Making it modern
By Hannah Benoit
Wheaton College is known for its quintessential brick-and-ivy campus, but beyond the classic Georgian quad that surrounds the Dimple, Wheaton's built environment tells a different story.
That narrative comes to life in Making It Modern: Wheaton College and the International Style, a student-curated exhibition and companion book that trace the development of the Wheaton campus from its founding in 1834 to the present.
At the heart of the story is Wheaton's shift from traditional Georgian Revival architecture to the iconoclastic principles of 20th-century Modernism-and the spirited personalities behind that change. Along the way, Wheaton became the first institution in the country to erect a Modernist building on a traditional campus.
The exhibition was curated by the students in the new art history course "Exhibition Design," taught by Leah Niederstadt, assistant professor of museum studies and curator of Wheaton's Permanent Collection. Working with Niederstadt and Zephorene L. Stickney, college archivist and special collections curator, the students selected and arranged more than 200 objects for the show, most of them drawn from the Marion B. Gebbie Archives and Special Collections in the college library.
On view in the Beard and Weil Galleries earlier this spring, the exhibition featured architectural plans and designs, campus models, sketches, maps, portraits, photographs (including striking black-and-white images by Walker Evans), and original finials from Cole Memorial Chapel and Mary Lyon Hall. (A mate of the Mary Lyon finial still sits atop the building's northeast corner.) The show also included nine original folding chairs from Plimpton Hall, once part of the Student Alumnae Building. Remarkably, the circa 1940 chairs are still in use in the college library.
The show was part of a yearlong collaboration focusing on Wheaton's architectural history that was spearheaded by Niederstadt, Stickney and R. Tripp Evans, associate professor of art history. In fall 2008, Evans taught the seminar "Modernism at Wheaton," which resulted in a 64-page catalog containing more than 50 archival images and five essays, four by his students and one by Stickney.
In the spring, Niederstadt's students used the 5,000-word essays as their starting point as they selected objects and wrote labels and other text for the exhibition. They also created audio podcasts on subjects such as the Walker Evans photographs, women leaders who shaped the campus, and Wheaton traditions and legends. Although the gallery show ended on April 18, an online version is now available at www.wheatoncollege.edu/MakingItModern.
Evans, who edited the catalog, wrote in its introduction that the story of Wheaton's development "not only tells us a great deal about the institution's evolving character, but ... also serves as a valuable case study of the changes that happened in twentieth-century campus design more generally."
In other words, Wheaton's campus represents a microcosm of the changes that took place in the last century on campuses throughout the country.
The idea for Making It Modern germinated during the first meeting of Wheaton's Preservation and Stewardship Team (PaST), a campus group focused on the preservation of Wheaton's historically significant traditions and material assets. At that meeting in spring 2008, Evans mentioned his long-held interest in teaching a course on Wheaton's 1938 arts center design competition, which had drawn entries from some of the leading lights of Modernist architecture.
Niederstadt expanded on the idea, suggesting that her "Exhibition Design" students could mount an exhibition on the history of Wheaton's campus. It was an ideal match.
The two seminars operated independently, but with considerable interaction. Niederstadt sat in on a couple of Evans's classes and helped copy-edit the catalog, and Evans gave a lecture on Modernism to her class. Stickney was the bridge between the two.
"Zeph was absolutely the essential component," says Evans. "She knows the archives, the collections, and all the stories backward and forward." Stickney assisted both classes with their archival research and co-led many of Niederstadt's class sessions.
The student link between the two classes was Ross Culliton '09, a studio art major and member of the exhibition design class. Through an independent study advised by Professor of Art Claudia R. Fieo, Culliton designed the exhibition catalog and poster, using Modernist-inspired elements throughout. He also created a striking graphic timeline of the college's architectural history that was featured in the exhibition and catalog.
As the students learned about Wheaton's architecture, they discovered that each new phase of development represented a progressive step forward.
"The title [Making It Modern] has an intentionally dual meaning," Evans writes in the catalog's introduction. "The visionaries behind Wheaton's built environment ... were all, in one way or another, interested in making Wheaton modern.... In another sense, the college's leaders were also invested in 'making it' as an institution-demonstrating, through its buildings, that the school had truly arrived."
The history of Wheaton's campus is indeed a story of visionaries, and as the students learned, the college's quest to keep up with the times didn't begin in the 20th century.
"Wheaton, even in its early years, was extremely forward-thinking, both in its educational curriculum and its campus planning," says Amelia Chaney '10, who wrote the essay "A Progressive Vision: Early Modernism on the Wheaton Campus."
"The creation of the gymnasium in 1844 attests to this progressive mind-set, illustrating the ways in which the school's curriculum has shaped its built environment," Chaney says. "It reflected a progressive attitude toward physical education, since it not only affirmed the founders' faith in the health benefits of exercise, but also evidenced a firm belief in women's physical abilities."
Wheaton's gymnasium is believed to be the first such building constructed on an American campus for women or men. (The clapboard Greek Revival structure was later moved to the Trinitarian Congregational Church, where it still stands today.)
Prominent in Wheaton lore is the story of how President Samuel Valentine Cole and architect Ralph Adams Cram strolled through the seminary grounds in 1897 and conceived the idea for a "Court of Honor," a stately and symmetrical quad with a grand building anchoring either end. The two men returned to Cole's office, where Cram sketched out a quick plan.
The sketch became the basis for Cram's subsequent design of upper campus, the first of several dozen campus plans he and his firm went on to complete. The humble pencil sketch, still in Wheaton's collection, was featured in the exhibition and catalog.
Often, the evolution of the campus reflected that of the college itself. For instance, the Georgian Revival buildings Cram designed for upper campus grew from the college's aspirations to transform itself from a female seminary to a full-fledged women's college-in other words, to come of age.
The college leaders of that era wanted to show that Wheaton was "just as good" as any men's college, Evans says-and that its buildings were just as stately.
"The library, built in 1923, is a perfect example of that. Wheaton looked at Harvard and said, 'You've got that library; we're just like you. We're going to build our library that looks like a smaller version of Widener.'"
In fact, the highly traditional buildings around the Dimple had modern impulses behind them. As Chaney explains, "Cram's campus plan was clearly influenced by contemporary architectural designs, including the Court of Honor at the [1893] World's Columbian Exposition in Chicago. By adapting such monumental architectural plans, Cram was able to maintain a sense of intimacy, while also generating a more imposing style in keeping with the ambitious visions for Wheaton's future."
That future came roaring in just a few decades later. Esther Isabel Seaver, a young professor of art, "swept onto campus in 1930 with energy, unconventional ideas, and an almost evangelical devotion to Modernism," Stickney writes in her contribution to the catalog.
Seaver took over the Art Department and pushed relentlessly for a shift to Modernism in campus architecture. That's Modernism with a capital M, Evans stresses.
"Modernism was a post-World War I phenomenon, when architects like Le Corbusier and Mies van der Rohe, in countries that were ravaged by the war, responded in a way that was intended to reinvent the world," he says. "They did that by institutionalizing a kind of cultural amnesia, as if to say, 'We reject everything that came before, and we're going to start over.'"
The approach these European architects adopted-marked by stark façades and a lack of ornamentation-came to be called the International Style, though its practitioners rejected the very notion of "style."
In 1937, Evans says, several of these "great gods of Modernism," members of the Bauhaus, fled Nazi Germany for the United States, where their ideas were embraced by members of the academy-including Esther Seaver.
Seaver detested Classical Revivalism and boldly urged Wheaton to adopt the cutting-edge architecture of Modernism."She was saying, 'We want to get on that bus. We want to be part of what's happening and what's exciting about our own time,'" Evans explains.
In 1938, Seaver convinced the college to sponsor a design competition for a new fine arts center. Co-sponsored by the Museum of Modern Art and Architectural Forum, the contest attracted entries from such Modernist luminaries as Eero Saarinen, Walter Gropius and Richard Neutra.
It also attracted plenty of attention. Dozens of newspapers and magazines covered the competition, and MoMA mounted an exhibition of the contest designs that later traveled around the country.
For her essay on the 1938 competition, Jillian Pfifferling '11 conducted research in the Wheaton archives and at MoMA. She was struck by the contrast between archival research and traditional research. Working with source materials such as letters, meeting minutes and other primary documents meant she had to read between the lines and use judgment.
"You can't just read the information," she says. "You have to say, 'When and why was it written? What was the tone of the letter? What was the relationship between the two people?' You have to deconstruct, and you have to understand the context."
The project was also an exercise in organization. Pfifferling's research notebook grew so fat she took to calling it "The Beast."
Owing to a lack of funding, the winning design by the partnership of Hornbostel and Bennett never moved past the miniature-model stage. But two years later, the college hired the duo to design the Student Alumnae Building (later incorporated into the Balfour-Hood student center).
SAB-the first Modernist building on a traditional college campus-was the very "model of International Style architecture," writes Pfifferling in her essay. "Its austere geometry, pipe-railing balconies, vertical ribbon windows, as well as its utter rejection of symmetry and applied ornament all set it distinctly apart from the rest of the campus."
The building was seen as groundbreaking design, widely admired within the college community and in architectural circles. SAB became a hub of campus life, with a modern game room, elegant parlors, a ballroom and even a bowling alley. Soon to follow were the construction of the library's Modernist Jackson Wing and an addition to the back of Science Hall (Knapton), and "by the 1940s, Wheaton's very identity had become inextricably linked with Modernism," Pfifferling writes.
By mid-century, Modernism had become the predominant style on college campuses. At Wheaton, the decade between 1954 and 1964 saw the construction of such Modernist exemplars as the lower campus dorms, Watson Fine Arts Center and Meneely Hall (altered in 2002 by the construction of Mars Arts and Humanities).
The transparent grid of Meneely's main façade, among other elements, made it "the purest example of the International Style to be built on Wheaton's campus," writes Carrie Peabody '10 in her essay.
The catalog was published just in time for the opening of the Making It Modern exhibition on March 18. Niederstadt, Stickney, and the 14 exhibition design students had had just seven weeks to pull the show together. With that many curators, the project presented an organizational challenge, so Niederstadt divided the students into three teams and asked each to present an exhibition design plan to the class.
"It was like the 1938 arts center competition," Niederstadt says wryly.
The winning design for the exhibition was selected by a jury consisting of the students and Evans, Stickney and Ann Murray, professor of art history and director of the Beard and Weil Galleries. The plan featured an inventive layout, with the displays in the Weil Gallery-the smaller, inner space-emulating the Dimple and Court of Honor, while the surrounding corridors of the Beard Gallery took the visitor through the 1938 competition, the development of SAB and later Modernist buildings, and finally to post-Modernism and the plans for the forthcoming Center for Scientific Inquiry and Innovation.
Melissa Scalzi '09, one of the student curators, says that the project has dramatically changed her perspective. "I'll never look at this campus the same way again," she says, echoing the sentiments of her fellow curators and essay writers.
"I've inhabited all these spaces for four years, and I've known little bits and pieces about them. But I had no idea that Balfour-Hood [SAB] used to have a bowling alley in it. Or that there was a couple who lived there who would make cookies for the girls. And the entrance at the back used to be the drive-up entrance where the girls would wait for their dates for the dances. It's all very romantic."
Her classmate Ross Culliton adds: "I think everyone at Wheaton should know this history."
The architectural historian Spiro Kostof once called architecture "the material theater of human activity." In presenting the history of Wheaton's architecture, the students of Making It Modern have lifted the curtain on a drama filled with romance, progressive vision and unforgettable characters.
The catalog is available for $10 from Betsy Cronin, manager,
arts events and publicity. Call 508-286-3644 or e-mail
bcronin@wheatoncollege.edu.
