nothin Triumph Of The Mind | New Haven Independent

Triumph Of The Mind

Yale Facebook Photo

The Nave.

There are not many architectural expressions of the triumph of the mind — of the religion of the intellect — around New Haven. But there’s one announcing itself on Yale’s campus, and it’s just gotten a facelift. Its name: Sterling Memorial Library.

The library’s history speaks to its new renovated form. At that time in the 20th century — as is still the case — the overtly borrowed aesthetic was lifted from ancient Oxford and Cambridge, and called the College Gothic” for this reason. Before his death in 1915, James W. Sterling gave the university enough money to hire a master of the style — James Gamble Rogers — to build the jewel in the crown of knowledge Yale aspired to be.

The library is full of architectural surprises. Although cloaked in perfected 1930 Gothic materials and details, this building’s entry was not rendered as an academic hall, mimicking banqueting, parliamentary or royal design, iconography or other aesthetic messaging. Instead, Rogers, with the approval of Yale, created a nave: what I see as a cathedral of knowledge.

As the library has aged, Yale has sought to preserve its architectural gravitas. Well over $20,000,000 has been spent in the last three years to undo subsequent erosions of the nave – a stair to the huge underground Cross Campus Library was removed from its central hall, security apparatus was removed, decorations revived, grime removed, all to bring back an overtly religious sensibility … in a pretty secular space. 

Religion helped create every Ivy League School except Cornell (and there are those who debate it’s Ivy-worthiness- mostly those of us who went there). If you are in a Retro state of mind, almost all of Ancient Great Architecture has a religious purpose or nod as religion was the science and literature and cultural foundation of almost every society before the Renaissance.

Even the most secular of buildings in the first truly secular government, the United States Supreme Court is a Xerox of a Classicist Temple. In its first 150 years America grabbed at the straws of precedent cultural credibility amid the antiquity of its Western progenitors.

But the United States now has 16 of the world’s top 20 universities, a military that dwarfs all others, an economy that makes or breaks the rest of the planet’s. Yale is arguably among the tip of education, creating those with an EZPass to power, and has access to wealth sufficient that it can spend billions on architectural expression beyond the simply necessary.

Click on or download to listen to the full commentary by WNHH radio Design Czar Duo Dickinson.

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