, young and old. That it should have been taken in the first place is significant. It suggests the materialistic values at work in the postwar world, together with the decline of the religious impulse in school life. It suggests also, a basic disorientation of spirit. A school confident of its future would not have come so close to forgetting its past.[64] The chapel was saved, but the trustees replaced the gym with a more functional but far less architecturally distinguished facility in 1958, again retaining the architect Richard A. Kimball.[65] More destruction awaited the school's historic core than the trustees ever would wish: on the night of January 21, 1961, the Big Study, now largely unused, succumbed to a fire, which was possibly the product of misadventure.

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58 Edward Larrabee Barnes, the principal of a firm still practicing in New York, is the architect of a wide range of buildings and master plans throughout the United States. Two of his most prominent works are the Walker Arts Center in Minneapolis (1971) and the International Business Machines Building in New York (1983). See "Minimal Sculpture Inside and Out: The New Walker Art Museum by Edward Larrabee Barnes," Architectural Record 150 July 1971): 34; "Brick on-Brick and White-on-White: the Walker Art Center May Be the Best Modern Museum in the U.S.," Architecture Plus 2 (July/August 1974): 38-47; Paul Goldberger, "What Should a Museum Building Be?" Art News 74 (October 1975): 33-38; "A Low Profile for IBM," Architectural Record 161 (January 1977): 141-46.

59 "Modest Dormitories for a Country Prep School," Architectural Record 133 (June 1963): 125-132; Masahiro Horiuchi, "Cluster Architecture," Space Design 5 (July 1985): 68-69.

60 "Modest Dormitories for a Country Prep School," 126.

61 Heckscher, 304-5

62 "Academic Village," Architectural Forum 133 (November 1970): 33-41.

63 Jonathan Barnett, "The New Collegiate Architecture at Yale," Architectural Record 131 (April 1962): 131.

64 Heckscher, 292-93.

65 Leonard Barker, "A Tour through the New Gymnasium," Alumni Horae 38 (Spring 1958): 13-17.