COMBINING INNOVATION WITH TRADITION
The John L. Vogelstein ’52 Dormitory (the last building on the right) at the
Taft School in Watertown, CT, was designed by Robert A.M. Stern Architects in the Collegiate Gothic style to
blend in with the rest of the campus, most of which was designed by Bertram G. Goodhue and James Gamble Rogers.
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.”
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 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.”
There are lounges on every floor of the residence hall. A typical lounge has a
large bay with three windows and exposed interlocking wood beams that cross the ceiling. Jersey City, NJ-based
Rambusch Lighting Co. supplied the pendant light fixture in this and other rooms.
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.”
Robert A.M. Stern Architects is a 140-person firm of architects, landscape architects, interior designers
and supporting staff. Over its 32-year history, the firm has established an international reputation as a
leading design firm with wide experience in residential, commercial and institutional work. As the firm’s
practice has diversified, its geographical scope has widened to include current projects in Europe, Asia, South
America and throughout the United States.
See details about the winning entry in the May/June 2004 issue of Traditional Building Magazine.
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