Affirmation and Adaptation: Values and the Elite Residential College

Abstract

Since so many of the American elite residential liberal arts colleges have their origins in the religious imaginations of their founders, to observe such a fact is simply to state a commonplace. In most of the institutions founded before 1900, the most prominent architectural feature of the campus is the college chapel, declaiming in wood or stone the central place accorded the public expression of religion in the life of the school. In many such institutions the geography of the principal quadrangle reflects complementary sitings of the chapel and the library, temples to the twin values of faith and reason by which Christian education in the West has for so long been guided. This shaping of space is most vividly demonstrated in the New Yard of Harvard University, since 1936 known as the Tercentenary Theatre. On the northern perimeter of this quadrangle stands The Memorial Church on the site of its predecessor, Appleton Chapel, which had been there from 1855; opposite, on the southern side, is the massive Widener Library on the site of its predecessor, Gore Hall, the old college library that had been built in imitation of King's College Chapel at Cambridge University. Libraries that look like chapels were an architectural conceit, with perhaps the most famous being the Sterling Memorial Library of Yale University. It is said that the donor wished to contribute to a splendid Gothic chapel at Yale,