Combining Innovation with Tradition

Walking on the campus of the Taft School in Watertown, CT, one wouldn’t know that the John L. Vogelstein ’52 Dormitory is new. Integrated with the original single-building campus, and connected to the 1929 Charles Phelps Taft Hall, the residence hall is a landmark of sympathetic new construction.

The Taft campus was originally built with all of its buildings connected in one articulated structure, and with a common architectural vocabulary and materials. In the early 1900s Bertram G. Goodhue designed a building for the school in an Arts and Crafts-Gothic style, which was later expanded by James Gamble Rogers in the high Collegiate Gothic style. By the 1960s, some of the school’s buildings had been constructed in a more modern style. However, since then, the school had them demolished or hidden by new construction. “This client has been a faithful steward of their architectural heritage,” says Robert A.M. Stern of New York, NY-based Robert A.M. Stern Architects. “They got rid of the buildings that were built in the 1950s and ’60s that were unsympathetic, and wanted the new addition of the dormitory building to be seamless with the best of their architectural legacy.”

The architects extended the original vocabulary of the campus to form a single composition. “Our main goal was, as always, to meet the programmatic requirements,” explains Stern, “but also to carry forward the language that the Taft School has had since Goodhue and Rogers. Since we were adding right on to a building by Rogers, we wanted to show that we could conceive of a building in the same manner, but with its own expression.” The architects’ research into the Gothic language was wide-ranging, but they also looked carefully at the Taft campus itself. “We tried to spend time in and around the buildings already there. Our addition is tiny compared to the sprawling structure that Goodhue and Rogers made. We’re lucky because we had in their buildings a gigantic built textbook.”

The 30,000-sq.ft. building has a steel-frame structure with brick facing. It features a tower, which adds another story to the otherwise four-story structure and ties it to the four-story Taft Hall. The architects studied the dimensions and proportions of the brick and mortar joints (taking into account repointing) of the buildings on the campus, measured profiles of the cast-stone trim, blended and graded the slate roof and gauged the effect of double glazing on the appearance of the leaded muntins. “We used full-scale mock-ups to understand how brick blends would read both up close and from a distance,” explains Stern.

The new hall comprises three classrooms, 48 student rooms, a lounge on each of the four floors and four faculty apartments. A bridge-topped cloister connects it to Charles Phelps Taft Hall. This connection reduced the size of some classrooms in the older structure, which is why the architects included classrooms in the new building. Guiding the design were the requirements from the school that the student population had to be directly supervised by faculty and that faculty had to be provided with family apartments competitive in size and style to local housing. But the first thing, says Stern, “was to meet the challenges of modern technology and building requirements, within the limitations of the budget.”

Some of the significant challenges of this project, says Stern, “included building a dormitory that provided privacy but wasn’t an iron fortress, and also addressed the mixed use of the building. Complications arose from having to provide faculty housing within student housing.” The expectation for the faculty was that they would be provided with privacy while at the same time be immediately available to the students. “A terrace area, for example, allows faculty to tuck away baby carriages, tricycles and the like that could otherwise be intrusive,” Stern says.

Another challenge was the connection to Rogers’ Charles Phelps Taft Hall. Stern chose to use a bridge. “Our design adds to the Rogers building in a sympathetic way while also forming a new courtyard.” The placement of the Vogelstein Dormitory perpendicular to Charles Phelps Taft Hall created a new quadrangle. The architects moved trees and paths so that the two walls of the Rogers building, along with the third wall the Stern building adds, create an attractive new outdoor space. “Any good building has the capacity not only to solve a problem within itself,” explains Stern, “but to create new opportunities.”

“This dormitory is built in a style that is known to everyone, but has small, original strokes of its own, such as the octagonal tower details, the chimneys (each of which has its own personality), the patterning on the roof and the bridge,” says Stern. “I’m very proud of the two-arch Gothic bridge and the glazed cloister above.” Connections between two buildings are a tradition in the Collegiate Gothic style, he adds. “Often there are open arcades, but because of the winter weather in Connecticut we included an enclosed path between the buildings on the second level. The whole point of working in a traditional vocabulary is not to invent a language, but to use an established language in an articulate way.” A simple vocabulary was used for the cloister – brick, cast stone, white oak paneling and bluestone pavers. “If you go into the Rogers building, special tile and other enriched elements are there, but we didn’t have the budget for that,” he says. “For that reason we returned to the more vernacular, and more economical, Arts and Crafts-Gothic vocabulary of Goodhue’s building.”

Every building on the campus is connected, a feature that is “unusual among American boarding schools,” Stern says. “It’s like one extended building. The students spend a lot of time indoors, since it can be very cold there, and they’re on campus nine months out of the year. We put nooks and crannies for them to discover to keep them interested.” The materials used on the exterior of the main part of the dormitory matches those on the exterior of the bridge, including red brick and cast stone, with massing modeled after the colleges at Oxford and Cambridge Universities. The roof is of multi-colored graded slate.

The work of Goodhue, and of Rogers at Yale, inspired the brickwork patterns, another unique touch. “The abstract patterning is from late-19th-century work in England and the Arts and Crafts style. It’s fun to bring it back into our architecture,” says Stern.

“The beauty of a Collegiate Gothic vocabulary is that, though the project truly encompasses mixed uses, the expression of each on the exterior adds up to an appropriately picturesque composition,” he adds. For instance, the tower contains student lounges, while the different sizes of the windows suggest their different uses – smaller ones for bathrooms or stairs. “The building can be read like a map,” explains Stern. “That’s typical of the other buildings here, especially Rogers’ fenestration patterns. The Gothic vocabulary is nice particularly because it encourages the expression of interior diversity.”
Each floor has 10 to 12 single rooms that can be combined to form two-room suites. The top of the tower is home to the building’s one double room. “The rooms allow the students a certain amount of flexibility, where they can put their beds, etc. Each student has a private room, but the possible connection to another fosters sociability,” says Stern. “The rooms offer more privacy than 1920s dorms.”

The fourth-floor lounge differs from the other floors’ in that it “represents a termination of a long axis that comes from the Rogers building, where the stair and the bridge are,” says Stern. Coming up the main white oak stair, one enters the lounge and is rewarded with the view across the playing fields of the school to the hills beyond. The fourth-floor lounge features one Gothic window, while the other lounges each have a large bay with three windows. The fourth-floor lounge is also larger, with exposed beams in an arched ceiling and a cast-stone fireplace. Similar rugs and a wood chair rail that encircles the room tie it to the other lounges, which feature exposed interlocking wood beams across the ceilings.

The lighting in the lounges and throughout the new building was adapted from the different types found across the campus. “We’ve been working with these ideas since the early 1990s,” says Stern, “at other boarding schools, like our Ohrstrom library at the St. Paul’s School.” The fixtures range from Medieval to Collegiate Gothic, but they are completely modern in fabrication. Illumination is provided with low-energy compact fluorescent fixtures. “We carefully studied the lamps’ ‘color rendering index’ and found colored acrylic that gives them a nice warm light, comparable to incandescent light, which is more appealing but more time consuming in terms of maintenance.

“Architecture is made up of any number of high and vernacular languages, like spoken languages,” Stern explains. “You can put your own accent on, you can change the pacing of the sentences. For this building we used little references to modern Gothic styles of the late 19th and 20th centuries, with reference to Goodhue and Rogers, or people they would have known. There are slightly Art Nouveau elements, following architects like [C.F.A.] Voysey or [E.L.] Lutyens. In other words, we were trying to do things that were new without throwing out the past.” – Marieke Cassia Gartner

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Last Updated February 15, 2008