NOT one of our elder buildings

American collegiate buildings clearly reveal the fierceness of the fight--from the first halls of the Eighteenth Century to the "University of the Future" existing only in the dreams of a few.

"We have none, or next to none of those coigns of vantage for the tendrils of memory and affection, built into English universities," Lowell complained in delivering the speech which has rallied the decoration and sentiment guild. "They are well high desolate of

But standards of value have changed since the Victorian are, the utility and structure guild replies. We so longer build colleges, or anything else, in the "General Grant" Goths of the dark and stuffy interiors, then fronts tortured with ornament.

Machine age esthetic stimuli are found in straight forward, business like buildings, where our Victorian grand parents insisted on gingerbread ornament from which to drape their tendrils of memory and affection." The sentimental Victorian distinction between "architecture" and "Building" no longer prevails for the modernist.

Charles Eliot Norton called the modernists to battle when he spoke of "noble architecture, sample as it may be"--a phrase that expresses the taste of a generation close to ours. Norton, Darvardian like Lowell, felt the inestimable influence of architecture at a "great seat of education-especially in our country." Both men's views on architectural greatness and its pedagogic value apply not only to our oldest and richest institution, but to every college everywhere.

We have an unsuspected and forgotten wealth of esthetic material in our college buildings--especially in those of Colonial and Early Republican times. In it, we can enjoy and compare a bewildering variety of artistic values. Fascinating, colorful connections come to light between the buildings and their builders with the undergraduates who inhabited them, with the whole civilization that produced them and enjoyed the fruits of the institutions they housed.

"The most beautiful campus in America" is a distinction claimed by more than a few colleges. In almost every case the distinction is based upon natural surroundings with which architecture or united plan are not integrated in any significant sense.

Five chapters comprise the evolution of the American college buildings.

1. The first successful attempts to establish primarily theological seminaries in Colonial New England and Virginia, with their earliest, long vanished halls and their varying versions of the Georgian vernacular" of the 18th century.

2. The first state universities and the colleges of the early republic, their more pretentious Romanized buildings reflecting the new self-sufficiency and larger scale of operations of the UniteD States.

3. The winning of the West, the multiplication of colleges, the series of Anti-Classical revivals in art and architecture--all phases of turbid, radical progress spiced with cultural glance over the shoulder at values inevitably doomed to extinction.

4. The period f architectural and cultural re integration at the end of the 19th Century clearly apparent in the re-discovery of the unified campus and the renewed Roman revival. Now college founded by individuals not by Church or State as before predominate.

5. Our own Post War era with its often errant, sometimes prophetic answers to the double problem of architecture and culture.

Harvard First Used

"House Architecture"

IN 1636 the General Court of the Colony of Massachusetts Bay generously voted to "give L400 towards School or College." A matter of $2,000 at today's exchange, it had a purchasing power of about $9,000.

The first Harvard curriculum, soaked with philosophy and New Testament Greek lagged behind the advances of early 17th century continental thought and science. Latin, still Harvard's official language, was not taught. It was merely assumed and commonly used. Scholastic disputations were still in vogue; and in the science of mid 17th Century Massachusetts the earth was still the center of the universe (as was Boston State House in the mid-roth).

Twenty dollars a year and they keeps was the princely salary of President Dunster's two first assistant of the Clubs of 1642. About half the graduates in the first century or so (an average of eight per year) went into the Congregational ministry, Harvard's first purpose.

John Harvard, M. A. Cambridge dying in 1636 gave his name to the new institution along with a very modest legacy--L400 to match the investment of the General Court and his entire library of 300 volumes. The endowment was evidently appreciated more than some of the stupendous sums sunk in later institutions (Rockefeller gave millions to the University of Chicago, but it is still called Chicago!)

Harvard a first buildings were of wood, New England's favorite building material in the sixteen hundreds. None remain, but a god drawing of what the original Harvard Hall must have looked like show nothing but an amplification of the typical Early American dwelling house. Tradition thus played large part in our earliest college architecture.

The house architecture tradition was all the more reasonable in the 17th Century American college since the halls served entirely as "chambers and studies." Thus they embodied the fundamental English and New England educational theory that a was only by studying and disputing, eating and drinking, playing and praying as members of the same collegiate community that the priceless gift of character could be imparted to young men. The dormitory character of all college buildings is preserved well into the 19th Century, and since the war has come in for lively revival.

The drawing at the left below shows Old Harvard Hall before it burned in 1794. The drawing at the right below shows the New Harvard Hall which replaced it in 1766. The later building, still clearly dormitory, is composed on the lines of the typical New England Town Hall or Court House, with continuous cornices, fully developed gables, and classes its parts.

The oldest college building still standing is Harvard's Massachusetts Hall of 1720. Seen on both old prints, it is midway in style between Old Harvard with its medieval emphasis on pointed dormer windows and its strikingly irregular roof line, and the more measured formality of New Harvard Massachusetts and reminiscent of Boston's Old State House of the Early Georgian period.

Here a type has been created, early in the 18th Century, which will influence American college buildings, with local and periodic variations, up to the Revolution. The red "Harvard Brick" has remained the dominant material in all Harvard's later buildings. As a rule, departures from it have been unfortunate.

This is the first in a series of special articles and "American College Architecture." The second will discuss other pre-Revolutionary colleges.--Editor.