Stone Fib?

Modern architecture may look good on a college campus, but alumni seldom think so. They want the new buildings they finance to look just like the old ones for sentiment as well as for the sake of architectural harmony. Florida's University of Miami is trying to solve the architectural problem by a clean break with its not-so-distant (1925) past: it is building an all-modern school on a new campus.

Harvard's $2,500,000 new Lament Library, now under construction, is a compromise--a kind of midway modern, which is streamlined enough to shock Cantabrigian purists (though the Harvard Yard is already a pleasant grabbag of Georgian, Greek Revival, Victorian and nondescript). Princeton, with its huge neo-Gothic halls already built, had, like Miami, gone all out for uniformity, but in the opposite direction. Its new $6,000,000 library was carefully designed to "fit in" on the campus.

Princeton's library, in the words of its librarian, Julian P. Boyd, is "Gothic on the outside and modernistic on the in side." To Modern Architect William Lescaze that seemed rather like dressing a professor in a suit of armor. Last week he wrote the New York Times an angry letter about it.

Lescaze had recently interviewed eleven graduating students of Princeton's own School of Architecture, gleefully reported that "Not one of them had a kind word to say for their Alma Mater's newest building. How could they? They had been taught to strive for honest architectural solutions and yet at the same time their own university had been building a library with a Gothic mask. Talking to them I had the feeling that Princeton's library may well turn out to be the last example of our colleges' long devotion to a mistaken loyalty . . . to the outside appearance."

He made no criticism of the efficiently planned interior (which provides 60 miles of shelves, air conditioning, 665 soundproofed cubicles for individual study). Lescaze's point was simply that from the outside the new library looked like a vast stone what-is-it--a sentimental fib.

"Old Gothic buildings are often fine, yet that does not dictate that all new buildings be Gothic," wrote Lescaze. "How curious that men who admire Chartres Cathedral should still fail to understand Chartres' great lesson--with one of its towers Romanesque, the other Gothic; one built 400 years after the first but not as a Romanesque copy of the first--namely, that architecture can only be of its time."

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