City and Campus Diverge: Introducing the Collegiate Gothic
Educational and religious architecture in South Bend from 1900 to the 1930s reflected trends that developed in commercial and residential architecture at the same time. Neoclassical, Gothic Revival, and Georgian Revival are all evident in almost equal measure, with much institutional architecture and landscape design being influenced by the City Beautiful movement. The Neoclassical style had a strong presence after the turn of the century, both downtown and at Notre Dame and Saint Mary’s. After World War I and the construction of the Lemonnier Library, however, both schools turned to the increasingly popular Collegiate Gothic style for classroom and dormitory buildings alike. At Notre Dame this included Alumni and Dillon Halls, Rockne Memorial Hall, the Engineering Building, and the famous South Dining Hall. At Saint Mary’s College this is especially evident in its largest classroom, office, and dormitory building, Le Mans Hall.
Historian Michael J. Lewis has described educational architecture in the Gothic style as “the highest note” of the Gothic Revival, which had been in continuous use since the 1830s. It first developed in England with the Oxford Movement, which promoted a revitalization of the Catholic Church in England after the Roman Catholic Relief Act of 1829, which permitted members of the Catholic Church to serve in the British Parliament. Politically speaking, it undermined the primacy of the Anglican church, giving Catholicism a legal foundation in England and thus cultural legitimacy. A. W. N. Pugin, codesigner of the Houses of Parliament, was the most visible proponent of the revival of the Gothic style.
While the Collegiate Gothic emerged first in England, it quickly moved to America with A. J. Davis’s design for New York University in 1833. After the Civil War, Gothic Revival design surged at schools including Yale, the University of Pennsylvania, Princeton, and Duke. The firm of Walter Cope and John Stewardson, for instance, beginning in the 1880s, developed a form of the Collegiate Gothic mixed with Jacobean and Elizabethan motifs, based on Oxford and Cambridge precedents, for classroom buildings and dormitories at the University of Pennsylvania and Bryn Mawr. At Notre Dame, Francis Kervick and Vincent Fagan developed a similar formula.
The use of the Gothic style for college buildings was considered by some architects as antithetical to the Beaux-Arts spirit of most campus plans at the time. Others believed it was appropriate to place Gothic Revival buildings within the context of formal, axial settings, even if their plans were irregular or at odd angles. Part of the appeal of the Collegiate Gothic style was its ability to organize buildings into smaller educational units, creating quads, houses, or colleges for communities of liberal learning where students and teachers could have close personal contact. The quadrangle of the English medieval college became the most appropriate model for architects working in a collegiate context.
The Kervick and Fagan Master Plan
The University of Notre Dame experienced spectacular growth from 1919 to 1930, with its student body and faculty nearly tripling in size. At the same time the university initiated a transformation in its architectural character, a change that would have a profound influence on the campus for years to come. This change took place under the leadership of architecture professors Kervick and Fagan. Under their visionary leadership, a modern version of the Collegiate Gothic style came to dominate Notre Dame’s campus architecture. In all, some fifteen buildings were constructed during this period, including dormitories, the South Dining Hall, the Law School, and the Engineering College, all designed in the Collegiate Gothic style.
Fagan had received his degree in architecture from Notre Dame in 1920 and was employed for a brief time in Boston before being appointed to the university’s architecture faculty. He later carried on an independent practice in South Bend and designed the All Saints Church in the industrial city of Hammond, Indiana, and St. Matthew’s School in South Bend.
University president Father John W. Cavanaugh commissioned Kervick and Fagan to produce a campus master plan to show the locations for the construction of new buildings and the appropriate style for their design. Historian Thomas Schlereth asserted that this plan, published in 1920, “influenced the physical development of Notre Dame for the next thirty-five years.” Placing special emphasis on new dormitories, the designers proposed an addition to double the size of Sorin Hall, the construction of the Howard-Lyons-Morrissey dormitory complex, and three new buildings along the campus’s southern edge plus several more to the east, behind Washington, LaFortune, and Hoynes Halls.
As Schlereth pointed out, this master plan proposed the creation of two new east–west axes, the first connecting Lemonnier Library with a new art building, to be constructed at the campus’s far eastern edge, and the second on the campus’s southern edge, which Kervick and Fagan identified as University Road. This plan was followed in spirit, if not in fact, throughout the 1920s, both for fundraising purposes and as a guide for campus expansion. Its importance lay in the fact that it was the university’s first comprehensive plan, done in the spirit of the City Beautiful movement, its intention being to outline the nature of its future growth.
The development of the master plan coincided with a serious housing shortage on campus. The university had long put a high priority on the residential life of its students, preferring campus dormitories over rooms and apartments in the city. The Reverend Matthew Walsh, president of the university from 1922 to 1928, was concerned about an increasing number of students who lived off campus, six hundred of them by 1921. He believed off-campus residency weakened school spirit, added to absenteeism and disciplinary problems, and reduced the effectiveness of religious training. Fraternities were not allowed on campus. Thus, there was a great need to build more dormitories. Schlereth referred to them as miniature parishes, each with its own chapel, several resident pastors, study rooms, lounges, and intramural athletic teams. Over time, each developed its own cultural and social traditions. They were essentially cloisters providing a quiet atmosphere for study.
The need for more housing was first alleviated in 1917, when St. Joseph’s Hall (now Badin Hall), which had housed an industrial school since the 1890s, was enlarged by the addition of two wings and converted to a student dormitory with a cafeteria in the lower level. Located southeast of Lemonnier Library, it formed the southern edge of a quadlike space fronting the library and extending eastward to Sorin Hall and the main quadrangle.
In 1923, following the master plan, Father Walsh commissioned three new dormitories: Howard, Morrissey, and Lyons Halls. They were located directly south of Lemonnier Library and west of Badin Hall. Kervick and Fagan took special care to spatially link each building to the others and to the landscape by providing a passage through the middle of Howard Hall and an even more magnificent arched passage in a diagonal wing that connected Lyons and Morrissey Halls, which were sited along a ridge overlooking St. Mary’s Lake. This arched passage framed a panoramic view of the lake, providing a visual and physical connection between the lake and the complex’s main outdoor space. The plans of the three buildings did not adhere precisely to the original plan, but in its actual execution, the complex framed a more coherent space facing south toward University Road than that suggested in the master plan.
These dormitories, designed by Kervick and Fagan, were the first truly Collegiate Gothic–style buildings to be constructed on the campus. Built of yellow brick and limestone masonry, they featured prominent gabled roofs with dormer windows, Gothic detailing around the main doors, and delightful Gothic tracery that references saints, famous Notre Dame professors, and themes of sports and changing seasons.
While the transformation of campus architecture to the Collegiate Gothic style reflected a national trend in college building design, it also followed an important precedent in Notre Dame’s history set by the Gothic-style Sacred Heart Basilica. Here the style of the religious realm was projected onto the academic realm. The distinction between these new dormitories and the recently built Lemonnier Library could not have been more evident. The change of attitude toward architectural style on the part of the university administration since the completion of the library was clear, and Kervick and Fagan gave it visible expression.
Building the South Quad
By the time the Howard-Lyons-Morrissey complex had been completed, Kervick and Fagan’s master plan was already outdated, as they had not envisioned the extent to which the campus would rapidly expand farther to the south, beyond University Road. This area was to become the South Quad, an entirely new academic quadrangle over twice the size of the Latin Quad and its buildings from the time of Sorin and Edbrooke.
The first building to be constructed along the south side of the new quad, and thus the first to define its spatial limits, was the South Dining Hall. The most inspired Collegiate Gothic building on the campus, it was designed in 1924 by Ralph Adams Cram in association with Kervick and Fagan. Cram was a leading figure in the Gothic Revival movement in the United States and architect of St. John the Divine Cathedral in New York. A devout Christian, he lectured widely across the country on the virtue of English Gothic as the most appropriate style for ecclesiastical and campus architecture. Inspired by Ruskin, he extolled the beauty and the uplifting qualities of the Gothic Style as a fitting expression of a Christian society.
Cram’s reading of the works of Pugin and Ruskin introduced him to the possibilities of the Gothic style as a way to move beyond both Richardsonian Romanesque and Neoclassicism. He made study tours of England early in his career, in 1885 and 1897, and studied and photographed English medieval churches, including the chapel at Magdalen College, Oxford. He compiled and published this research in the book entitled English Country Churches (1898). Cram’s first major commission came in 1903 when his firm, Cram, Goodhue and Ferguson, won a competition for the rebuilding of the U.S. Military Academy at West Point. In the words of Paul Venable Turner, it was an “uncompromisingly Gothic and picturesque design” that evoked romantic images of medieval fortresses or monastic strongholds. Shortly after, the firm was commissioned to design the crossing and nave of St. John the Divine. The choir had already been constructed in the Romanesque style by the firm of Heins and La Farge. Cram continued the building’s construction but changed its design to the English Gothic style, which he preferred.
In the 1910s and the 1920s Cram served as the supervising architect of several colleges and universities, including Princeton, Bryn Mawr, Mount Holyoke, and Wellesley, where he further promoted the Gothic Revival as the style for collegiate architecture. He also published several books on architecture, sociology, and religion, including The Ruined Abbeys of Great Britain, The Sins of the Fathers, and The Gothic Quest.
Notre Dame honored Cram with an honorary doctorate degree in 1924, and soon after it commissioned him to design the South Dining Hall. A distinctive structure, the design was based on a medieval guildhall, with two large refectories connected in the middle by a two-story building containing the kitchens, a cafeteria, and a faculty dining hall. Its plan is symmetrical, with the central wing featuring a pair of gabled pavilions framing three lancet-arched doorways. A tapered, domed cupola rises from the center of the roof. The large dining halls on either side are marked by tall lancet windows set high in the walls, with projecting bays marking the main axes. The building is especially distinctive in the context of the campus for its vermilion-colored brick exterior and for its interior dark-oak paneling, terrazzo floors, and beamed ceilings. The original cafeteria space was adorned with wall frescoes by the Hungarian artist Augustin Pall.
The South Quad was further defined by the construction in 1931 of a pair of dormitories, Dillon and Alumni Halls, which are among the university’s most distinguished works of residential architecture. Located immediately east of the South Dining Hall, they extended the Quad’s southern border. Alumni Hall fronts on a circle that terminates the main axis leading from Notre Dame Avenue to the Main Building. Both buildings are designed in a modified U-shaped plan that encloses a common courtyard between them, resembling a medieval cloister.
The architect of Dillon and Alumni Halls was the Boston firm of Maginnis and Walsh, known nationally for their design of Catholic churches and institutional buildings. Timothy F. Walsh was born in Cambridge, Massachusetts, in 1868 and apprenticed in the office of Peabody and Stearns in the 1890s. He spent two years studying and traveling in France before beginning his own practice with Charles Maginnis in 1896. Charles Donagh Maginnis was born in Londonderry, Ireland, in 1867 and was educated at Cusack’s Academy in Dublin. He came to Boston as a young man and in 1885 entered the office of city architect Edmund M. Wheelwright. He was noted for his pen-and-ink drawings and published the highly regarded book Pen Drawing (1921). He received numerous honors over the course of his career, including the Laetare Medal from Notre Dame and honorary degrees from Boston College, Holy Cross College, Tufts University, and Harvard University. He served two terms as president of the American Institute of Architects in 1937 and 1938, and he received the institute’s Gold Medal in 1947. From the 1890s to the 1930s, Maginnis and Walsh designed more than 115 ecclesiastical commissions, including buildings for Boston College, the National Shrine of the Immaculate Conception in Washington, DC, Holy Cross College in Worcester, Massachusetts, the Cathedral of Mary our Queen in Baltimore, and Maryknoll Seminary and Convent in Los Gatos, California.
The Gothic detailing on Dillon and Alumni Halls is finely carved with some of the most intriguing sculpted figures of any campus building. Alumni Hall features an elaborately detailed, deeply shadowed arched entrance facing onto the circle. Maginnis and Walsh would go on to design Cavanaugh, Zahm, and Haggar Halls in 1937 to 1938, Breen-Phillips Hall in 1939, and Farley Hall in 1947, all facing onto the North Quad.
Besides designing many of the university’s finest dormitories, Maginnis and Walsh also designed the Law School. Built in 1930, it faces the circle opposite Alumni Hall, the two buildings forming a gateway from Notre Dame Avenue. Consistent with the Collegiate Gothic style of other buildings from this period, it features an entrance tower with a lancet-arched doorway. A long range of lancet-arched windows on the upper stories indicate the location of the impressive reading room of the Law Library. An addition to the library would be constructed in 1972 and a second, extensive addition to the south would be added in 2005.
Continuing the South Quad’s eastern extension, the university commissioned Kervick and Fagan in 1933 to design the Cushing Hall of Engineering to replace the Engineering Hall of 1905, which was damaged in a fire caused by a lightning strike. Designed for a site east of the Law School, it was for many decades the largest classroom building on the campus.
Also in 1933, the university commissioned the Chicago firm Graham, Anderson, Probst and White to design a building for the College of Commerce. The college had been established in 1921, and money for the new building was donated by Edward Nash Hurley, who was chairman of the U.S. Shipping Board during World War I and who had received the university’s Laetare Medal in 1926. He encouraged the university to hire the firm, which he knew from his own projects in Chicago.
The building is a large and centrally located structure sited in order to define one corner of the campus’s main quad and enhance its overall crossaxial plan. It has two stories and an E-shaped plan. The grand two-story entrance hall is decorated with wall murals depicting international shipping routes and a giant globe at its center, reflecting Hurley’s desire that the college have an international perspective.
Both the College of Commerce and the Law School are notable for the fact that they represent a high point on the campus for the Collegiate Gothic style. When considered collectively, Kervick and Fagan, Maginnis and Walsh, and Graham, Anderson, Probst and White together made a simplified or modernist-inspired Gothicism a predominant architectural style on the Notre Dame campus in the 1920s and 1930s. The stylistic turn toward Gothicism that these architects advanced was a widespread trend at college and university campuses across the country.
The western end of the South Quad was finished off with the construction from 1937 to 1938 of the Rockne Memorial Hall, named after the university’s famed football coach Knute Rockne. Designed by J. Maurice Carroll and C. E. Dean of Kansas City, Missouri, it features a central entrance portico flanked on either side by loggias. It houses a gymnasium, swimming pool, and fitness facilities.
Carroll was a 1919 graduate of Notre Dame’s School of Architecture. His first project after graduation was the design of Le Mans Hall on the Saint Mary’s campus. He later gained prominence for the design of two churches in his hometown of Kansas City, Missouri: St. Vincent’s Church in 1922 and St. Peter’s Church in 1947, both of which gained him medals from the American Institute of Architects. He formed the partnership Carroll and Dean at the time of the construction of Rockne gymnasium. In the 1960s he would serve as the vice president of the Notre Dame National Alumni Board.
The development of the South Quad was consistent with the Beaux-Arts system of architectural planning, another manifestation of the influence of the Columbian Exposition and the City Beautiful movement. As Turner has written, the Beaux-Arts system was based on principles of monumental organization that facilitated orderly planning on a grand scale and was capable of including many disparate buildings within a unified overall pattern. It was natural, in Turner’s words, “that many of the new American universities, large both in size and ambition and thinking of themselves as cities of learning, should turn to the newly fashionable Beaux-Arts system to create their physical form and self-image.” Yet at the same time, the South Quad, with its open expanses and tree-lined walkways, channeled the pastoral ideal of peaceful seclusion that had guided prior generations of campus architects at Notre Dame. Kervick wrote of the South Quad in 1938,
Several of the buildings erected since 1930 have been placed on a new campus, to the south of the old one. The newest development of the campus, is sometimes called a plaza, but is in effect a spacious mall, extending east and west. The place has been planted with elm trees, and it is hoped that as these develop, this part of the campus will be characterized by that sequestered peace one feels on the common of an early American village—rather than by the confusion of a sun-baked market-place which the term “plaza” connotes.
The South Quad thus possessed a degree of formality and grandeur that diverged from the picturesque informality of the Latin Quad while maintaining its pastoral, almost bucolic, ideal.
The 1920s were one of the most important decades for the character of Notre Dame’s campus planning and architecture. The development of the Howard-Lyons-Morrissey complex and the South Quad created an entirely new campus center distinct from the Latin Quad, which remained the campus’s historical sacred area. The transformations from Victorian Gothic to Classical Revival and then to Collegiate Gothic marked profound changes to the campus’s image.
Saint Mary’s College
The principal features of the Saint Mary’s campus were well established by the turn of the century with the construction of Holy Cross Hall. Saint Mary’s Avenue, with the fieldstone gateway at its entrance and its circular drive in front of Holy Cross Hall, provided a picturesque point of arrival to the campus.
The largest building to be constructed at Saint Mary’s was Le Mans Hall, begun in 1924 and completed in 1926. Designed in the Collegiate Gothic style, it was adapted from Carroll’s thesis from his fifth year as an architecture student at Notre Dame.
Called at the time of its construction “New College,” the building housed the upper classes and provided classrooms and office space for the administration. Its cost was nearly $ 1.5 million, and when the fundraising efforts fell short, the Holy Cross sisters mortgaged two-thirds of the cost. While the hall was still under construction, the college received approval for an additional wing, housing classrooms and a dining hall, to ensure that it would meet the students’ needs for several decades to come. A large, imposing structure, it is U-shaped in plan and features a crenellated tower and prominent entrance recessed under a series of arches as well as Tudor and pointed arches, buttresslike pilasters, and Bedford stone trim.
City and Campus
It is interesting that, as of 1930, in a span of some fifteen years between World War I and the onset of the Great Depression, Notre Dame and Saint Mary’s achieved an overall unity in the composition of their architecture as they embraced the Collegiate Gothic as the official campus style. South Bend’s architecture, however, assumed a different trajectory in this same era. The architects who came of age at the turn of the century with the Prairie School turned to all manner of styles for commercial and residential buildings. The city of South Bend developed a disparate urban image with great variety of Period Revival styles, continuing the Neoclassical while expanding its architectural repertoire in multiple directions. Ironically, as South Bend’s residential fringe edged closer to Notre Dame’s campus in the 1920s and 1930s, the architectures of city and campus grew further apart.
EDITORIAL NOTE: This article is excerpted from City and Campus: An Architectural History of South Bend, Notre Dame, and Saint Mary’s (University of Notre Dame Press, 2024). It is part of an ongoing collaboration with the University of Notre Dame Press. You can read other excerpts from this collaboration here. All rights reserved.
