At Yale, 2 Costly New Colleges Aspire to Look Old

More than a decade ago, Yale University realized it was facing a campus-planning dilemma. To increase its undergraduate enrollment by 15 percent, it wanted to add two residential colleges to the dozen it already had. But those 12 colleges were hemmed in by university, commercial, and residential buildings. There was no possibility of putting two new ones nearby.

Adding to the challenge, eight of the existing 12 were Collegiate Gothic masterpieces from the 1920s and ’30s. Designed primarily by James Gamble Rogers, their arches and courtyards and dining halls had defined the undergraduate experience at the university for decades, but the common wisdom was that they would be impossible to equal today. The architect Eero Saarinen had tried in the early 1960s, adding Morse and Stiles Colleges in the Brutalist style, but even after a recent top-notch makeover, those are landmarks much less loved their predecessors.

This time, Yale turned to Robert A.M. Stern Architects, a silk-stocking firm headed by Mr. Stern, at the time the university’s dean of architecture (he has since retired as dean, but remains active at the firm). And the university picked a site across from the Ingalls Rink and Science Hill. The location is separated from the older part of the campus by the walled Grove Street Cemetery, and is about a 10-minute walk from Yale’s main library.

But the recession intervened, and fund raising lagged. Things got rolling in 2013, when a 1954 graduate gave $250 million toward the project.

And this month — finally — Yale students are moving into two just-completed colleges that have courtyards, common rooms, and carvings galore, along with hand-forged iron gates, vaulted corridors, and enough ornamental brickwork to wow Henry VIII. The university won’t say what the seven-acre project cost, but the student-run Yale Daily News and the Hartford Courant have both put the total at around $500 million for 900 beds — an extraordinary amount by any measure. The colleges are named for, respectively, the inventor and founding father Ben Franklin and the civil-rights activist and Episcopal priest Pauli Murray.

Yale’s twin colleges aren’t the only high-profile residence halls to open on college campuses this summer. The University of Pennsylvania has just completed an $80-million overhaul of its Hill College House, a Modernist monument designed by Saarinen as a women’s dormitory in 1960 but now home to first-year students. Fortresslike on the outside but sunny and airy within, the 500-bed building anticipated current thinking among first-year-housing experts by pairing small double rooms with plenty of space for socializing.

Meanwhile, the University of Delaware has just opened a brand-new 517-bed first-year residence hall with many similar features, at a cost of about $58 million.

And the University of Southern California has just completed the 2,700-bed, eight-college USC Village, which is a neighborhood-revitalization effort as well as a student-housing project. The 15-acre undertaking has six five-story buildings with street-level retail and Gothic ornamentation. USC’s president, C.L. Max Nikias, said at the opening ceremony that “the looks of the University Village give us 1,000 years of history we don’t have,” but the Los Angeles Times was less impressed, calling the boxy $700-million project “a fantasia of just-add-water heritage, equal parts Disneyland and Hogwarts.”

Research-Based Fantasy

You could call Yale’s two colleges a fantasia, too, but it’s fantasy based on years of research and analysis. The university had just finished top-to-bottom renovations of the 12 older colleges, and “all the lessons learned fed into these,” says Melissa DelVecchio, a partner in Mr. Stern’s firm. In addition, she and her colleagues studied the sightlines, size, masses, materials, orientation, and ornamentation of the James Gamble Rogers buildings, and visited Oxford and Cambridge to see the buildings on which he himself had drawn.

Two of the project’s central goals, says Ms. DelVecchio, were to “to help the site that was selected feel as close as it actually is,” and to insure “parity” with the older colleges. To suggest proximity, for instance, the complex has two towers tall enough to be seen from streets and windows on the older part of campus. And a broad pedestrian passageway between the colleges aligns with Lock Street and one end of the new university health center.

Parity was a two-part challenge. Not only did the architects have to provide spaces commensurate to those in the older colleges, but they had to make the spaces feel at once antique, imposing, scholarly, quirky, cozy, and comfortable — to make them feel as much as possible like buildings from the 1920s and ’30s.

Using as much granite as Rogers did was out of the question, even with a half-billion-dollar budget, but brickwork laid in multiple patterns made for an adequate substitute, and some 4,000 windows were set off with random arrangements of real and cast stone. Modern construction techniques helped save some money — whole sections of towers, for instance, were assembled at ground level and lifted into place by cranes, and chimneys and woodwork were prefabricated off-site.

What resulted are two colleges that each have four courtyards, one of which is large enough for a graduation tent. Each college has a home for a college head and apartments for a dean and fellows, a dining hall overlooked by a library, a common room, and suites of student rooms organized by entryways. (“Yale has a system that they know works,” Ms. DelVecchio says.) The entire complex is accessible. A single underground prep kitchen feeds serveries in both dining halls and is connected to an enclosed loading dock. The complex is expected to earn a gold-level LEED sustainability rating.

What students will think of the new colleges remains to be seen — classes begin next week. The present-day cost for top-grade 1930s Collegiate Gothic is clearly steep, although the $11-million price tag for the original residential colleges was probably equally striking in its day (most of the money came from Edward Harkness, a Standard Oil heir turned philanthropist). And Yale clearly intends these buildings to last as well as their predecessors have.

“Yale knew they wanted traditional buildings,” says Ms. DelVecchio, noting that Gamble’s designs rely on more elaborate interplays of masses and shapes than their Oxford and Cambridge models do. That, she says, is what gives them such a memorable sense of place, and what she and her colleagues worked hard to recreate.

Lawrence Biemiller writes about a variety of usual and unusual higher-education topics. Reach him at lawrence.biemiller@chronicle.com.

Correction (8/28/2017; 10:10 a.m.): This article originally misstated the number of colleges in the USC Village project. It has eight colleges, not 13. The text has been updated.