Charles A. Coolidge

The career of Charles Allerton Coolidge, notably in the infusion of dignity and grace into the older-time hodgepodge of American college architecture, was exceedingly interesting. His achievement in that field began before what we are accustomed to describe as the brilliant period of American architecture. It began in the Coolidge early Eighties, in the office of the distinguished architect, Henry Hobson Richardson, whose own influence, combined with that of his associates, was destined to lead the way to that landmark in the history of his craft, the architecture of the Chicago World’s Fair of 1893. The list of Coolidge’s constructive works is impressive. It covers the law school, medical school, art museum and dormitories at Harvard, the Art Institute and Public Library at Chicago, and new buildings for institutions as widely distributed as Yale, the Universities of Chicago, Brown, Nebraska, and the Rockefeller Institute, not to mention as far-away an establishment as Constantinople College. He was particularly described as having “recreated” architectural Harvard.

Coolidge was from the first an expert draftsman. It is recalled that he was one of the founders of the Harvard Lampoon, the undergraduate pictorial weekly of the early Eighties, whose good-natured persiflage, social skits and amusing sketches really set the stage for a type of humorous weeklies such as hardly existed before, but has ever since survived in the broader field of periodical literature.

Alexander Dana Noyes
1937 Century Association Yearbook