The Arts Quad
I’ll begin with the oldest part of Cornell’s campus, what is now known as the Arts Quad.
This is where the college began in the 1860s, when the first three buildings were
constructed: Morrill, McGraw, and White
(in order, left to right, as you face them from the quad).
These buildings, now known as the Old Stone Row, were the entirety of
Cornell’s campus until 1870. They are all built in the architectural style
called “Second Empire,” so named because it was popular during the
Second French Empire. It is characterized by semicircular arches capping the
windows, limestone trim on the arches and the corners of the building, and
Mansard roofs creating an extra story with dormer windows. Second Empire
buildings often had horizontal stripes of color in their shingles, and used
square or round towers with peaked roofs to create focal points in the facade,
both of which can be seen in McGraw Hall. Interestingly enough, the gray stone
used in their facades is very local, quarried from the same hill they are
built on top of.
You might notice that the tower of McGraw Hall is at the
“back” of the building, opposite the quad; in fact, the front
facade of all three buildings faces the slope rather than the quad. The
founders of Cornell, Ezra Cornell and Andrew White, originally envisioned the
campus as a “grand terrace” overlooking Ithaca and Cayuga Lake, so
they oriented the buildings to face this scenic view. This plan was discarded
when the second row of buildings was built behind the first, enclosing a quad,
but it was somewhat revived in 2008 when the new West Campus dorms were built
specifically to reveal the scenic view instead of creating courtyards (thus
creating a second “terrace”).
At the time they were built, many critics considered these buildings
“ugly” and “utilitarian,” due to their boxy design and
relatively plain gray facades. Ezra Cornell, however, liked them that way
because he disapproved of excessive ornamentation and wanted a practical and
utilitarian university. He even disapproved of A.D. White’s choice of a
neoclassical style for Goldwin Smith Hall. Ironically, the Old Stone Row now
looks charming and ornamental compared to some of the modern buildings
recently added to Cornell’s campus (such as Physical Sciences, an unadorned
glass box).
Uris Library, perched next to Morrill
Hall on the crest of the slope, is Cornell’s main library. Although the
founders of Cornell planned for a university library as early as 1867, the
building itself was not built until 1888-91, partly as a result of the long
dispute over Jennie McGraw’s will (known as the Great Will Case). McGraw was
the only child of a wealthy lumber merchant, and left a large share of her
vast fortune to Cornell for the purpose of building a library. However, just
before her death in 1881, she married Daniel Willard Fiske, Cornell’s first
librarian. Fiske then had a falling-out with Cornell’s trustees and sued to
invalidate the will on the basis of a state law forbidding a married woman
from leaving more than half of her money to charity. After a long legal fight
the Supreme Court ruled in Fiske’s favor, and trustee Henry Sage ended up
using his own money to build the library. The library became Cornell’s most
iconic building, and the prominent clock tower a recognizable symbol of
Cornell. The clock tower contains the Cornell Chimes, 21 bells that are used
to play musical concerts as well as ringing out the hour. Originally there
were 9 bells, donated by Jennie McGraw in 1868, and they were hung in the
small tower on McGraw Hall while waiting for the library to be constructed.
Uris was designed by William Henry Miller, Cornell’s first architecture
student, and uses the Romanesque Revival style of architecture. Its windows
are framed by classical Ionic columns, and the main entrance is emphasized
with a massive semicircular arch. In an interesting contrast with the nearby
Second Empire buildings, Romanesque Revival facades tend to be distinctly
asymmetrical, and as a result the entrance is not in the center of the
building. The library was originally cross-shaped, but an expansion in 1936
squared off the space between the south and west wings, using closely-matching
sandstone. It was expanded again in 1982 by adding rooms underground on the
slope-facing side; the exposed glassed-in staircase connects to them.
On the other side of the Old Stone Row is Olive Tjaden Hall,
which was originally named Franklin Hall when it was constructed in 1883. It
was built for the Department of Electrical Engineering, and besides the profile
of Benjamin Franklin over its entrance, it is adorned with the names and images
of other scientists in the field of electrical engineering. Its style is rather
transitional between Second Empire and the newer Victorian Gothic that emerged
in the 1870s: while it uses many of the basic design features of Second Empire
(arched window caps, light-colored trim accenting the corners, Mansard roof),
its polychromatic color scheme is very similar to Victorian Gothic buildings
such as Sage Hall. The red stone used in the facade was quite expensive, and
caused the building to run far over budget for its construction, but A.D.
White insisted on using it.
Ironically, given its original name, the building was struck by lightning
in the 1950s, causing a fire that burned the roof off the tower. The tower was
given a “temporary” flat roof until 1998, when Olive Tjaden ‘25
donated enough money to restore the building and replace the roof. The building
had at that point already been renamed in her honor (she was a prominent
architect, and the Architecture Department renamed it in 1981 when it moved into
the building).
Sibley Hall has a bit of an unusual history, as it
was built in three distinct phases over a period of 32 years. The first
building consisted only of the section to the left of the dome, and would have
looked like a near replica of White Hall when it was built in 1870. This
structure was positioned in the center of the north end of the Arts Quad,
which explains why the current building is not centered on the quad and the dome
doesn’t particularly align with anything. Then, in 1894, another building of
the same size and shape was constructed at the northeast corner of the quad,
leaving a gap between it and the original Sibley. In 1902 the domed center
building was built in the gap, joining the two existing buildings to create
the modern Sibley Hall. These buildings were originally used for the Sibley
School of Mechanical Engineering, but are now the home of the College of
Art, Architecture, and Planning.
By the time the second and third components of Sibley were built, the
Second Empire style used for the original building had gone out of fashion.
The rear facades of the buildings (which originally faced various laboratory
outbuildings) show the transition to newer materials and styles, but the front
facades were intentionally chosen to match the original section’s design.
The only exception is the dome on the central building, which comes from the
neoclassical style popular in 1902 and has been derisively called “the
breast of campus” by alumni responding to a survey.
The Johnson Museum sits just outside the Arts Quad on the
edge of the slope. In the 19th century there was a different building on this
site: Morse Hall, a Romanesque Revival building constructed
in 1889 to house the Department of Chemistry. Unfortunately, as sometimes
happens with chemistry departments, it caught fire in 1916 and was almost
completely destroyed. The remains of the first floor were covered with a
temporary roof and used as an art gallery until 1954, when they were torn
down. In the 1970s Cornell decided to build a new art museum on the same site,
and brought in famous architect I. M. Pei to design it; the result was the
current Johnson Museum, which was finished in 1973.
This building is something of a cautionary tale of the effects of
Starchitecture (valuing the name of a famous architect above the quality of
the work he or she produces). Its odd shape and windowless raw concrete
exterior look completely out of place next to the traditional stone buildings
of the Arts Quad, and its position and massing no longer align with Tjaden and
Sibley (the way Morse once did), making it stick out like a sore thumb from
the otherwise orderly design of the quad. Worse, huge swaths of exposed
structural concrete tend to deteriorate rapidly when exposed to precipitation
and a freeze/thaw cycle, making this building “age” quickly in
Ithaca’s climate. However, Cornell ignored all the potential downsides and
approved this design, presumably due to Pei’s star power and name
recognition.
Rand Hall is next to Sibley, just outside the Arts Quad
to the east. It was built in 1911 in the style of a “daylight
factory,” a design that took advantage of (then-new) steel-frame
construction to create light-filled industrial work spaces. The interior is
one large open room, divided only by support beams, and the non-load-bearing
walls have long banks of windows to admit as much natural light as possible.
Similar designs were used for many of Henry Ford’s buildings in Detroit. The
facade is a brick version of neo-classical, arranging the windows into stacked
orders separated by pilasters with distinct capitals, and framing the
third-story windows with arches. Until recently, Rand was the home of the
Architecture Department’s work studios, but these were moved to Milstein upon
its completion, and the building is now mostly unused. Cornell plans to
eventually turn it into a Fine Arts Library, after making extensive
renovations that would include capping the roof with a glass box.
Milstein Hall is the steel-and-glass rectangle that
appears to float in the space between Sibley and Rand. It was built in 2011 as
the new headquarters and centerpiece of the Architecture Department, after a
lengthy and heavily-debated design process. The artistically embellished
postmodern design is indicative of the type of building most Architecture
students want to build, so it is in a sense an appropriate building for this
department. On the other hand, the glowing white spheres embedded in concrete
and lack of a visible ground-level entrance are baffling to most passersby.
Although the Arts Quad is a designated historic district and any new buildings
on it would normally be required to match the historic character of the
existing buildings, Milstein falls just outside this rule’s effect because the
end of Sibley Hall defines the northeast corner of the quad.
Opposite White Hall is Lincoln Hall, which
is currently the home of the Music Department. Built in 1881, it has a fairly
simple Romanesque style that is made much more interesting by the use of
striking red stone (the same variety used for Tjaden Hall). Like Uris Library,
the quad’s other Romanesque building, it avoids a single central entrance in
favor of two off-center entrances framed by Roman arches. The rear facade of
the building used red brick to save money (the red stone was quite expensive),
and an addition built in 1998 also used brick, although in a style sympathetic
to the original. Lincoln Hall is named for President Abraham Lincoln, not
because he donated any money to Cornell, but because he signed the Morrill
Land Grant Act, which established funding for state land-grant
universities.
Goldwin Smith Hall is the home of
several humanities departments at Cornell, and was designed in the
neoclassical style preferred by Andrew White, whose statue sits in front of
it. The northern wing was originally a standalone building that housed the
Dairy Science program; when the rest of Goldwin Smith was built in 1902, the
design incorporated the Dairy Building and matched it with a parallel wing on
the south side. The front of the building is centered on the gap between
Morrill and McGraw where the statue of Ezra Cornell stands, so the statues of
Cornell and White face each other. Since Ezra Cornell was well-known for
disapproving of both the study of the humanities and the excess decoration of
neoclassical architecture, it appears that A.D. White’s statue is protecting
“his” building from Ezra, while Ezra’s statue is guarding
“his” side of the quad.
Olin Library encloses the south end of the Arts Quad,
next to Uris Library. This oversized concrete-and-glass box was built in 1959
to satisfy Cornell’s urgent need for much more library space. At that time,
the Arts Quad had not yet been designated as a historic district, so there
were no objections to the plan to shoehorn such an aggressively modern
building into the venerable core of Cornell’s campus.
However, this eyesore was not always the anchor of the
otherwise-picturesque Arts Quad. In the original design of the quad, Olin’s
place was occupied by Boardman Hall, home of the law school
and the lavishly ornate Law Library. This building was named for the first
dean of the law school, Judge Douglas Boardman, and designed by William Henry
Miller to match Uris Library. It was also Romanesque Revival, composed of
sandstone, and had a similar size and shape to the east-west axis of Uris.
The interior had high vaulted ceilings, carved wood paneling, and several
large fireplaces that were (ironically) forbidden from use due to the fire
hazard. Unfortunately, as Cornell’s library collection expanded in the 1950s
and Uris became overcrowded, the university decided to destroy Boardman Hall
to build a new library rather than build the new building on unused land. By
that time, the law school no longer needed the building (the Law Quad having
recently been completed), and apparently no one in the administration had any
respect for the memory of Judge Boardman or William Henry Miller.
Finally, Stimson Hall flanks Olin Library on the opposite
side of Uris. Originally, Uris Library, Boardman Hall, and Stimson Hall
formed the “president’s row,” three stately buildings designed by
William Henry Miller that led up to the University President’s house on the
hill across East Avenue. This was the last one to be completed, in 1903. It
uses the same sandstone materials as Uris and Boardman, but the style is a
transitional mixture of periods. The rusticated (i.e. made of rough stone
blocks) base emulates the Second Empire buildings of the Old Stone Row, while
the entrance is emphasized with a heavy Romanesque arch, and the upper floors
have smooth colonnades more similar to a Beaux-Arts building. The well-defined
horizontal boundary between the base and the second floor was designed to be
at the same height as the eaves of Boardman Hall, providing visual continuity
as the buildings “stepped up” the slope.
Stimson’s footprint is U-shaped rather than rectangular, and a second
building was planned for the space behind it (roughly where Day Hall is
now), with a corresponding U-shaped footprint that would complete a small
courtyard between the two buildings. Unfortunately, the second building was
never built, and the courtyard space is now a parking lot.
Ho Plaza
The area of Cornell’s campus just south of the Arts Quad is mostly defined
by Ho Plaza, though not all the buildings face it. The pedestrian walkway was
in fact a road until the 1990s, as evidenced by the fact that it lines up so
perfectly with the terminus of College Avenue. This road, Central Avenue, cut
through the center of campus and skirted around Uris Library to meet the road
in front of the Old Stone Row, which is now a dead-end parking lot. It was
closed to traffic and converted into Ho Plaza as part of the university’s
efforts to make central campus more pedestrian-friendly.
Olin Hall was built in 1941 to house the Department of
Chemical Engineering, and ended up being the first phase of the Engineering
School’s move out of Sibley and into the new Engineering Quad. It was funded
by the same Olin family that later funded the construction of Olin Library and
Olin Laboratory, hence the confusing redundancy in names. Its style is
essentially a late 30s Art Deco, but executed almost entirely in brick instead
of the usual white tile or stone. The carved ornamental symbols above each
entrance, a distinctive Art Deco feature, led some alumni to comment that the
building would be “better suited to a Department of Alchemy” when
they saw the finished product. The wing extending along Campus Road was added
later; although the facade generally matches the rest of the buildings, the
more modern windows give it away.
Sage Chapel was one of the first buildings outside the
Arts Quad. Since Cornell was the first American private college with no
official religious affiliation and no mandatory church attendance for
students, critics in the 1870s called Cornell students “the heathens on
the hill.” Henry Sage, one of Cornell’s first trustees, eventually tired
of his school’s reputation as a godless den of sin and funded the construction
of a campus chapel in 1875. This building was designed by Charles Babcock,
Cornell’s first professor of architecture, in his favorite Victorian Gothic
style. It was expanded three times, in 1884, 1903, and 1939, and the first two
expansions were also designed by Babcock. The stained-glass windows, rather
than honoring saints or depicting Biblical stories, instead represent famous
scientists, philosophers, and other scholars. Many of Cornell’s original
trustees, including Henry Sage and Ezra Cornell himself, are buried beneath
the floor of the chapel.
Barnes Hall, built in 1888, was another William Henry
Miller creation. Miller actually created two different designs for this
building; the other was a Victorian Gothic design that would have matched
neighboring Sage Chapel, but the trustees preferred this Romanesque Revival
design (possibly because it matches Uris Library so well). The building was
originally intended to provide space for a Christian student organization, as
part of the trustees’ campaign to contradict the rumor that Cornell was a
“heathen school,” and later became a general-purpose student
union. After Willard Straight Hall was built it was converted to
administrative offices, and it currently houses Career Services, but the piano
recital hall is still used for music performances in the Cornell Concert
Series.
Willard Straight Hall is Cornell’s undergraduate student
center and houses many facilities and services for students, including a
full-size movie theater (Cornell Cinema). It was built in the 1920s, with a
pleasant combination of Collegiate Gothic style and modern steel-frame
construction that allows it to extend a fair distance down the Slope and still
support a vaulted “great hall” with two-story windows. The walls
are local Ithaca llenroc with cream-colored limestone trim. An addition in
1954 filled in a square corner between the south and west wings (this is now
the Okenshields dining hall), but the builders carefully matched the new
facade to the style of the existing building. Note that the front (east)
facade actually has two entrances; the smaller door on the left was originally
the women’s entrance.
The building is named for Willard Straight, class of 1901, but he did not
directly fund its construction. He died in 1918, and left a provision in his
will that some of his fortune be used to make Cornell “a more human
place.” Nothing was done with the money until 1920, when a student named
Leonard Elmhirst came to New York City to solicit donations from wealthy
alumni to fund his club. Elmhirst was the president of the Cosmopolitan Club,
one of the few non-fraternity social clubs at Cornell, and it had gotten
deeply in debt. He met Willard Straight’s widow, Dorothy, and told her a
heartwrenching story about how hard life was for non-frat-associated students
at Cornell, and how clubs like his were the only social activity such students
had available. Apparently he was so convincing that, not only did Dorothy
agree to pay off the club’s debts, she funded the construction of a new
building for the purpose of undergraduate social activities — and
married him shortly afterward.
The Law Quad
At the southwest edge of Cornell’s campus, tucked into the corner between
Ho Plaza and College Avenue, the Law Quad contains a set of buildings that are
used by Cornell’s Law School. Most of these magnificent Collegiate Gothic
buildings were at least partially funded by Myron Taylor, a 19th-century
graduate of Cornell’s Law School who became a wealthy steel industrialist.
Taylor specifically requested a Gothic style for the buildings he donated,
which is why they retain a consistent look despite being built many years
apart.
The anchor of the Law Quad and its front entrance from the road is
Myron Taylor Hall, naturally named for the quad’s primary
donor. It was built in 1932 out of local Ithaca stone, with limestone trim and
slate roofs. The second and third floors of the building are combined into a
magnificent two-story atrium, complete with huge hanging chandeliers, which
became the new law library when it was completed. It is perhaps less
surprising that the Law School was willing to give up their ornate law library
in Boardman Hall (and let it be destroyed) once they were in possession of
this space. In the 1980s the building was expanded to the south with the Jane
Foster Addition, which is the wing with the tower to the right in the above
picture. The addition mostly adhered to the existing style, except for a
reduction in the limestone trim around the windows, and the slight difference
in color of the newer Ithaca llenroc.
On the other corner, facing Myron Taylor Hall, is Annabel Taylor Hall,
named for Myron’s wife. Although it was built in 1954, it
matches the Collegiate Gothic style of the older buildings because of the
stipulations Taylor attached to his donations. This makes it by far the nicest
building Cornell constructed in the 1950s. The south wing contains an
interfaith chapel, complete with stained-glass Gothic windows, which was
constructed in part as a memorial to Annabel Taylor herself.
East Avenue
A series of buildings along East Avenue are not part of any named quad or
region of campus. They were built in different periods of time at the edges of
other parts of campus, and generally faced the road for convenient access.
Starting at the northern end of East Avenue, Baker Labs
is perched at the top of a slope overlooking Lincoln Hall.
It was designed around 1910, but it took so long to find funding for the new
building that it was not constructed until 1918-21, becoming one of Cornell’s
first postwar buildings. The long-sought-for donor was George Baker, who chose
to remain anonymous during construction of the building and only revealed his
identity at the building’s dedication in 1921. Baker Labs uses a neoclassical
style, though slightly more modernized than Goldwin Smith, and uses vertically
aligned sets of rectangular windows to suggest a continuing colonnade on
either side of the entrance. It is one of Cornell’s first buildings to be
constructed with modern materials, such as steel and concrete, with a stone
facade that is decorative rather than load-bearing. (The columns, in fact, are
concrete covered with limestone, rather than solid stone blocks). Baker was
originally a fairly shallow building, but was expanded in 1967 with two
parallel wings extending to the rear; like the midcentury addition to Willard
Straight, the new wings’ facades were carefully designed to continue the
existing building’s style. Unfortunately, Baker Labs did not work very
effectively as a laboratory when it was first opened. The building was plagued
by inadequate ventilation, low ceilings, and a basement that regularly
flooded. Alumni responding to a survey in Cornell Alumni News described Baker
as “a US Post Office conferred by a Republican administration.”
The Physical Sciences building fills in the space between
Baker, Rockefeller, and Clark Hall. Originally there was a courtyard between
the buildings, and Physical Sciences simply enclosed it with a glass box,
constructed in 2010. The original facade of Baker Labs’ south side was left
visible, and the entrance to Baker Labs from Physical Sciences is actually its
original (outdoor) entrance from the courtyard. Physical Sciences is such a
bland building that it doesn’t even have a proper name (the university is
still waiting for a large enough donation to name it), and its only notable
feature is the fact that it blocks the view of Clark Hall’s ugly cement
tower.
Rockefeller Hall is named for John D. Rockefeller, who
donated a large sum of money towards its construction. It was designed by the
same architecture firm that designed Goldwin Smith,
and built at around the same time, in 1903. Its size and shape were designed
to match Goldwin Smith, with its forward-extending north and south wings
aligned with Goldwin Smith’s rear-extending wings, in a mirror image
“reflected” over the dividing line of East Avenue. This symmetry
has now been obfuscated by Klarman Hall filling in the space between Goldwin
Smith’s wings, but it’s still somewhat visible from the air. Unlike Goldwin
Smith, however, Rockefeller was designed in a Colonial Revival style, with a
red-brick facade, light stone highlights, and a hipped shingle roof. Its
interior continues the style with carved-wood staircases and trim.
Unfortunately, upon seeing the finished building John D. Rockefeller thought
it was so ugly he declared he would never donate any more money to Cornell.
(The Alumni News survey somewhat agrees, since the respondents named it
“Public grammar school No. 16”). If Rockefeller thought this
building was unacceptably ugly, one wonders what he would have thought of
Olin, Clark, or Physical Sciences.
The A.D. White House, on the corner of East Ave and Tower
Road, was built for A.D. White in 1874, so that he could live near Cornell’s
campus while serving as its first president. It is an impressive mansion in
High Victorian Gothic style, designed by William Henry Miller and Charles
Babcock. After A.D. White retired he turned the house over to the next
university president, and it became the president’s official residence until
the 1950s. In that decade, increasing student agitation and protests on
campus led then-President Malott to move his residence somewhere further away
and less easily found by protesters. The house was converted to a University
Art Museum, and its carriage house (garage) was converted into the Big Red
Barn, an activities center for graduate students. In 1973 it was again
repurposed as the offices and teaching space of the Society for the Humanities
at Cornell.
On the opposite corner is Uris Hall, which was built in
1972 using a gift from the Uris family, whose donation also named
Uris Library. The design of the building was
specified by the Urises; they had recently visited Pittsburgh and were
impressed with the look of the US Steel Tower, and asked for their new
building to be built in a similar style. The US Steel Tower had a facade of
Cor-Ten steel, which develops a warm gold patina when it reacts with common
air pollutants (such as those found in Pittsburgh). However, there are no air
pollutants in Ithaca, so the Cor-Ten steel framing used for Uris’s facade did
not oxidize as planned. Instead, it has been slowly rusting away for the past
40 years. The rust creates a caustic runoff that gets deposited onto the
windows when it rains, which must be quickly removed before it destroys the
glass. In addition, the large single-pane windows are poor insulators during
the winter, which drives up heating costs. The combination of window-cleaning
and heating costs makes Uris Cornell’s most expensive building to maintain.
It’s also one of Cornell’s ugliest.
Facing the corner of East Avenue and Tower Road, Day Hall
is the central office of Cornell’s administration. It was built in 1947 in a
style called Stripped Classical, a sort of late Art Deco with fewer decorative
flourishes between the windows, and a smooth white facade carved into orderly
low-relief pilasters. Although it looks at a glance to be a simple cement box,
the facade is actually made of limestone, which is why it has not stained and
rusted over time. Originally Day Hall had “sleeping and bathing provisions” in
addition to offices, but these were phased out after a few years. The
building’s square shape hides a central courtyard, which was designed to
provide more natural light to the interior offices.
The Statler Hotel and its connected academic building
Statler Hall occupy the rest of the block from Uris to Campus
Road. This long conglomeration of buildings was constructed in several phases,
beginning in 1948 with what was then called the “Statler Inn.” The
original building was only 2-4 stories high for its entire length, with an
entrance to the inn (from East Avenue) on the north side and an entrance to
Statler Hall on the south side. The first three stories used limestone with a
smooth “stripped classical” facade, similar to contemporaneous Day
Hall but even more minimal, while Statler Hall had a red-brick fourth floor,
possibly chosen to coordinate with Sage Hall.
Prior to 1948, this block of East Avenue was lined with houses, called
Faculty Row, which extended from A.D. White’s house all the way to what is now
Rhodes Hall. Most of them were removed to make way for Statler Hall, and the
rest were demolished in the 1960s when the Engineering Quad was built. Note
that Barton Hall was built in 1917, and thus originally faced the houses;
Statler Hall’s construction had the effect of blocking Barton’s front
entrance.
The Statler buildings have been renovated and expanded several times,
starting in 1987 when the massive tower was added to Statler Hotel and the
entrance was moved to the back of the building. At the same time Statler Hall
was given a new limestone archway over its East Avenue entrance to match the
arches at the hotel’s entrance. In 2004, a new wing was added to the back of
Statler Hall, and in 2009 it was extended again with the auditorium tower
built over the south end. These additions were in a new, modern style, with
glass curtain walls and metal fins, but they used white limestone tiles and a
local bluestone base to provide some continuity with the original design.
Finally, in 2014 the entrance to Statler Hall was remodeled yet again, and the
1987 archway was replaced with an asymmetrical glass-and-steel entrance that
matched the modern design of the 2004 addition.
Directly behind Statler is Barton Hall, which is not really part of any
quad, but used to face East Avenue until Statler blocked it. This enormous
gymnasium was constructed over four years, from 1914-1917, to be the
headquarters and drill hall for the Military Science department. Its castle-like
Norman Gothic style reflects its military purpose, with taller, narrower windows
than the Collegiate Gothic buildings (such as neighboring Old Ives), arrow slits
in the towers, and crenelations along the roofline. Originally called the Drill
Hall, it was renamed in 1940 to honor Colonel Frank Barton, a Cornell graduate
and later Professor of Military Science. Beginning in the 1920s the building was
used for indoor sports in addition to military training, and in the 1970s and 80s
it began to be used as a concert venue as well. Although today it is most familiar
as an athletic facility (and the uncomfortable location of final exams for some
very large classes), Cornell’s ROTC program still has offices here.
Sage Hall, a magnificent High Victorian Gothic building
overlooking Ho Plaza, was the architectural masterpiece of Cornell’s campus
when it was completed in 1875 and is still the most beautiful building Cornell
owns. It was designed by architecture professor Charles Babcock, and features
brightly colored brick accents, soaring towers with spire roofs, and engaged
columns supporting the Gothic arches over paired windows. Originally there was
a central courtyard with an opening to East Avenue, but when the building was
renovated in 1996 the courtyard was covered over and the gap between the south
and east wings was filled in with new construction. This new wing was made of
red marble rather than brick, and used a heavily modernized version of
Babcock’s style.
Although it is now the home of the Johnson School of Management, Sage Hall
was originally built to be Cornell’s first dormitory for women. In a very
progressive stance for the 1860s, Cornell was founded as a coeducational
institution, and the first female student was admitted in 1870. However, at
that time there were no on-campus dormitories, and Cornell had difficulty
retaining female students (the first few all dropped out) because of how
difficult it was for them to commute to campus from downtown Ithaca in the
winter. Henry Sage realized that the school would need to provide on-campus
housing if it wanted female students, so he funded the construction of this
building. It was designed to house up to 150 women, and although it was never
full to capacity, it was a success at significantly increasing female
enrollment at Cornell.
Science Hilltop
The area of campus between East Avenue and the Ag Quad has no real name,
and the buildings are not organized in any particular layout. Since all of the
buildings behind Baker Labs and Rockefeller house science departments and
additional lab space, and this area is on top of the hill that slopes upward
from the Arts Quad, I’ve decided to call it “Science Hilltop.”
Attached to the back of Baker Labs is Olin Laboratory
Tower, which is technically a separate building but can only be
entered through its connection to Baker. This massive, boxy edifice can be
seen from most places around central and north campus. It was built in 1967
when the Chemistry department badly needed more laboratory space, and its
construction was overseen by Bill Miller, a Chemistry department administrator
who valued price and functionality over aesthetics. He directed the architect
to design a cheap, functional box with hardly any windows, for the purpose of
containing as much lab space as possible. As if to emphasize the ill-fated and
unpleasant nature of the building, the tarp covering its structure during
winter construction caught fire, turning the half-finished building into a
grim wall of flames. (Fortunately, there were no fatalities, and construction
resumed once the fire was extinguished). Although its austere design was
reasonably on-trend for the late 1960s, Cornell’s architecture students
objected so much to the building’s cheap architecture that they staged a
protest at its dedication ceremony: when President Perkins stood up at a
podium to begin his dedication speech, they unfurled a large banner reading
“MEDIOCRE” from the rafters behind him. To make an ugly building even uglier,
a pair of cement “horns” were carelessly slapped onto to the roof in the 1990s,
to accommodate some more exhaust towers.
Clark Hall stretches between the back of Baker Labs and
the back of Rockefeller Hall, and provided the third side of a courtyard
between these two buildings before the Physical Science building filled it in.
This modernist concrete fortress was built in 1965 to provide more office
space for the Physics department, and is formed of a tall, mostly-windowless
box sitting on top of a long, low first storey. Although the windows are
arranged in horizontal bands in apparent imitation of the then-current
International Style, the rough finish of the concrete panels between them and
the inconsistent massing of the cube and the base layer are inconsistent with
that style. The strongly emphasized vertical concrete supports between the
windows suggest that it may be an attempt at a Modernist interpretation of
neoclassical design, similar to Helen Newman Hall’s concrete
“columns.” Fortunately, this building is now mostly hidden by
Physical Sciences, and is only visible from the cramped parking lot behind it.
The Space Sciences Building is another hastily-built
office building from the 1960s, this time for the Space Science department.
The design is mostly a black-tinted glass box, supported on either side by
massive, windowless concrete towers with a brick veneer. The vast expanses of
brick broken up only by sheets of mirror-coated black glass is very similar to
the “brick Brutalist” style of Bradfield and the Vet Tower, but
here the glass is broken up by horizontal bands of concrete, so it is not
quite a Brutalist style. The building was originally only four stories tall,
but in 1987 it was extended by another two floors, which is why the glass
looks newer on the top two stories.
Malott Hall, the current home of the Math department, was
built in 1963 to be the home of the Johnson School of Business. At the time,
Kennedy Hall did not yet exist, and Malott was built to align with the last
building on the Ag Quad, which was Roberts-Stone Hall. This served to visually
extend the Ag Quad by another pair of buildings, since Bailey Hall, facing
Malott, aligned with Comstock Hall (which was what the CCC building was called
at the time). Malott is a classic example of early 1960s modernism, with its
highly geometric shape (rectangles within rectangles), large windows
uninterrupted by dividing frames, and soft white globe lights. Although it was
funded largely by a donation from William Carpenter ‘10, the building was
named for outgoing president Deane Malott because Carpenter Hall had just been
named for the same donor.
In 1977, Malott Hall was extended rather clumsily by tacking a new
building onto the back, connecting through a hallway on each floor. The new
wing was not quite aligned horizontally with the floors of the existing
building, so the connecting hallways slope noticeably as you walk from the
“old” Malott to the “new” Malott. The new section is
also a completely different architectural style: a very Soviet-looking late
International Style, with the building reduced entirely to a smooth concrete
rectangle and neat strips of windows extending horizontally across it.
Bailey Hall, across a paved courtyard from Malott, is the
only building in this area not used primarily for math and science. It was
built in 1912-13, and intended to be a new lecture hall for the Agriculture
School; it was named for Liberty Hyde Bailey, the first Dean of Agriculture.
At that time the new Roberts Hall did not exist, so Bailey Hall aligned with
the row of buildings on the north side of the Ag Quad. This building was
designed by Edward Green, class of 1878, in a neoclassical style featuring a
large central dome surrounded by Ionic columns. It encloses the largest indoor
auditorium on campus, and hence is now used for various large lecture classes
(such as Introductory Psychology) as well as hosting concerts and popular
visiting speakers.
The Agriculture Quad
The second major quad of Cornell’s campus, the Ag Quad was constructed in the
early 20th century to provide a new home for the Agriculture School. Although
some of its buildings are now used for more general University purposes, it is
still the location of many offices and classrooms for the College of Agriculture
and Life Sciences (CALS).
The Computing and Communications Center, formerly known as
Comstock Hall, is primarily a Colonial Revival building, though it rather
unusually uses tan-colored bricks rather than red. It was originally
constructed in 1912, and in the 1980s it was extended with a boxy addition to
the rear in a matching sandstone color. This building was named for John Henry
Comstock, class of 1874, a renowned entomologist, and was the home of the
entomology department until the the Bio Quad was developed in the 1980s.
When the department moved to their new building in 1985, Cornell also
“moved” the name Comstock Hall, and this building became officially
nameless. Presumably, Cornell is still waiting for a large enough donation to
endow the building with a new name. In the meantime, it is named for the tech
support offices that currently reside there.
Caldwell Hall, right next to the CCC, is a very similar
Colonial Revival building and was built around the same time, in 1913. Both
buildings were designed by the architecture firm Green & Wicks, which Cornell
retained for most of the initial buildout of the Ag Quad. Originally Caldwell
was the home of the Soil Sciences department, but it has since been converted to
generic office space and is primarily occupied by the Cornell Graduate School.
Across the quad from Caldwell and the CCC is an empty space
currently occupied by some temporary prefab buildings. This is the former site of
Roberts-Stone Hall, a set of three connected buildings
constructed in 1905-06; they were individually named Roberts, Stone, and East
Roberts.
These Colonial Revival buildings were similar in size and shape to Caldwell
and Comstock, and arranged in a U-shape similar to the Plant Sciences
building, with Roberts Hall in the center and Stone and East Roberts flanking
it at right angles. East Roberts became the new Dairy Building, since Goldwin
Smith Hall had just absorbed the old Dairy Building on the Arts Quad. Until
their destruction, these buildings were an integral part of the original
design of the Ag Quad, completing the two parallel lines of buildings that
extended from Warren and Plant Sciences down to Bailey and Malott.
Unfortunately, nothing remains of this key element of Cornell’s
architectural history. In 1973, Roberts-Stone was becoming old and decrepit
after years of deferred maintenance, and Cornell commissioned a study by the
architecture firm of Franzen and Associates to determine the cost of renovating
all five Colonial Revival buildings on the Ag Quad. The architects concluded
that it would cost $14 million to fix the buildings, more than the cost of
replacing them with new buildings of similar size. In part, this expense was
due to the fact that the state fire code in 1973 required all office buildings
of this size to have two exit stairwells, one at either end of the building,
but all of the Colonial Revival buildings had been designed with a single
central staircase; changing the buildings to comply with the fire code would
require a complete gut renovation and internal redesign. As a result, Cornell
decided to demolish and replace all five buildings, starting with Roberts-Stone,
since these were owned entirely by Cornell (whereas Caldwell and Comstock were
partially owned by the state).
By 1978, Cornell had a concrete plan to replace Roberts-Stone with a new
building, but the total cost was estimated at over $18 million. Despite the
fact that renovating the existing buildings would now be less expensive,
Cornell decided to proceed with the demolition plan anyway. Students objected
to this decision, and along with Historic Ithaca (a historical preservation
society), lobbied Cornell to preserve and renovate the original buildings.
These groups succeeded in getting all five original Ag Quad buildings listed
on the U.S. National Register of Historic Places in 1984.
In the end, neither the high cost of a new building nor the public
pressure from historical preservation activists ended up changing Cornell’s
mind. In 1988 the university proceeded with its original plan and demolished
Roberts-Stone, despite a recently-enacted Ithaca ordinance requiring city
approval before any landmarked historical structure could be demolished.
Meanwhile, Caldwell and Comstock were renovated by the State of New York,
which co-owned them, and successfully brought up to modern safety standards.
Kennedy-Roberts Hall is the new building Cornell built
in 1989 to replace Roberts-Stone. The original plan was for a single building
of 10 stories, but during the design phase Ithaca enacted a height-limit
ordinance that would have prohibited a building that tall (interestingly,
the ordinance was created in response to the danger posed to low-flying
planes by another Cornell building, Bradfield Tower). Instead, the architects
separated the building into two 5-story halves, connected by a covered
breezeway. These plain beige boxes are typical of modern office buildings of
the 1980s. Kennedy Hall was named, not for the political family, but for
Provost W. Keith Kennedy, who had recently retired in 1984 and had previously
been the Dean of CALS.
Warren Hall, which completes the line of buildings on the
north side of the Ag Quad, is about as long as Comstock and Caldwell Halls
combined. It was built in 1933, and intended to be in the Beaux-Arts style
popular in the early 20th century. Budget cuts due to the ongoing Great
Depression, however, resulted in most of the Beaux-Arts ornamentation being
eliminated, with the traditional second-story colonnade reduced to a single
pair of columns over the entrance. On the other hand, the rusticated base,
decorative cornice over the (implied) top of the colonnade, and classical
pediment on the entrance were all retained. The building was originally called
the Agricultural Economics Building, but was renamed Warren Hall in 1939 in
honor of George Warren, a prominent agricultural economics professor and
economic advisor to President Franklin Roosevelt. In 2015 it was extensively
renovated, which is why the facade is so clean and white.
The Plant Sciences building is an almost exact mirror image of Warren Hall,
built on the opposite side of the Ag Quad in 1930. It too was intended to be
designed in the Beaux-Arts style, but was rather stripped-down in implementation
due to the Great Depression. As a result of the steep slope on the south side of
the Ag Quad, the Plant Sciences building is an entire story taller on the rear
side, leading to an interesting extension of the rusticated base that makes it
just as tall as the two-story colonnade of the “main floors.” Appropriately
enough for a building devoted to the study of plants, this is one of Cornell’s
only buildings that remains covered in ivy.
The Ag Quad is anchored on the east end by Mann Library,
constructed in 1953 as the new consolidated home of the College of Agriculture
and College of Home Economics’ library collections. It remains the main
library for CALS, although all college libraries are now managed by the
central University Library system. Despite its 1950s construction date, this
building is an excellent example of Art Deco design, with a smooth white
facade carved into pilasters and adorned with several decorative symbols in
low relief. The windows, vertically aligned between the pilasters, are divided
neatly into panes and separated by iron panels embossed with further geometric
patterns. Even the interior of the library, although modernized, retains many
Art Deco flourishes, including period-appropriate brass fixtures and lamps,
geometric patterns inlaid on the windows and tile floors, and embellished
futurist fonts on all the signs. Note that the rusticated base of Mann’s
facade perfectly matches the bases of Warren and Plant Sciences on either
side, and in fact these buildings are now seamlessly connected by small
extensions that were later added at the corners.
Right behind the Ag Quad, attached to the back corner of Plant Sciences, is
Bradfield Hall. This enormous, windowless tower was built in 1968, and it
remains the tallest building on campus; it is so tall that had to be outfitted
with red warning lights for airplanes, and the city of Ithaca passed new zoning
laws after it was constructed to prevent any more buildings of this size
from being built without their approval. Bradfield’s design is essentially
Brutalism: a massive, monumental structure, overpowering in size and scale, with
no windows or human-scale elements to interrupt the solid mass of the building.
However, in a curious departure from classic Brutalist buildings, its exterior
surface is finished brick instead of raw concrete (normally a key feature of
Brutalism – the name Brutalism even derives from “Béton brut,” French for “raw
concrete”).
Bradfield was built to be the home of agronomy, hydrology, and soil sciences,
and hence contains many labs for experiments that need to be strictly
climate-controlled. This was probably a contributing factor in the decision to
design the building without windows, as it is much easier to achieve exact
climate control in a windowless room. Only the meteorology department, housed
on the top floor, has any view of the outside world. As useful as the lab space
is, however, Bradfield’s stark, inhuman design and overwhelming mass make it
rather unpleasant to be around. To paraphrase a famous saying about the Tour
Montparnasse in Paris, the best view of Cornell’s campus is from the top of
Bradfield Tower, because it is the only point from which you can’t see Bradfield
Tower.
