Bowdoin Beata – Part IV

Bowdoin College, c.1907.

Hubbard Hall and Walker Art Building, Bowdoin College, c.1910.

The turn of the 20th century saw Bowdoin College welcoming new, untested architectural styles to its campus, in an attempt to transition itself away from its image of a small college with a chapel, tucked away in a corner of a small college town, to the appearance of a prominent academic institution with appropriately ceremonial buildings to publicly display that status. Memorial Hall's grandiloquent Gothic presence was a good start (see my last post), but now it was time for more architectural symbols of scholastic and artistic excellence in the arts and sciences to round out the Bowdoin Quadrangle.

Searles' solemnity

The Mary Frances Searles Science Building (1894) had a bad rap on campus. Legend had it that the descendants of its namesake were out to build "the ugliest building possible" because they'd been cut out of her late husband's will when his money was left to build it. Though I wasn't much for its purplish paint job – wondering what that covered up – it was one of those buildings I found myself stopping and staring at. 

Which is a litmus test for great architecture: the extent to which it makes you stop and stare, and for how long. (No wonder I kept ignoring the Hawthorne-Longfellow Library.) And why was Searles worth a special look? It had the majestic presence of an old English or Danish castle, of the kind Hamlet would home in – owing in part to the predilections of its architect, Henry Vaughan, a Brit by birth, for Elizabethan and Jacobean (known as "Jacobethan" in combo) stylistic elements in his designs. 

East Boston High School (1926, John M. Gray Company). Photo by Antony.22.

It also brought to my mind those Gothic and Jacobethan schools and colleges in New York I fondly remembered –  Erasmus Hall High School, Flushing High School, City College of New York, many others – as well as the welcoming octagonal twin turret-towers flanking the entrance of East Boston High School. In short, Searles' style said two things: scholarship and showmanship.

Mary Frances Searles Science Building (1894). Photo by Dirk Ingo Franke.

Which were part of the building's intent: to unify the Biology, Chemistry and Physics Departments under one roof that promoted their academic reputation through a regal design of high Dutch gables, octagonal crenellated turrets, domed lance-like towers flanking the entrance, oriel bay windows, Amherst sandstone trim and finials, and a crowning classical cupola, all reflecting the repute of the likes of Oxford and Cambridge.

The Maine Street elevation of Searles takes the form of a pair of identical gabled rear ells enclosing a courtyard on three sides. Vaughan designed it just so to allow the laboratory-lecture halls in the ells as much daylight as possible, picking up on the natural illumination architecture for scientific classrooms and labs established by Seth Adams Hall in 1861 (see my previous post). This courtyard also came in handy for Searles' 1999 renovation and expansion by Cambridge Seven Associates, who filled it in with a 2,000-square-foot granite/glass atrium, a sequence of ramps interconnecting all floors, interdisciplinary communal rooms, and cutting-edge computer/audiovisual high-tech, to bring Searles into the 21st century.

Searles was yet another demonstration of Bowdoin's foresight in the architectural planning of all its buildings, making them just as useful with every passing age, up to and including our IT/AI age.

Sadly, I have no Searles memories to share, never having passed through its doors. I never studied science at Bowdoin, no thanks to its lack of course distribution requirements, which would have given us a well-rounded curriculum by which we would have discovered new interests that opened doors to fulfilling careers.

Thankfully, distribution requirements were restored at Bowdoin, thanks (real thanks) to Prof. Barbara Kaster, who once declared in class, "You folks are being shortchanged by having no distribution requirements!" and set out with her initiative to bring them back, thus benefiting Bowdoiners from Gens X, Y and Z.

Walker's wonders

The Walker Art Building (1897) accomplished for Bowdoin's art collection and curriculum what Searles did for its scientific studies, this time in the form of a classical temple that completed the Bowdoin Quadrangle's eastern parameter with a monumental miniature of some of America's great art museums, from New York's Metropolitan Museum of Art to Boston's Museum of Fine Arts to the one just down the road in Portland.

To be continued...