Henry Vaughan, Architect of Unity Church Remodeling (c. 1896)
Until the early 1870s the school had been more or less guided by one man, its founder, and his designate, the first rector. But in the 1880s, as these two gentlemen neared old age, a new generation of trustees began to exert a more powerful influence over the school's educational mission and its architectural character. Charles Perkins Gardiner of Brookline, Massachusetts, who served on the school's board from 1865 until his death in 1908, played a decisive role in shaping St. Paul's architecture when he initiated the selection of a young English-born and trained architect, Henry Vaughan (1846-1917). When tapped by Gardiner, Vaughan was just becoming established in Boston, devoting himself almost exclusively to church and church-related buildings. Vaughan was a man of deep religious conviction, an ascetic lifelong bachelor totally devoted to the Anglican and Episcopalian worship and to the English Gothic architecture he regarded as their true and proper architectural expression.
Vaughan's chapel of St. Peter and St. Paul [42] (1886-94) burst on the school and on the architectural profession as a proclamation of high ideals. On the strength of it, Vaughan went on to many other important commissions, most notably two chapels at Groton School; the Mary F. Searles Science Building (1894) and the Hubbard Library and Grandstand (1902-1903) at Bowdoin College in Brunswick, Maine; and the Christ Church in New Haven (1895-98). Towards the end of his life he was preoccupied with the design of the National Cathedral in Washington, D.C. A decade after its completion, Vaughan's chapel was already deemed a landmark. In 1899 the fledgling architect Ralph Adams Cram, who was to become the preeminent American Gothicist of the twentieth century, wrote that "In Henry Vaughan's Chapel at St. Paul's School we return from the dazzling personal to the reverently faithful, the thoughtful and scholarly spirit that varies from precedent only enough to give the work life and contemporaneousness. It has this in sufficient degree, and is in no respect archaeological, except in the sense that it is absolutely correct in detail. ... it shows admirably how close one can hold to medieval models and yet be thoroughly modern, thoroughly alive and real. . . Henry Vaughan's chapel is a model of calm composition, of self respect.'' The chapel was Vaughan's masterpiece, to which he brought a higher vision of architecture than the school had hitherto known, establishing the school's principal and enduring focus. Vaughan's red brick and Springfield sandstone church, with its superb oak stalls, remains as he designed it, except for the lengthening of its nave which took place in 1927-1929 when, under Cram's direction, the chapel was temporarily deconsecrated and cut apart so that two more bays could be introduced to allow for the increased size of the school. With that extension, the chapel lost none of its remarkable qualities save one: as Vaughan designed it, the 120 foot tower, completed in 1890, had been almost as high the chapel was long, a very unusual relationship, now gone. Though the chapel of St. Peter and St. Paul remains largely as Vaughan designed it, its present situation in the school village is dramatically different from the one for which the building was planned. Today the chapel stands isolated amidst greenery with a seemingly improbable arcade extending from the principal entrance into space. But when it was dedicated in 1888, the chapel was part of a dense network of buildings along Dunbarton Road, connected to the study by a wooden cloister that was replaced in 1920 when Bertram Grosvenor Goodhue, Cram's former partner, designed the rather too abstract one now in place.
Vaughan's strategy for dealing with the cluttered context was brilliant and had a profound impact on the school's subsequent urbanism. By setting the chapel back from the street behind the lawn, he provided the school village with its first significant ceremonial outdoor gathering place, its village green. Coupled with the chapel's strongly articulated English Gothic vocabulary, this siting brought to the school's village-like setting more than a whiff of the quadrangular organization of the principal English universities, Oxford and Cambridge, thereby not only reuniting the colonial world of the New England village with its English roots, but also making a departure from the near adhocism of Shattuck's original approach. Based on this evidence, it would seem that Vaughan was intent on transforming Dunbarton Road into what the English would call a High Street and Turkey River into a somewhat wayward River Thames or Cam.
Vaughan's legacy at St. Paul's also includes the Lower School [42] (1890-92, demolished 1971), the Orphans' Home Chapel (1897, demolished ca. 1952), an unrealized scheme for a library (1895), the annex to the Big Study (1898-99, demolished 1951), and probably the most interesting of all, save the chapel, the New Upper School (1902-4). Though committed to the English Gothic with a near religious fanaticism, it would seem that Vaughan believed in recreating a continuous albeit fictive architectural history for the school, an idea that James Gamble Rogers would pick up at Yale where the residential colleges recapitulate a version of Anglo-American architecture from English medievalism to American colonialism. How else can we account for the Wren-inspired Georgian of Vaughan's Lower School, where gabled roofs and red brick walls elusively seem at once English and American? Surely Vaughan's version of the Georgian was far more asymmetrical, movemented, irregular than that of its eighteenth century prototypes--more Gothic, if you will, and more personal: somehow, Vaughan made the Georgian style his very own.
Vaughan's last building at St. Paul's was the Upper School, replacing the building of 1870. From the point of view of the school's fictive architectural history, the new Upper filled in the gap between the high Gothic of the chapel and the early Georgian of the Lower School. The style of the Upper can be best described as Tudorbethan: a transitional style of late medievalism that, while fundamentally Gothic in its quadrangular massing, has an overlay of Classical detail reflecting influences from Renaissance Italy.
The Upper does not offer a strong image, perhaps because Vaughan imagined it as the first component of a larger complex of buildings, a quadrangle attached to other quadrangles. But Vaughan's vision of a cloistered school was never realized, and the Upper has always stood free. As a result, it is a bit disparate in its composition to make a sufficiently strong point; its isolation also probably accounts for the somewhat ambivalent feelings alumni have about the building, which they rightly perceive seems lacking a front door. Problems of siting and context aside, the Upper is a very fine building, offering a wealth of delightful details that conveys a gentle intimacy to a building of considerable size. The handling on the outside of the stone and brick, the doubling and tripling of scales of windows, the curved bays, gabled entrance tower, and hipped dormers, all yield a rich but not aggressive variety to the mass. In addition, Vaughan introduced important rooftop elements--weathervanes and cupolas, which have become less prominent as the landscape has matured, but nonetheless provide the school's skyline with delightful gracenotes. Inside, Vaughan's vocabulary of enclosed arcades, the English inspired refectory in the form of a great hall with a vaulted timber-framed ceiling and its oak paneling eminently suited for recording the school's history in the continuous lists of graduates carved into its surface, reintroduced the warmth and domesticity of the school's early days, although at a manorial scale.
Not all of Vaughan's ideas were adopted by the trustees, as recent research by Alan Hall of the school's English department has reminded us. In 1895 Vaughan proposed that the school build a combined library and auditorium. This proposal, estimated at the time to cost $75,00, was rejected by the trustees as being too expensive. It was to have been connected by a cloister to the chapel, balancing the schoolhouse on the west, thereby further defining the new lawn or green, as a courtyard or quadrangle, bounded on its fourth side by the rectory and other houses that sat on the northwest side of Dunbarton Road. When Mr. Hall unearthed Vaughan's unrealized plan in an old issue of the Horae Scholasticae, our plans for Ohrstrom Library were at a critical stage in their evolution. How delightful, and to the skeptical how reassuring, to see that our decision, to place the library perpendicular to the chapel, came so close to Vaughan's 100-year-old proposal. Like its siting, the composition of Vaughan's building, and the spirit of its detailing, was in a way not so different from what we were proposing for Ohrstrom. Vaughan's Elizabethan-inspired design included a reading room, a library accommodating 20,000 books, a choir room on the ground floor, and a 500-seat auditorium and museum above, the latter, like a portion of the library, receiving light from a fourteen-square-foot rooftop lantern crowned by an ogive roof surmounted by a weathervane.
Commissioned by the officers of the school's Library Association, Vaughan's design was accompanied by some extraordinarily sound advice to the Trustees and others involved with St. Paul's physical future: ". . . it may seem a little premature to make plans for an object which just now is only a hope and a longing, looking out into a rosy future. But it should be remembered that the careful study of possible sites for so important a building, and the choice of a proper style of building upon the determined site, and the working out of a convenient, economical arrangement of the different parts of such a building, to meet in a practical and tasteful way the valuable ends in view must all require much time and thought... such a building as in now proposed. . . must be at the center of the school life; it must be handsome and in harmony with the other large buildings, which it is to be joined with and to supplement; and it must substantial enough to go down with dignity into the coming generations."
Even though his library proposal was not accepted, Vaughan's architectural vision--the vocabulary of the English Gothic and early Georgian as well as the planning ideal of the quadrangle--became the fundamental point of reference for almost all that was to follow, with one no doubt painful exception. Imagine Vaughan's disappointment when, five years after his design for a new library was published, funds suddenly became available for a library even larger than the one he had imagined, but one that was to be designed by another architect. In 1900, the family of Mr. William Crawford Sheldon, Jr., a trustee of the school from 1877 to 1896 and the senior member of a successful banking firm in New York, W.C. Sheldon & Co., came forward with the necessary money for a new library as a memorial, provided the school hire the young, French-inspired, French-educated Classicist, Ernest Flagg (1857-1947).
http://library.sps.edu/exhibits/stern/vaughn.shtml