Cathedral Culture

The monument (Yale's new library) will indeed remain through the centuries as a memorial to the character of its builders. For ages it will unmercifully reveal their soul. It will tell the story of American wealth and academic culture of the earlier twentieth century. Skyscrapers narrate only a part of the story; in a generation they must give way to others, and in their mortality lies their smallness. The Yale library will not give away, and historians, philosophers, and sight-seers in five hundred years will reconstruct the America of our day form its venerable stones.

When Yale went in for expansion, endowments, and publicity, it was not content to build ordinary buildings that with common efficiency would carry out the functions for which they were intended. Under the Yale hand, a chemistry laboratory became a Hampton Court palace; a gymnasium became a Norman Cathedral, well fortified from all access of light; fraternity houses and senior-society tombs were built as Attic temples, Saracenic strongholds. Tudor mansions, Venetian palaces, and sacred edifices of the classical revival. Every minor building became other-wordly, enchanting in its antique quaintness, its cumbersome and happy extravagance. The donors were tickled by the splendor, hardened business men felt holy when erecting imitation abbeys to their own memory; and Yale's cultural stock went up...

Radical? It surpassed all expectations. There was no limit to its innovations. Under the inspiring genius of James Gamble Rogers, the new Yale library was designed to include: (L) A cathedral of the English decorated period. (2.) A group of Tudor pavilions, loosely connected. (3.) A cloister, (4.) A court with details of: a. An Italian Gothic or Spanish arcade. b. An Elizabethan house. (5.) A central book tower armored with extremely heavy masonry under Romanesque inspiration, pierced by Early English lancet windows. (6.) Interiors designed with elaborate vaulting, Tudor bosses, medieval roof-painting, and furniture of Jacobean influence. (7.) A room in early Colonial style. (8.) Certain rooms to be decorated in High Renaissance style...

A library? You would never recognize it when you saw it. Enter it-pass through a bastard version of the west portal of an abbey. Continue down the main hall, which is a precise copy of a nave with five bays. Observe the massive and unnecessary piers, the inconvenient but orthodox side aisles, the lofty transepts bristling with sanctity above and serial catalogues below. Advance to the high altar-a $25,000 book delivery desk; overhead, admire the rood screen, of utmost complexity and facility at catching dust, which has been cleverly placed to hide the important library clock from view. See the space where the great apse painting is to go. (At the present time the painting has not yet been transferred from preliminary drawings, but the work is unofficially believed to represent two nude figures, both viewed from the rear-one, a woman, flying off to the left, and the other, a horse, flying off to the right. The conception is of course in keeping with the general library scheme.) Turn about and gaze at the triforium gallery above the vast nave; scan the splendid cler-estory windows, heavy with tracery and mullions, highly effective in minimizing the light, and sealed hermetically shut. Pass down the corridors, and cry out in rapt adoration of more color, more carving, more corbels, more plaques, balconies, chandeliers, wall brackets (electric, in the style of ancient torch holders), a book, how your head in holy ecstasy!....

Despairing then, he hurries towards the exit portal of the sanctuary. And the last thing that greets his departing eye, at the end of the nave, is a telephone booth, designed as a fourteenth-century confessional. William Harlan Hale in The Nation