Charles Z. Klauder

From the draughting board Charles Zeller Klauder rose to an assured position as one of the most successful architects in the country. Partly he owed his rise to the practical abilities of an able partner, Frank Miles Day, also a Centurion. At the height of their joint career the firm had seventy-five schools and colleges as clients and their income was very large. When left to carry on the business alone, Klauder was frankly worried as to whether he could handle clients and conduct all the other business activities of the firm, a field that was totally unfamiliar to him. He succeeded without effort by simply being his own direct, kindly self. There was a naive quality about him that was disarming—his quite justified and refreshing admiration of his own work, for example.

The son of German immigrants, he entered the office of Day in Philadelphia at the age of eighteen. He was made a partner in 1911, and took over the firm in 1918. Thus he had no academic training as an architect and none of the associations or friendships that go with college life. It was sheer skill as a designer that slowly brought him to the fore in the Day office. Neither his colleagues nor those who met him at the Century found it easy to know him well. No one could have been more kindly or more friendly, or more diffident. Everything connected, directly or indirectly, with his profession interested him. But not much else, it would seem. He was devoted to his art; it was his life, as everyone could see.

The buildings to which he contributed make a lengthy list. Gothic was the style chiefly used by the firm for its educational buildings and Klauder made himself a master of its possibilities. At Princeton he designed, for example, the Joline Memorial Dormitory and the Fine Memorial Hall; at the University of Pennsylvania, Franklin Field and Hutchinson Gymnasium, among others. The Princeton work is, perhaps, his greatest monument. Better known is the sensational Cathedral of Learning at Pittsburgh, forty-two stories tall. He had the imagination to use the Gothic style freely, without a suggestion of the slavish copyist. Upon his drawing board it became an inspiration, never a restraint. As a result, he left himself free to do excellent work in other styles. One of his much praised designs is that of the University of Colorado at Boulder, done throughout in a primitive Italian style, admirably suited to the landscape of the region.

Geoffrey Parsons
1938 Century Memorials