Frederick Law Olmsted: 1920 - 1930

In 1923, Frederick Law Olmsted, Jr., and the architect Grosvenor Atterbury (1869-1956), with whom Olmsted had previously collaborated in the design of the model suburban village, Forest Hills Gardens, in the borough of Queens, New York (begun 1909), were asked to reassess the school's physical plan.[40] Building upon the work of the Architects Committee, they called for a new road to by-pass the school on one side toward Dunbarton and on the other toward Hopkinton, thereby creating a much enlarged traffic-free campus.[41] Olmsted and Atterbury posed two alternative models for the school's future expansion. "On the one hand it would be logical to adopt a Collegiate Gothic type, as typified in the new 'Upper' and the Chapel, the two largest and most substantial buildings on the property, for all the teaching units and to harmonize with it an English domestic or cottage type for the housing groups." Such an arrangement would "emphasize somewhat the institutional character of the community. The Infirmary and one or two other recent structures have apparently been designed with this general plan in mind."

On the other hand, Olmsted and Atterbury argued, "It is possible to conceive of the entire development as a village-like community gathering around a teaching institution or local school and chapel. In such a case no attempt would be made to relate, architecturally, the housing groups and units to the teaching group. The prototype would be found in a small New England village in which the chief interest and the only architectural feature was a boys' day school."[42] Olmsted and Atterbury believed that it was the village concept that lay behind such recent building as the Squash Courts, Friendly House, and the Community House (1923, demolished 1961)[43] designed by Edmund O Sylvester (1869-1942).[44] What concerned them was the school's inability to decide between the two models: "Following first one and then the other, or both, or neither, at one and the same time, has produced an utter jumble that is neither harmonious, dignified, nor picturesque; that produces no clear impression as a whole yet serves to vividly emphasize all the ugly buildings, while it stultifies the leavening effect of those that are good."[45]

While appearing to be unbiased in their feelings about the merits of various St. Paul's buildings, in an appendix to their report Olmsted and Atterbury were barely able to conceal their feelings about the perennial ad hocism of the school's site selection process and its casual attitude to architectural aesthetics. "Curiously enough, although they appear to have been a more or less natural expression of the development of the School organization, from the old days of Dr. Shattuck's house through years of gradually enlarging size and scope and, therefore, might naturally be supposed to express pretty accurately in their plan and accommodations the functions of the school, this is by no means the case. One of the baffling things to a stranger attempting to grasp the principles of the organization of St. Paul's is the complete lack of relation between the physical and the theoretical organism."[46] The plan also rated the value of existing buildings, finding the School House useless on practical, aesthetic, and structural grounds. Surprisingly, it placed the twenty-year-old Sheldon Library in the "doubtfully permanent category." Of the two schemes Olmsted and Atterbury proposed for future development, the first, the creation of a grand quadrangle that would embrace the chapel, had its origins in Vaughan's ideas and the 1911 proposals of the architects committee; the second, calling for a more informal grouping along the ridge west of the chapel meadow, picked up on ideas first articulated in the Olmsteds' 1898 report.

Though the Olmsted-Atterbury report, in many ways a culmination of almost twenty years of thought before it, appears to have never been officially adopted by the school's trustees, it did set the agenda for the school's building program undertaken during the late 1920s and early 1930s. Besides articulating two distinct physical models for St. Paul's future growth, in chiding the school for its casual attitude toward the expressive and representative values of architecture, it seems to have awakened the trustees to a renewed sense of architectural purpose: amidst the materialism of America's roaring twenties, the world of fast machines and big bucks, the school would fulfill Vaughan's vision with English Gothic architecture that would help it maintain a reasonable balance between God and Mammon.

In 1927 the school completed a central heating plant and a new complex of dormitories developed as individual residential houses of forty boys supervised by a master.[47] Both the plant and the new quad were designed by the well-known architect specializing in collegiate Gothic architecture, Charles Z. Klauder.[48] The new dormitories lined a new, curving street, formed a loosely-bounded quadrangle opening to the meadow, honoring the quadrangular planning of the Upper School but in a much more casual way. Here the incentive was the creation of individual buildings so that various donors could be identified: Ford, Manville, Simpson, and Brewster. In addition, Hargate (1928-29), designed by Benjamin Wistar Morris, was built as part of the dormitory plan to provide a dining hall for the lower school, all prompted by the 1911 report.[49]

The new central heating plant was very similar to the one Klauder designed for Yale. Its dramatic scale makes a bold contrast with the new dormitories and dining hall. In part this was unavoidable, given the technology of the day; but the size and character of the powerhouse , only rivaled by Vaughan's chapel, carries with it a certain wry symbolism as well: it is a cathedral of the machine age. That such an image was on the minds of its designer and his clients is confirmed by the prayer carved on its walls, offering to those who contemplate its now-quieted but once belching furnaces: "Oh, ye fire and heat, bless ye the Lord." How Henry Adams would have smiled. Adams, the 19th century historian and philosopher, had posed the Dynamo and the Virgin as two opposite poles of modern life: the Virgin representing the medieval world, whole, complete, focused on God, an otherness of spirituality, a community; the Dynamo representing the confusion, stratification, the energy and the unresolved, opposing tensions of the secular realm.[50] When Dr. Shattuck founded St. Paul's in 1855, his dream was to escape into a garden, away from the industrialization of mid-19th century New England. Now, the machine was in that garden.

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40 Atterbury had a long and distinguished career that included pioneering projects in historic preservation (New York's City Hall, 1903) as well as the development of a low-cost system of prefabricated concrete building. See "Grosvenor Atterbury, 87, Architect, Dead," New York Times (October 19, 1956): 27.

41 Atterbury and Olmsted, "Report on the Physical Development of St. Paul's School, Concord, New Hampshire": 89

42 Atterbury and Olmsted, 23.

43 Editorial, Horae Scholasticae 56 (May 12, 1923): 192; "The Community House," Horae Scholasticae 56 (May 12, 1923): 194-5; "Dates of School Events, Building, Etc.": 104.

44 An alumnus of St. Paul's School, Sylvester opened an office in Boston, specializing in church buildings, while designing various public buildings in Boston and the vicinity, including the John Curtis Public Library (1907) in his native town of Hanover, Massachusetts. See "Edmund O Sylvester," New York Times (September 24, 1942): 27.

45 Atterbury and Olmsted, 23-24.

46 Atterbury and Olmsted, Appendix C: 47.

47 "St. Paul's School Dormitory, Concord, New Hampshire," American Architect 135 (February 5, 1929): 179-193. This presentation also includes drawings and photographs of the central heating plant on pages 189, 192-93. Also see Horae Scholasticae 63 (October 23, 1929): 11-12.

48 Klauder worked as an apprentice in the firm of Cope and Stewardson and went on in 1900 to establish his own reputation as a collegiate Gothicist at universities throughout the United States: Holder, Hamilton, and Madison Halls at Princeton University; Men's Dormitories and Memorial Cloister at Cornell University (1917-29); Greene Administration Building at Wellesley College (1923); and the Cathedral of Learning in Pittsburgh (1931) among others. "Monographs on Architectural Renderers: The Works of Charles Z. Klauder," Brickbuilder 23 (1914): 220-222; "Some Architectural Drawings and Office Studies by Charles Z. Klauder," Architectural Review (Boston) 5 (March 1917): 61-64, 173-79, John G. Bowman The Cathedral of Learning of the University of Pittsburgh (Pittsburgh: Eddy Press, 1925).

49 Horae Scholasticae 63 (October 23, 1929): 11-12.

50 Henry Adams, The Education of Henry Adams (Washington, 1907):331-340.