Bowdoin Beata – Part II

When bright skies were o'er us,

And life lay before us,

'Neath Bowdoin's pines we gathered far and near.

So filling our glasses,

And greeting all classes,

We drink a health to alma mater dear.

So it's clink, clink, drink, drink, drink!

Smash the glass to splinters when you're done.

O Bowdoin Beata,

Our dear alma mater,

There is no fairer mother 'neath the sun.

Photo by Michelle Stapleton.

My dear alma mater's song (words by Henry H. Pierce, Class of 1896; revised by Anthony Antolini '63, Director of Bowdoin Chorus Emeritus) perfectly captured the polarity of the Bowdoin College experience: the high academic standards vs. the high living that came with the territory of its formerly fraternal social life, in the form of alcohol, drugs, horseplay, and heaven knows what else. 

In my previous Bowdoin Beata post I explored the latter situation, and how the fraternity houses moved on from it when they became the College Houses, which revealed their fine architecture as a framework for the intellectual, social and cultural communities I wish had been mine for the asking.

But now I'd like to focus on my favorite academic buildings at Bowdoin, those that have formed and shaped the college's scholastic identity as I remember it.

Massachusetts modesty

Massachusetts Hall (1802), Bowdoin's oldest building, was built soon after the college was chartered by the Massachusetts State Legislature (remember, Maine was part of Massachusetts then) in 1794, from a Federal design by Aaron & Samuel Melcher III. And it stylistically says "Massachusetts" all over, recalling contemporary works of Charles Bulfinch in Boston and Samuel McIntyre in Salem.

This style speaks through its symmetrical façade and chimneys, narrow center entrance with fanlight transom and cornice, hipped roof, simple interior paneling, and the mahogany-railed staircase that curves up to professors' offices and the top-level floor-through classroom. All these elements present the hall in a unified form to the Bowdoin Quad.

Massachusetts Hall, Bowdoin College, in 1884. Photo by Amos O. Reed.

This modest unity of minimal detail and maximal cohesion was also an outgrowth of the financial constraints affecting Bowdoin's development, including rising real estate values. So it was decided to start the campus small, hence Massachusetts Hall's modest, diminished, lowly stature, well atoned for by architectural foresight and planning.

As a result, its small size didn't stop it from supplying multiple faculty offices, including the English and Philosophy departments (until the latter relocated to the Edward Pols House on 5 Bath Road), the Faculty Room, the McKeen Study, and a sizable floor-through top-floor classroom (which barely fit me and the overflow of 30 students in Prof. Geoghegan's Religion 32), which the Hall's high hipped roof and square footprint – almost as deep as it was wide – made possible.

Residential row

Bowdoin College c.1823. Artwork by John G. Brown.

Massachusetts Hall, in a way, spurned the development of the four brick dormitories that were to shape the beginnings of the Bowdoin Quadrangle, by virtue of establishing brick as the building material, rehiring the Hall's architect to design the first dorm, and lining them up along the new campus's western parameter so they would fully border the Quad by the time the last one, Hyde Hall, was built.

Winthrop Hall (1822, Samuel Melcher III), c.1925.

Winthrop Hall (1822) was Samuel Melcher III's follow-up building, and the first of four brick dormitories that formed the western parameter of the Bowdoin Quadrangle, setting it up for future campus development with a "Harvard Yard" appeal. Establishing the standard for Bowdoin's dormitory superblocks followed through the 1950s, Winthrop repeats Massachusetts Hall's narrow center entrance with fanlight transom, but breaks from it with tripartite central windows, portending the 20th-century modernism of "Chicago" windows.

Note how, by lining up regimentally along the Quad's western parameter, the "street wall" of Winthrop Hall and the subsequent dorms inspired a path along the Quad, confirming its intimate rectangular form. 

Maine Hall (1837), designed by Anthony Coombs Raymond, follows Winthrop's standard with nearly identical brick façades and tripartite windows. The arched entrances are a bit wider and more deeply recessed into the façades, perhaps to allow freer inward and outward passage to more students at once, and to grant them pre-entry and pre-exit shelter from the elements.

Maine Hall repeated the pattern of stylistic uniformity in dormitory design that Harvard Yard established when Bulfinch's Stoughton Hall (1805) was built as a near-replication of Hollis Hall (1762). This turned Bowdoin into sort of a "little Harvard," which was of great appeal to me when I was visiting Bowdoin for my application interview (since my dad wished I would go to Harvard).

Appleton Hall (1843) was designed by Samuel Melcher & Sons, who followed in their father's footsteps with the dormitory template set by Winthrop Hall, but with variations according to the shift to the Greek Revival: A squared center entrance with higher stoop, flat lintel and broad keystone underscores the tripartite windows, giving the entry a sense of verticality.

Hyde Hall (1917), designed by Allen & Collens (best known for New York's Riverside Church and Union Theological Seminary), is one of three dorms that stretch the Winthrop Hall prototype of 1822 way into the 20th century, the others being McKim, Mead & White's Moore Hall (1941, my freshman dorm) and Coleman Hall (1958). The visible changes in the elevations, heights, chimney placements, entrances, stair-hall windows and cosmetics from one dorm to another as the years progressed showcase a pattern of architectonic adjustment according to the changing needs of new generations of students, the growth of the college and its student body, and the advancement of structural engineering and material manufacturing throughout those years.

Hyde Hall picked up its predecessors' brick facing, center entrance, central tripartite windows and punched rhythm of fenestration, but elongated its front door and one of its tripartite windows, to express and shed light on the upward mobility of the stairwell, which the lowering of one window and the elongation of another clearly expresses as a separate entity from the living quarters. Hyde's basement windows signify the increasing use of basements for practical purposes, such as more advanced plumbing and laundry facilities. Moore and Coleman moved their entrances from the ends to the sides, allowing for four entries for busy student traffic, with taller stairwell windows above them for more ease of finding one's way to one's room after pulling an all-nighter, getting drunk, or partying the night away (below).

Moore Hall (1941, McKim, Mead & White).

Coleman Hall (1958, McKim, Mead & White).

Chapel chimes

Bowdoin College Chapel (1855, Richard Upjohn). Photo by Andrew Mass.

Photo by William Morgan.

The Chapel (1855), which completes the western border of the Bowdoin Quadrangle as a cynosure of the campus, is the college's principal landmark, the one that immediately defines its scholastic identity, in many ways: with its twin towers visible from afar, chiming their Westminster Chime on the quarter-hour to remind students, faculty and staff of their obligations and deadlines; with its axial symmetry on its footpath, which served as a compass for future campus development; with its colorful interior and resonant acoustics and organ, serving as Bowdoin's central venue for concerts, recitals, Chapel Talks and lectures; and with the myriad of other ways it has served the college and its community over the years, kudos to its versatile wings. 

"Brunswick College Chapel, Brunswick, Me.", rendering by Richard Upjohn, 1845.

Designed by Richard Upjohn, famous for Trinity Church in New York (1846) and the First Parish Church in Brunswick (1846), the Chapel demonstrates, in stature, structure and use, how everlasting the Gothic Revival can be (even with the phase-out of compulsory religious services at Bowdoin in the 1960s), kudos to the same architectural foresight that went into Massachusetts Hall.

With this foresight, the Chapel was planned for mixed uses from the beginning: a central hall for worship and music, a library, and an art gallery. The German Romanesque random-ashlar Brunswick granite shell was given a tripartite scheme that included library and gallery wings.

The chapel interior is a wonderworld of stained glass, hammerbeam roof rafters, black walnut woodwork, colorful fresoes, two organs (front and rear), and resonant acoustics. This has made it a blessed space for Chamber Choir concerts – I fondly remember singing solos in a Mozart mass and a "new song contest," and the song with my solo was the winner: "Susie Asado," James Sellars' adaptation of a poem by Gertrude Stein. Other fond Chapel memories were Sunday afternoon Chapel Talks, which enabled students and faculty to soapbox their views on a myriad of issues and arguments of mixed merit. An unconvincing one was "The Resurrection of Jesus Christ: Fact or Fiction?", in which a Bowdoin Christian Fellowship member used semantics and bombast rather than logic, evidence and deduction to argue for Jesus' ascension: 

"This brilliant scholar says that there is overwhelming evidence that the Resurrection really occurred... The results [of his research] stunned him." The student also described the process of death by asphyxiation on the cross and the secure guarding of tombs back then. That was reasonable logic to show the impossibilities of survival of crucifixion and of grave robbery (more logical reasons for the disappearance of Jesus' body), but not to show that the story of Jesus was true. Yes, faith triumphed over reason.

And, oh, the way the sunlight penetrated the stained-glass windows and spotlighted the frescoes, bringing out their rich colors and delicate artistry! Upjohn likely calculated the window placements for the right impacts of light at certain positions of the sun – still more foresight.

He also must have calculated the siting of the sharp-pointed bell towers according to when and how the sun would hit them at various solar positions of the diurnal arc. Which made the towers a handy "sundial" for Bowdoiners: bright towers meant rise and shine (and get to class), and red-orange towers meant bedtime was nigh (unless you were pulling an all-nighter).

The east end of the Chapel's south wing, Banister Hall, originally housed a two-level art gallery, displaying sculptures on its lower floor and paintings upstairs. This was the extent of the college's "art museum" – in rather cramped quarters – until the fine artworks found brighter, roomier breathing space and elbow-room in the Walker Art Building across the Quad in 1894. Banister Hall then housed the Department of Music (which was handy for Chapel concerts and recitals next door) and the Department of Psychology, until they too found new homes, in the Harvey Dow Gibson Hall of Music in 1954 and eventually Kanbar Hall in 2004, respectively. 

Today Banister Hall houses the Joseph McKeen Center for the Common Good, a community service and civic engagement center, and the THRIVE program, supporting first-generation and limited-income students in transitioning into and on from the college experience, and to give them a sense of belonging. (THRIVE was made possible by a major grant from Netflix co-founder Reed Hastings '83.) Very worthy new uses for the spiritual community center the Chapel was built to be!

The library in the opposite wing, despite its beautiful arch, column, bracket and drip moldings and dark walnut woodwork, had but limited capacity for Bowdoin's ever-growing book collection, as the overflowing shelves show here. Hubbard Hall's completion in 1903 was the answer to the library's prayers.

But in time even Hubbard burst at the seams with books, as the evolution of knowledge dictated, until the functional but drab Hawthorne-Longfellow Library assumed the book-burden in 1965, with an expansion in 1984. (Looking more like an office park than a college library, this is my least favorite building at Bowdoin, so it won't be featured here.)

Other occupants of the wings are the Office for Inclusion and Diversity, the Banister 106 classroom and media presentation room, and a Muslim Prayer Space. The wide array of uses the Chapel has provided the college attest to the strength of its granite edifice in lasting through the ages, still ringing its bells and boasting its towers from far and wide to declare, "This is Bowdoin."

Class of 1875 Memorial Gateway on axis with Chapel in 1907.

The Chapel's axial path gave rise to future campus growth on that axis. The Class of 1875 Memorial Gateway (1902, McKim, Mead & White) mirrored the duality of the Chapel's towers with twin fluted columns and Grecian urns in the "City Beautiful" classical style. Their axial symmetry with their progenitor framed and reinforced the Chapel's central sanctity to Bowdoin

until the Visual Arts Center (1975, Edward Larrabee Barnes) blocked their view of the Chapel with a new, ominous gateway to the Quad, forcing passage through a dark tunnel to enter the campus – a barbarian byproduct of the modern age that was invading the academic peace of historicism that once blessed Bowdoin.

To be continued...

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