Post World War II: 1940s - 1950s

After the second World War, as the school struggled to continue to meet the needs and values of the constituency it had traditionally served, while broadening its appeal to others, its architectural mission foundered. When at last the trustees decided to build a proper assembly hall to replace the inadequate meeting room above the old gymnasium, the firm of Ralph Adams Cram was retained. Their ambitious Gothic style design, intended for a site northwest of the Schoolhouse, where two small clapboard cottages stood, would have furthered Vaughan's quadrangular plan. But instead, the trustees turned to a different architect and a different style, opting as well for a different site, remote from the school's heart, facing away toward the playing fields and the expanding city of Concord beyond. Memorial Hall (1951), designed by Richard A. Kimball of Gugler, Kimball, & Husted, though functionally long overdue and very useful, was an overblown evocation of the Greek Revival meeting houses that in the 1830s spread across America from New York State to Ohio.[55] Perhaps its design grew out of a desire to carry the school's fictive architectural history beyond Georgian colonialism into the early Republican era and to recognize the nation's expansion beyond New England. But if this was the point, it was too obscure; and the heavy handed design was too banal. The Payson Memorial Laboratory, also the work of Richard Kimball (1951),[56] and other buildings that cluster around the Memorial Hall, created a new sub-center, but one symbolically cut off from the school as a whole. If not a complete break in the architectural conversation of the place, they certainly constitute a non-sequitur. The remotely sited Georgian-style Drury House (1940) also seems conversationally out-of-it, excusable, perhaps, in that it is a tribute to the fomer rector and his taste.[57]

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55 "A New Science Building and Auditorium Begun by the Rector," Pelican 5 (April 19, 1950): 1.

56 "Work Begins Next Spring on Memorial Lab," Pelican 5 (December 7, 1949): 1; "Science Building and Auditorium Begun by Rector": 1; "Dedication of Payson Memorial Science Building," Alumni Horae 31 (Autumn 1951): 110.

57 Drury," Horae Scholasticae 73 (November 30, 1939): 41-42; "Samuel Smith Drury Memorial," Alumni Horae 19 (July 1939): 59-60; "Final Report of the Samuel Smith Drury Memorial Committee," Alumni Horae 20 (April 1940): 10; "Drury--The New Dormitory," Alumni Horae 20 (December 1940): 92, 97-100.