Interview with Arthur Hove and Anne Biebel

Arthur Hove and Anne Biebel (#281)

BT: So why don't we begin, just as we began with Art. [? essentially ?], I thought you said it really well the first time.

AB: Does anybody know how to pronounce this fellow's name? Rague I always want to--

AH: That's what I--

AB: Rague that sounds so spaghetti sauce-y.

AH: Yeah. Rag-uet? Rag-weed?

BT: That will give people something to connect to. Why don't you start out exactly as you just did, and if we can move on from there, right into the development of the land, and plan-- and Anne, again, I think a good way for you people to signal is Anne, if you have something to say, you might just reach and touch Art's arm, and then Art, when an appropriate place comes, you can just stop for a second. We need a second between, because, you know, there might be some cutting here. OK, why don't we start with Art.

AH: Well, the university is very fortunate in the sense that it has one of the more beautiful campus sites in the country, and the property came to the 00:01:00university by virtue of it's being offered by a local man named Aaron Vanderpool, who had a group of lots here on what was then called College Hill, and he offered these lots for sale to the University, and the regents agreed that this would be a good site for the University, and they purchased the property, and that's when the campus began to be developed. Now with this property being such as it is, the original plan, which was devised by an architect named John Rague took into account the hill itself, and at the top of the hill was to be a fairly traditional college building, and that would be the main hall, or the principal university edifice, I guess you could call it. And 00:02:00that would be flanked by, in the original plan, four buildings. Only two of those buildings were built. The first campus building was North Hall, and subsequently, South Hall was constructed, and finally, what we know today as Bascom Hall, which was called originally Main Hall and then later University Hall.

So this location was a particularly favorable one, both at the time, and in subsequent years. Of course, the university has been known for the beauty of its campus.

BT: Do you want to just go over the completion of North Hall? We don't have a date in there at all, and let's just see if you can talk about the completion of North-- when it was started, when the plan was started. If you can remember, and the dates [UNINTELLIGIBLE]. Wait, wait. OK.

AH: The Rague plan came forward at the request of Chancellor Lathrop, who was the first head of the University. The Rague designed plan in 1850, and shortly thereafter, North Hall was constructed, and was available in 1854. And that became, then, the first university building.

BT: Anne, do you have anything you can add about the actual construction of the halls, or the design of them?

AB: Well, Rague was the architect, as well as the principal planner of this arrangement of what was to have been five buildings, initially. He was working in an Italian renaissance style that was, you know, pretty typical of the time. He used indigenous block. later, I don't know if you want me to bring this up 00:04:00now, but later-- I'm sorry--

BT: Start with later.

AB: Later, in 1908, Laird and Cret were so impressed with the buildings, Bascom and the original buildings of the University, that they recommended that subsequent buildings follow suit. Be built of similar indigenous yellow stone, or yellow brick, and have this sort of tempered Italian renaissance stylistic affiliation.

AH: I think it's interesting, from that standpoint, to note that Wisconsin, and of course one of the world's famous architects, Frank Lloyd Wright, used one of his principles, the idea that you would use native material in the design of your buildings, and you would try to take advantage of what was available to you. So we see this kind of thing developing right at the beginning, in terms of the construction of the oh major buildings. And we have that warm, beautiful 00:05:00stone, that was quarried, just what was west of town, here, in what we know as Shorewood Hills.

AB: There was a front portico, a rounded portico, originally, that was removed in 1894, and then the dome was also part of the original construction. And that, of course, burnt in 1916.

BT: Could you rephrase that and say where the portico and dome, that they were part of University Hall, [UNINTELLIGIBLE] context?

AB: OK. University Hall, Bascom as we know it now, was originally designed with a rounded portico as its front entrance. There was also a dome. The portico was removed in 1894, and then the dome burnt in 1916. Shortly after the fire, there was talk of-- the state capital was being reconstructed at this time, and there was talk of displacing the dome from the former capital building, and moving it to the University, and affixing it too what was left of Bascom. So the building 00:06:00has changed over time. Bascom, or University Hall, has been subject to additions on either side of the original structure, done at different points in time, the east and west wings.

BT: Now, I think, from there, maybe we could, if either of you could talk for a second about why the other two buildings weren't completed, we could segue way into the building that was done after these three buildings were completed. [UNINTELLIGIBLE]

AH: I don't know why--

BT: OK, let's-- you have any idea why?

AB: Mm-mm. I think it was sort of a--

BT: No, we have to--

AB: Oh, I'm sorry. The placement of the two flanking buildings seems a little flawed to me, in that if you look at the hill now, and see North and South Hall, and Bascom, as they stand, I don't really see where there would be room for the additional--

AH: Well, later, university plans showed, and we still have these drives, drives 00:07:00going up either side of the hill. And if you had built those two buildings there, you simply would not have access to hill without destroying what we know as the green space in front, there, which is sort of university commons in much the same way a lot of New England villages were constructed. So in order to make your way up the hill, you needed that access on either side.

BT: Now, I'm assuming that after the original plan, it was sort of catch-as-catch-can building on the campus, up until the Cret plan of 1907. Could we just talk, almost anecdotally, about some of the buildings? For example, Art, if you could talk about the old Science Hall burning down, and the new Science Hall, you can even add that wonderful little story that Watrous threw in the other day, they had no idea about there being an art gallery with fairly famous 00:08:00paintings that were burnt?

AH: Well, as the University began mature, legislature began to be sensitive to the fact that we had a number of resources here that were going to be important to the development of the state, and they wanted to encourage that. So in the 1870s, they appropriated some money to build what was then called a Science Hall. And the Science Hall not only had classroom and laboratory space, but it had a museum, a natural history museum, and it also had an art gallery in it.

And the University early on really developed an art collection, and one of the distinguished artists of the time, Thomas Moran, had passed through town, and had stayed for a while, and was commissioned to paint a couple scenes of Madison, both of lakes, Mendota and Menona. And in that gallery, there were 00:09:00these two paintings. We do have a copy of one of them. Unfortunately, neither of the originals survived, because the original Science Hall burned you in 1884, and we had to put in a replacement structure, which was built shortly thereafter.

And I think it reflects the legislature's sensitivity to the progress that we were making, academically, in the fact that they were not hesitant at all to replace the building, and to encourage the University to continue its activity.

AB: Well, in addition to Science Hall being constructed at that time, there were two other buildings, in addition to a boiler house, all built out of Conover's 00:10:00office, who was engineering professor at the time, and it was during these years that Frank Lloyd Wright was in his office as a draftsman, supplementing his minimal college education. So that's a sort of interesting aspect of the Science Hall thing.

BT: Let's go right into the development-- [LAUGHTER] [UNINTELLIGIBLE]

AH: The education wasn't minimal! He was here for a minimum amount of time. The education was substantial!

BT: Why don't you just do that one again.

AB: I think Art's clarified for me, thank you. No, I forgot what I said.

BT: No, but Frank Lloyd Wright, I think that's interesting.

AH: Frank Lloyd Wright was a student here, but for a short time.

AB: Well, for just courses.

BT: OK, why don't you start with that, and then let's say, let's go right into, the next major building plan came in, and then go right to the Cret plan of 1907. Anne, if you just want to tell that story, then you guys can decide who wants to go into the next one. Maybe Art can start, and Anne can jump in. OK?

AB: All right. Well, with regards to Science Hall, it was one of a complex of 00:11:00buildings that was being constructed at the time. This would be 1887. The buildings were being constructed out of Allen Conover's office, who was a university professor, and also in charge of engineering. He had a private practice in Madison, as well. Frank Lloyd Wright was working for him as a junior draftsman at this time, and he was doing this while he was taking courses at the University. He was never enrolled in a degree program.

AH: Now, of course, the university began to grow, by virtue of having these facilities, and by virtue of more and more people moving into the area, and students seeking college experience. So the size of the university began to grow quite substantially towards the end of the 19th century, and that momentum continued into the current century. It became obvious then that as the 00:12:00University was growing and becoming more complex, that we simply could not get by with the facilities that we had. That we would have to construct more facilities, and that we would need more diverse types of facilities, and that the campus could be expected to continue to expand. So therefore, it was obvious, shortly after the turn of the century, during the early stages of President Van Hise's administration, that we had to do some responsible planning if campus was to mature in an orderly way.

AB: Van Hise very much spearheaded this movement to develop the campus in terms of its physical plan. He was appropriated by the legislature a $200,000 a year 00:13:00building budget, which he fought and fought and fought to have the amount raised to $300 a year.

He was friends with an architect in Philadelphia by the name of Warren Laird who he had been corresponding with for a number of years, getting recommendations about different architectural problems and projects for the university campus. This evolved into Van Hise and the regents hiring Laird to undertake a developmental plan for the University. Laird recommended that this be done in conjunction with an assistant the university, his university, had recently hired, Paul Phillipe Cret, who had just finished from the Ecole des Beaux Arts in France, earned his degree there in 1903.

So you had this young, brilliant designer. Laird operated pretty much as the business partner in this concern, Cret the designer, Peabody, the Madison 00:14:00university architect, operated as something of a liaison.

I don't feel very verbal.

AH: The plan that came forward in 1908 was an enormously visionary plan. It provided for the use of an extended campus, one that went far beyond the hill, and it contained designs for locations of various disciplines and areas of concentration. It is, to look at as a drawing, a very beautiful plan.

The interesting thing is, if you take that 1908 plan, and superimposed on it a campus map of today, it's very close. Here we are, almost 90 years beyond the 00:15:00date that that plan came forward, and you can see how the campus evolved very much along the lines that were planned way back in 1908. So the anticipation that the planners had, at that time, was remarkable.

I think there's one other sort of ironic aspect of this, and that is Cret, being from the Beaux Arts school, liked heavy buildings. And so, if you look at that early plan, there was a lot of massive stone, and the lake was almost completely ignored in the plan. If you look at it, it's as though the lake was sort of the back door, and nobody paid much attention to it at all.

But the plan did contain what we know today as the areas for specific discipline, such as the humanities, and the sciences, and agricultural campus, and medicine, and engineering, and even athletics has a very definite place 00:16:00within the plan.

BT: What actually, we look at the plan today, and we can say that almost, we can see how the campus has almost followed this plan. But in terms of when the plan came, in 1907, what actual buildings were built because of the plan, and how did it affect the shape of the campus at that time?

AB: Well, the plan called for a grand entrance to the campus, a grand esplanade, to be in roughly the space lower campus is today. Architecturally, beyond-- well, in Cret's renderings, I think you can see the State Historical Society building very much setting the tone, in terms of its colonnade, and the Italian renaissance style. The buildings in Cret's drawings look, often, don't they, like the State Historical Society, just in different groupings around campus. As 00:17:00Art said, it did really address-- when you when you think that, at the time, there was just a smattering of buildings up on College Hill, and the scale of the plan was monumental. It was vast. It was taking the campus all the way back to Picnic Point, essentially. So it was visionary. It was also in this great beaux arts tradition that had piqued everybody's curiosity after the 1893 Columbian Exposition in Chicago, which had been designed along similar lines.

John Nolan when was working on a city plan for Madison at roughly the same time, just a little bit later, and he wrote a letter to Van Hise in which he, in fact, questioned the plan for not acknowledging the lake more fully. He was more, what would be called a naturalistic sort of landscape designer, and thought that Laird and Cret, his criticism was that they didn't acknowledge the lake. That 00:18:00the lake should have been used more fundamentally as a component in the design, instead of extending this axis from Bascom Hall down, closing the door on the natural beauty of the setting.

AH: I think it's to the university's credit, in the long run, that we does not forsake that natural beauty of the lakeshore and the approaches to it, which we now still can see very plainly, at such spots as Observatory Hill Overlook, and so forth. So we did not disrupt the view of the lake to any great degree, subsequently. And that still maintains beautiful vistas that we have on the campus at these upper levels.

BT: Now, the next thing, Anne, maybe you can start out talking about this, is 00:19:00the lower campus sketch by Peabody around 1920. And if you could give us, figure out a little break to get, the next major campus development after the Cret plan was the Peabody plan, something like that, sort of segue way.

AB: OK.

AH: Well, Peabody, when he went to be state architect-- wasn't that it?

BT: You're the expert. You want to start out, Art, and Anne can come in?

AH: Well, Arthur Peabody was the university architect until 1915. And then, he became the state architect, and as such, was still responsible for working with the University in developing campus. And one of the things that he came up with was a plan for the lower campus, which had been incorporated into the earlier, 00:20:001908 plan, and this refined it a little bit further.

AB: Well, I don't think it refined it, so much as, and I hate to say it, I think it almost bastardized it. It took the monumental elements out and made it sort of a humanities complex. It did away with the red gym, put in a new facility in lieu of Music Hall, it's rather pedestrian and heavy in its renderings, and I think one thing Arthur Peabody might have been after here, was that he was working on his design for the union at the time, and I think he wanted a lower campus that was then consistent with that building. And again, he didn't go much beyond Cret in terms of-- though 20 years had passed, he didn't go much beyond Cret's stylistic recommendations in that these buildings, for the most part, 00:21:00look like the State Historical Society, lining up-- you know, it's a quadrangle again. It doesn't have the drama, that beaux arts drama, that the 1908 lower campus did at all.

BT: And then we get into things like Trip and Adams and the development of that part of the campus. How does that coincide with all of this? Is that tied in in any way, or is that, those lovely dorms with their gate houses and all of that?

AH: No, I think that's a sort independent-- The development of what we know as Lakeshore Halls, which were the first dormitories on the campus beyond North and South Hall, which originally housed students, was something that was initiated when we received some funds to build dormitories. And of course, as the enrolment was increasing, there was pressure for the university to house 00:22:00students, as opposed to what had been done previously, literally turn them loose in the campus area, city nearby the campus. So it was a site that had developed and was available because the University was moving gradually west towards the University Bay, and we had an agricultural dean's house, we had some agricultural buildings at that end of the campus, and there was still space there to develop it. And once again, using the natural stone, which duplicated that, which we had encountered in the first building, the dormitories were set in this very wonderful lakeshore area, and provided a quite attractive place for students to reside.

AB: It seems to me that the dormitories were positioned in that location in the 1908 plan, and that is probably the one situation in which they do really take advantage of the views in the vicinity. And the playing fields, and everything else.

BT: Before we leave, I want to start getting into up toward World War II, and then into the big explosion afterwards. But one thing we didn't talk about early on, that I'd like to go back to, North and South, when we had the three buildings. If you could just give sort of a sketch of what life was like, the fact that the students lived in North and South Hall, the fact that the Sterling family actually lived in the dorm, the fact that they had these kinds of furnaces that were operating, and the fact that students actually would shoot quail out of their windows, and the classes were held, you know, where the classes were held and stuff. Just a little feeling for what the campus was actually doing.

AH: Those early buildings met a number of needs and fulfilled a number of uses.

They were, literally, the home of the students. They were the place where the students studied. They were the source of recreation, and sometimes the students didn't have to go very far, they just leaned out the window and fired off at the local game, because one of the things that students had to worry about in those days, was foraging, literally, for their own meals and so forth. That kept the costs down. And this being a beautiful natural setting, there was a hunting and fishing nearby, so we'd get a lot of this. And the students had to heat their own facilities, too. If you look at some of those early pictures of Bascom Hill, there aren't many trees there. I wonder if that isn't because they were all chapped down to heat the dormitories, or what have you!

But life was pretty spartan in those days, and students to lived together with 00:25:00the faculty in these buildings, and they studied, and they were all-purpose buildings, in many regards.

BT: Do you want to talk about the Sterling family for a second? Can you say anything about them?

AB: I think Art is probably better equipped to do that.

AH: Well, John Sterling was the first university professor. He met the first class, and was, in many ways, a father figure for a lot of the students, because he would do everything from teach them to rent them their beds, and issue their textbooks, and really have virtually all kinds of influence on their lives. And this continued throughout his career. He, on two separate occasions, served as acting president of the University, and was an enormous influence through his 00:26:00career, so that when he died, and they had a memorial service for him, there was a wreath of flowers with a blue ribbon, where it had the legend on it, Father of the University. And I think that we can regard Sterling both as the metaphorical as well as the actual father of the University, because of his long-time service, and enormous versatility that he showed as a faculty member, as an administrator, and he was, of course, beloved by the students because of the interest that he took in them.

BT: Excellent. Let's go now to-- the drums of war are approaching. I know in my history of how--

AH: Which war?

BT: World War II.

AB: Skip one!

BT: Civil War. We could go back to that if we wanted to.

AH: Spanish Americans. You furnish the picture, I'll furnish the war.

BT: I know that in the building of dormitories, there were some plans in progress, and everything was halted when the drums of war sounded, any kind of planning at all. Was there any other kind of general campus planning that came about that was halted with the onset of the war, and--?

AB: I have in my notes here--

BT: Don't say that.

AB: OK. In 1941, Dykstra's administration undertook a developmental plan that modified the 1908 plan. This involved a commission, and they pulled together a lot of data, and after extensive analysis concerning age of existing buildings, traffic patterns, and so on and so forth, they put together a proposal, nothing like the 1908 plan, but a proposal for construction of new buildings, 00:28:00development of roadway, so on and so fourth. Now, in reading through these manuscripts, or these documents, they're all full of sort of bureaucratic exchange, and they're a little difficult to work through. But as you noted earlier, everything stopped with the war.

AH: The Depression had, of course, an enormous influence on not only the University, but the whole society. So as the Depression deepened, there were a lot of things that weren't done here. And faculty realized that the University could not provide the resources that they could normally expect would be forthcoming, and they realized it to the point where many of them voluntarily 00:29:00took a salary cut to keep the university going.

And as the Depression begin to turn, and remove towards World War II, people began, again, to think about the development of the University, and to move towards meeting some of the needs that had obviously emerged as the University continued to grow, and as it was growing towards the eve of World War II.

Now, new administration had come in the form of Clarence Dykstra, who had replaced Glenn Frank, who was fired by the regents in 1937, there was a sense that, the Depression now being over, that we had to move forward. And so there 00:30:00was an effort to inventory what the university's needs were, and to develop a plan to meet those. This was beginning to emerge at the time, then, of course that the war was fast upon us, and so one had to then suspend activity, because all efforts focused on the war at that time, with the exception of Elizabeth Waters, a new residence hall, was built in the early 1940s and became available at that time.

BT: I think from here we could go to the post-war era, and talk about, sort of, a different kind of building. Excuse me, by the way, for forgetting about the Depression.

AH: I was born in it, so I remember!

BT: You said that, I was, oh my God, the Depression, I forgot all about the Depression! We can go and look at a different kind of housing, which was the 00:31:00temporary housing, the boom that followed the end of World War II.

AH: The biggest concern of the University following World War II who was to find means to accommodate all the veterans who were returning to of the campus, and who were having access to the university through the GI Bill. So the enrollment, which had been severely curtailed by the fact of the men, and later, women going off to war, was suddenly exploding. And there were two concerns, then. Where are we going to find the instructional space for these people, and most of them being older, many of them were married students. And so we had to find housing 00:32:00accommodations for them. And this included almost every available space we could think of in the community, and we went so far as to go north to Baraboo, where we took advantage of the facility that had been available to the workers at the ammunition plant up there, and created a little community of our own called Badger Village. And so we ranged as far afield as we could, and in fact, we even utilized every space that we could on campus, and in the community, so that there were students literally sleeping in churches. And even the home of the president of the University was used as a rooming house for students, in those days.

BT: One word from either one of you about the Quonset huts, the new shape that 00:33:00everybody got used to in such a hurry after World War II?

AH: Well, one of the-- so there was a sort of mushroom-like explosion, shall we say, on the campus, you know, as the University tried to create temporary accommodations. So the lower campus, what was then the mall, or the play field on the lower campus, suddenly sprouted these Quonset huts. And most people in, those days, recognized the Quonset huts as a temporary military building which was used. And those were constructed on lower campus to really serve as a kind of extra space for not just instruction, but for library facilities. And so we 00:34:00saw those developing. And then westward, at various locations on the campus, there were other temporary buildings that were built. In fact, some still exist at the corner of Breese Terrace in University Avenue, right across from the Congregational Church, we still have some vestiges of those temporary buildings from World War II.

So we had a lot of construction, which at the time was presumed to be temporary, but stayed with us for a long time. Then, at Camp Randall, the old Camp Randall Memorial Park, which is a Civil War memorial area, was completely transformed by a group of trailers that had been purchased from the military as surplus, and they were put down in that area, right east of the Camp Randall Stadium. And 00:35:00those were used as married student housing facilities. And so for a number of years, we did have temporary housing out there, until the enrollment boom subsided.

AB: The Quonset huts remained on the lower campus pretty much until they were cleared out to make way for the construction of Memorial Library in 1951.

I'm sorry. I really feel like I'm doing a bad job.

BT: You're falling into a [UNINTELLIGIBLE] where you're-- now, take the time. We've got a tape, we can let it roll for a minute, if you want. Just bring your thoughts together at that time. I want us to get Memorial Library next, so let's talk about that.

AB: Well I guess I wanted to then--

BT: No, no, no, just say it.

AB: I'm sorry. In 1948, Library Mall was also subject to another developmental plan that was sort of an offshoot of the 27 Peabody scheme. This was developed 00:36:00by the Wisconsin Foundation, and it could have been those Quonset huts, that sort of had everybody agitating for a more orderly arrangement. Again, it was just, you know, the space, the rectangular quadrangle, lined with the buildings. One component that was constructed that exists today is the [? Hagenau ?] Fountain, but that's about the only element of that plan that ever really was implemented for us to see as we walk around the campus today.

AH: One aspect of the Quonset huts on the lower campus was that they suddenly became billboards. And the students would periodically decorate them with slogans, or with announcements, and so even though they were rather ugly buildings, students, as they have a way of doing, transformed them into kind of a lively pictorial representation of student life at the time.

This tradition was begun a little bit earlier. On Langdon Street, there was a long brick wall in the 500 block, 600 block of Langdon Street, which was actually the back boundary of Professor Kiekhofer's home. And so this wall was called the Kiekhofer Wall, and it became, again, a billboard, and when the wall was destroyed, a lot of the painting that went on there was moved to the Quonset huts. And then a little bit later, during that time that the Humanities Building was being constructed, the building site there was bounded by this plywood fence, and so while the Quonset huts had gone in the meantime, students suddenly 00:38:00got another place where they could exercise their creativity, and decorated those walls periodically.

BT: Now, the one major building that popped up during this time, during the time right after World War II, was the Memorial Library. Art, could just give us a basic little rundown on that? And tie in E.B. Fred if you can, because it's sort of his--

AH: As the University's library collections began to grow, really, way back in the 1930s, it became obvious that the University's library, which was part of the Historical Society building, was becoming inadequate in terms of housing our collections. So by the end of World War II, in circularizing people on the campus, President Fred recognized that one of the prime needs of the University 00:39:00was a new library. And he felt that this would be something that had to be pushed through, if we were to move forward, academically. And so he worked very hard along with Lou Kaplan, who was one of the associate librarians at the time, to get this facility before the legislature, and get it constructed. Because the collections were simply not accessible. There were a lot of things that we had purchased, and books were being literally stuffed in corners and piled on top of each other, and so you may have had the collections, but they simply were not accessible. And President Fred recognized the need, and pushed forward this plan 00:40:00for the library. So in the early 1950s, we began construction, and the library was dedicated in fall of 1953, and then became one of our principal focal points for student study and activity.

BT: We have, then, the next major plan being the 1959 Sketch plan, right? And why don't we just jump right into that. We're going to go back and cover certain people and other things that we can pick up later on, but let's continue with the--

AH: The university did experience this tremendous enrollment boom at the end of World War II when the veterans came back. And enrollment, at that time, roughly peeked at between 18,000 and 20,000 students, which was phenomenal, of course, 00:41:00for the time. Then, in the early 1950s, when that generation had been educated, enrollment began to decline. And so in the early '50s, you get a drop back to what had been, if you had gone on a straight-line projection, a normal increase.

So in the early '50s, the enrollment was around 12,000, 10,000 to 12,000, roughly. Then, of course, as the enrollment began to climb, and more and more high school graduates began to go on to college, the enrolment increased progressively. So by the mid-'50s, it became obvious that we were sort of running out of space on the existing campus, at that time. The regents, 00:42:00recognizing this, appointed a land acquisition committee for Madison and Milwaukee, also. One has to remember that in the '50s, in 1955, the university had acquired the old Milwaukee Normal School campus, and we had a separate university at Milwaukee. So the development began to encompass not jut what was happening in Madison, but what was happening in Milwaukee.

Nevertheless, in Madison it was apparent that we would have to move south of University Avenue. It was also apparent that with the increased size, not just of the university but of the community, there was going to be a lot of interface between pedestrian traffic, between vehicular traffic, and there was, if we were 00:43:00to plan this campus correctly, the need to balance all of the various concerns, that is, the need for more space, the need to preserve the beauty of the campus, the need to respond to the academic programs that were being developed. We not only increased enrollment, but our knowledge began to explode, so we begin to get developments of academic areas that we had not anticipated before.

This, then, led to the development of a plan which would take these factors into account. The plan came forward in 1958, and was approved by the regents in 1959. Its principal focus was to deal with these numerous issues about the use of space, and also, to recognize that the University would begin moving into the nearby community, which, up until that time, had been primarily residential.

BT: Before we get into the actual buildings themselves, what that resulted in, let's go back for a minute to another problem that sort of expands the plan timeline a little bit, and that's the whole question of parking, which is both serious and amusing at the same time.

We can start out, maybe, by talking about how transportation was in the early days, Van Hise with his horse, for example, things like that. And how parking, students would never bring their cars, and most professors lived within walking distance, and so that was never a problem. And how that finally developed. And get into some of the more amusing, creative solutions, like eliminating one of the bays, and Lake Mendota. Are either of you familiar with that? They were going to fill in University Bay, and make it a parking lot. And they were also going to make a parking lot, where was it, Ralph, at the bottom of Bascom Hall?

AH: No, on the hill. You're going to drive in the bottom of the hill.

BT: And it was also a bomb shelter. So Anne, why don't you start out with Van Hise and the horses, and we'll just move from there.

AB: Well, in the early days of the University, State Street came right up to Park Street. And at the base of the hill, there were trolley tracks. And up until, oh gosh, I think it was probably the '30s or so, and I think that students were localized to the extent that they were very close to campus, in approved rooming houses, and transportation was not really an issue. If they were a little further off campus, you know, the trolley would take them right to College Hill.

AH: We have a picture of Charles Van Hise on a horse. And this represents a 00:46:00number of aspects of his character. One is that, of course, the horse was used when he was reviewing an ROTC parade at the time. The second is that, in terms of his leadership, Van Hise was literally a man on horseback. He was a very effective leader, and so we see him, metaphorically, as a man on horseback. Of course, the other practical aspect of that, is during that time that he was president, one of the more common ways of getting around town was to riding a horse. So we didn't have a lot of automobiles chasing around the campus, or the city. This, of course, began to change progressively through the years.

Now, by the time we got to the 1950s, not only the president of the University have a car, but so did a lot of the students. And this became a problem in the 00:47:00'50s to the point where those students who did have cars were not allowed to drive on campus during the peak periods of the day, roughly from 9 in the morning until 3 P.M. So there was a sort of a caste system at work in that regard.

Then, of course, we were faced with the reality that if we were going to preserve green space on the campus, and still build these buildings, there wasn't much room for parking. So the parking lots that did develop were a very minimal. Very small. We didn't have a lot of space to spread out, and develop parking lots that would accommodate large numbers of cars. We did, at one time, once the Quonset huts were removed from the lower campus, we even had parking down there, for a brief time, on the old play field. But that, of course, was 00:48:00eliminated fairly rapidly.

Now, the state and the city were conscious of this. And we did go through a period where the city was discouraging any kind of parking accommodation, because they wanted to promote mass transit. And this meant that the local planning commission would not approve additional parking spaces for the campus. So our parking spaces reached roughly 9,000 and peeked at that particular level. This is, of course, as the enrollment is increasing, and the number of people employed at the university increases, and we just simply run out of space.

There were some rather interesting schemes that arose as a result of trying to find ways to accommodate cars without necessarily corrupting the campus. One, which was not very long entertained, was to fill in a portion of University Bay and make a parking lot out of it. Another was an ingenious scheme to put a parking ramp under Bascom Hill, which would mean that you would excavate virtually the whole front half of Bascom Hill, make a parking lot, and then put the dirt back, and at Park Street entrance, you'd have all these cars coming and going. Well, of course, the cost of doing that was phenomenal, so that scheme 00:50:00was abandoned. Another thing was to do a similar scheme for the lower campus, through the Library Mall, as we know, but of course we discovered that if you dug down very far there, that you'd hit the water table right away, so you'd have to have a parking lot for submarines, not automobiles, when you went there.

A couple of our buildings did incorporate parking, the most notable being Helen C. White Hall, at the end of Park Street, which does have a parking garage in it, and was designed to accommodate that demand.

BT: You might also just mention that the new business school is making a, very briefly.

AH: This demand still continues, of course, because this is a very congested part of the city. And we are in the process now of building a new business 00:51:00school, and part of that business school will include a parking facility, which will replace some of the parking that was in the existing area, that is the block bounded on south and north by Johnson Street and University Avenue, respectively. And this will provide spaces for staff and faculty, but it will also provide public parking for access to the numerous cultural facilities and commercial facilities that are in the area.

BT: Boy, I had no idea about that water table thing. That's great.

AH: Yeah. Sure, you don't have to go down very far and you hit water immediately. So the engineering--

BT: OK. Let's turn back now toward, we're moving ahead real well on the Sketch 00:52:00plan. We can talk about, how did things go from there? Is that where you got three phase development? Did that come out of the Sketch plan, with the high-rises and all that stuff?

AH: The Sketch plan, of course, was a living document, and it began to be refined. What it did was to set out various areas of the campus for development of the various disciplines. So if you look at the layout of the campus, we have the lower campus, which is primarily the cultural corridor, plus south of University Avenue, we have the addition of residence halls, and some academic buildings. Those academic buildings are related primarily to cultural activities, specifically Vilas Hall, which houses the Theater and Drama program, 00:53:00Communication Arts, and of course, the University's broadcasting activities. And then, we have the southeast dormitory area, which houses a number of our students, roughly 35,000 students in this particular area. And there's a combination of graduate student and undergraduate student housing here in the area.

In the meantime, we were developing additional housing beyond the original lakeshore sites in the Eagle Heights area. And so those two areas were set aside for housing development. Now, the Hill being basically oriented to Letters and Science, the College of Letters and Science, and the biological sciences on the 00:54:00west slope, and then we move out towards agriculture, and then to the south and west, we have the University Engineering Program developing.

So the plan took all of those factors into account. It also recognized that we had pretty much run out of land, so that we couldn't develop in a horizontal sense. We would now have to move to make our buildings soar, so to speak, into the air. And during the 1960s, when we had our real explosion of campus development, much of the construction involved high-rise construction facilities. The first one, and notable example, being Van Vleck Hall, which 00:55:00houses the mathematics department, and contains general classroom space, was put down in what we call, in the planning business, a very small footprint area. So we could get a tremendous amount of square footage there, without using up a great deal of land.

And then subsequently, we did a similar thing with Van Hise Hall, which has roughly 17 storeys on it, and does not seem to dominate to landscape because if its architectural design. That is, set back from the street, and has a tower which is visible, obviously, but still not overwhelming.

BT: Anne, what about some of the aesthetics of the building, after? You know, we 00:56:00have sort of our golden years, where we have these beautiful buildings that were coming up on campus, and then we have--

AH: Our sandstone years.

BT: Our sandstone years, yeah. And then we go into the, some of the more modern stuff, like some of the buildings behind Bascom Hall, which aren't nearly as attractive, and Humanities, which is not exactly one of our beauties on campus. Can you comment on the, you talked about the different styles you had up on Bascom Hill, with the different porticoes. Can you characterize this later building in any way, besides just saying, and if it is just a mish-mash, just say that it's a mish-mash.

AB: It seems to me that most of the post-World War II building on campus is functional, primarily functional. Especially in area of Library Mall, where you have a combination of old buildings and new buildings. I think that great care has been taken to give it an aesthetic cohesiveness that is not quite to the extent that Paul Cret might have imagined it, or even Arthur Peabody. But you 00:57:00have a common roofline going around, the buildings all have sort of classically rendered facades, though in, for instance, the case of Memorial Library, it's in more of a modern kind of reticence, a more abstracted sort of form. The Humanities complex, that is a form of architecture that's referred to as Brutalism, [? sam ?] which seems to be an apt characterization. When you talk about Van Vleck and Van Hise, those buildings are functional, not excessively beautiful, but they blend in. You know? And I think that that was always the objective. Tall, big, functional, nice.

AH: If you look at what these buildings say, they don't say something about humanity and one's aspirations. What they say, basically, is cost per square foot. And that became the primary consideration, because with this enormous 00:58:00building program that we had, there was always a concern of, well, what is it going to cost, and how can we get the most for our money? So the designs followed the needs of the program, but they were based on what you could get by spending a certain amount of money, and how many square feet could you get for the money that you had for the project. And so much of this translates into an aesthetic being based on funds that were available.

BT: Now, in terms of people, we've talked about Cret, Peabody, Rague, and Laird. When building goes along after the '20s, we start getting the '30s, '40s, '50s, '60s, are we getting any particular individuals who have that kind of name 00:59:00recognition, or are we getting the state architects? Who is doing this building, and is there anyone distinctive amongst us lot that we should be talking about?

AB: Well, Kirchhoff was the state architect.

BT: Well, Harry Weese.

AB: Oh, Harry Weese did the Humanities complex, [? Ann Alvium ?] out of Chicago. And he's quite renowned nationally. Beyond that, but more general, going back a little ways, post-World War II architecture was largely, my impression, sort of an administrative thing. Somebody would say, we need a new building. It was a good thing these plans had been put in place, and were constantly being revised, because I think that that has a lot to do with why, I mean, how we can have these sort of disparate styles, where a concern with cost became primary, and functionalism, and yet maintain a cohesive look about the campus, where spaces flow.

AH: One of the aspects of the Sketch plan of '59, and subsequent modifications 01:00:00of it, was that there were certain segments of the campus that had developed a visual cohesiveness in the sense of color. So if you look at the Bascom Hill area, it is primarily a soft cream color. And buildings in that area have subsequently been color-keyed in that regard. They're either oh white-colored or cream-colored. As you move towards agriculture, Agricultural Hall, which was one of the early buildings, has a red tile roof. And so many of the buildings that 01:01:00were subsequently built, in the modern era, had red brick, or a red color to them. And a similar pattern exists for the engineering campus, and that's a sort of a little deeper cream color, a little sharper, a brown perhaps, than we see on the hill. But those buildings are all kept to similar color, in one regard or another. And then, of course, if you go all the way out to the Health Sciences Complex now, we have a darker brown which characterizes the hospitals and clinics area.

BT: Let's go back and talk for just a moment, and Anne, you mentioned it in one of your answers, but let's define it. We haven't really talked about it. That's the 1945 University Campus Planning Commission, subsequently called Committee, 01:02:00or was it Committee first, and then Commission?

AH: Commission, and then Campus Planning Committee.

BT: Why don't you talk just a little bit about that, and some of the motivators behind the early development of that committee.

AB: Are you referring to their Wisconsin Foundation?

AH: No.

AB: Oh, then I don't, then Art better handle it.

AH: As part of this renewed interest in building that emerged towards the end of the Depression, and part of Dykstra's early administrative activity, we created the Campus Planning Commission. And this had do with our interaction with the state, also. And so that group begin to develop some further refinements of the early 1908 plan, and to try to adapt to the contemporary realities. And so 01:03:00buildings, then, had to be reviewed by this commission, University of Wisconsin Planning Commission.

By the end of the decade, that is, roughly 1949, we begin to, again, develop a rather substantial backlog, and things begin to really accelerate. So when we reached the '50s, the workload began to increase, and with the creation of the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, it became obvious that it would be too difficult to try to integrate these two activities. So in 1959, we subdivided and created Campus Planning Commissions for both the university at Madison and 01:04:00at Milwaukee. And then, the subsequent development of the University Campus Building Program became the responsibility of the Campus Planning Committee.

And the first head of that was Dean of Engineering Kurt Wendt. Up to that point, the person responsible for literally all of building development on the campus was the Superintendent of Buildings and Grounds, who was named Albert Gallistel, and he had held that position from 1907 to 1959, which gave us 52 years of continuity. He was a very capable, very visionary individual, and did oversee an 01:05:00enormous amount of campus development, and did have certain sensitivities which preserved a lot of the campus beauty during that time.

BT: OK, excellent. Anne, what about, or if you can't answer it, Art, let's talk for a minute about the relationship of the state and the university in terms of building. Was there was a partnership relationship, was there, from, we talked a little bit about some of the animosity early on. How did that develop over time? How could you characterize it? Was it a fairly friendly relationship? I mean, obviously, there's an adversarial relationship, you know, because the state doesn't always want to give funds, and the university wants them. But how could you characterize it, overall?

AH: The planning for the buildings, and the financing of the buildings, was a fairly hit or miss activity through the years. Much of it, of course, as it 01:06:00always does, depended on the funding that was available. So even as recently as the development of the Memorial Library in the late '40s and '50s, we saw that if the university was to get a building, it more or less had to convince legislature to appropriate funds for this purpose.

Then the state created the Department of Administration in the late 1950s. And part of that department was the Bureau Facilities Management, which was to oversee the development of the state building program. So about the time our Campus Planning Committee was coming into play, the state, in turn, was 01:07:00developing this Facilities Management Program, and a separate appropriation for state buildings. I mean, not only the University was growing, but the entire state administration was growing, so you had this enormous state building program, operated throughout the state, for facilities of government.

So we, then, began to be plugged into this process, and we had to develop our own priority list over an extended period, usually a 6 to 10 year period, and that list, then would go downtown with the budget every two years. And the Building Commission which was created, State Building Commission, would consider 01:08:00that as a separate appropriation.

BT: I just glanced up at the clock, and looks like we've been going an hour and ten minutes. But I've got just a few more areas I want to cover. Then I want Ralph to jump in and put in his money's worth.

AH: Is he still awake?

BT: Oh, I think he's very much awake. Let's move out to the West End for a while, and just talk about that more recent development, the University Hospitals. Just characterize it, so we have it out there. And then, if you could, we haven't had much building recently, but we're starting to get a little bit more with the engineering, the addition to the engineering building and to the business building. If you feel like you'd like to just sort of speculate on what building we might be seeing in the near future at UW, on the campus, if that's possible. That's pure speculation. This is where people in 100 years can say hahaha, you were stupid. But let's just kind of leave it on that note.

So let's start out with the West End, the development of the building of the hospitals, then a little bit that's going on now, and then push it up towards the future.

AH: As I said earlier, we began to run out of land at about the time our space increases developed in a gigantic way. One part of this was the old Wisconsin General Hospital, which was constructed in what later became almost the center of the campus. So in this area, we had not only a full-blown hospital operation, but we had a whole medical science research activity being developed. And the 01:10:00increased interest on the part of the federal government, and society in general, in health-related research, meant that increased funds were coming to the University which stimulated further academic and research development, and this meant that we were simply running out of space.

So we recognized that we have to increase our capacity here. We couldn't do that in a location that was there since 1925. And we looked to the west, as America's always been doing, of course, and saw that we had this whole research, agricultural research area, in the University Bay. And that had, for years, been 01:11:00experimental farm. And the only building that had been constructed out there was the Veterans Administration Hospital. Then north of that, for many years, we had still maintained that as an agricultural research facility, plus there was a certain amount of natural development in there, in the University Bay area.

So it was decided that the most feasible thing to do would be to construct a modern-day hospital and research facility on the western edge of the campus. And this, then, became the most expensive and substantial single state-funded activity, building activity, up until that time. And this was going forward in the 1970s. And so we constructed that facility, which included the university 01:12:00hospitals and clinics, as well as a number of research facilities, plus the School of Nursing facility, and the library.

BT: Let's talk about the future of the university. Any direction, building direction, we're talking about now. We have a business school being built now. How fast is the University going to continue its expansion, and if so, in which direction, which way? Care to hazard a guess? This is an optional question.

AB: I really don't know. I wouldn't mind a Black Earth extension.

AH: We have never been modest in our ambitions. And during the 1960s, which was the boom era for building, it was also the boom era for enrollment. And so our 01:13:00enrollment began to accelerate beyond what we had anticipated. At one time, Fred Harrington, who was then president, and was a very dynamic and aggressive leader, said that the University, conceivably, could grow to accommodate 60,000 students. In order to do that, we would have to have two campuses. one would be the current campus, which would be for upperclassmen and graduate students, then we would build a satellite two-year campus, out on what is the [? Charmini Reader ?] Farm location on the southwest side of Madison, it's now the site of the University Research Park. We would build a whole new campus there for the 01:14:00first two years, freshman, sophomore, instruction. And then, if need be, we would bus students back and forth between the two campuses.

Well, this never quite came to be, but it was certainly a gleam in Fred Harrington's eye, and was, at that time, certainly considered to be a very feasible development of the university. We did sort of peek at roughly 45,000, and we didn't build that satellite campus, and we since used it for a satellite holding facility for School of Veterinary Medicine, and also for University Research Park development.

Now, if we talk about the future development of the campus, once again we're faced with that problem. We don't have any more space to speak of. We now sort 01:15:00of have exhausted it with the current construction of our School of Business, which takes up virtually 8/10 of a city block, and will contain an enormous amount of square footage.

So if we're going to increase our space capacity, we have to do one of two things. We have to retrofit, is the word that the planners use, our existing buildings, and modernize them, or we would have to raze some existing structures, and replace them with new structures. But once again, we will have to go up, as opposed to out.

And any time you build a new building, then you're back to that parking question, of where are you going to put everybody, and what kind of parking facilities will have to be incorporated with it. So our, we do still have this 01:16:00very practical problem of our physical boundaries to limit our flexibility.

BT: Ralph, any comments, questions?

RALPH: Yeah, I've got sort of two or three things, just brief responses, really. Can we skip back to the compression, and talk briefly about the Memorial Union, which is kind of an odd thing to have been able to put up during the Depression? I've got a whole program-- [UNINTELLIGIBLE]

BT: Two-part program, as a matter of fact. We just want to--

AH: Well, actually the union--

BT: You heard me there, start over.

AH: Van Hise had, as part of his administration, conceived of the development of a union, which would be a sort of gathering place for students and faculty to interact, and to explore intellectual questions, as well as to provide a social 01:17:00environment, where one would get the sense of college and university. This was obviously something that state probably would not fund, but it was something that seemed to be educationally important and essential. And so a number of people picked up the idea and moved forward with funding for this. And there was a private fundraising campaign that was developed to raise money for the construction of the union. And that went on into the mid-1920s, and construction was begun in 1924 on the union, and completed in 1928.

It did provide us, at that time, with a marvelous facility, which is still very 01:18:00much a part of campus life. In fact, the idea was so compelling, that in the 1960s, when the population base of the campus begin to shift, we recognized that the Memorial Union would not be able to supply the needs of the total campus student population, and so we constructed another union on the southwest edge of the campus to service the students and faculty and staff in that area. People at the time thought, well, this isn't maybe a pretty good idea, because is it going to be able to sustain itself? Because it would have to pay for itself. And of course, we're now roughly 20 years beyond that initial decision, and Union South 01:19:00has a very prominent role in the activity in that whole area of the campus.

BT: Thank you, I'd forgotten about [UNINTELLIGIBLE].

RALPH: One other point, if you could talk about the Sketch Plan, in terms of, where did this strange name come from? I haven't found that anyplace. Does anyone know?

AH: No, I suppose it's a sketch in the sense that it's always sort of, sketching out some ideas-- That's OK. There are two other quick ones here. If [UNINTELLIGIBLE] comment about this other plan and end goal, sort of looking at University Avenue, [UNINTELLIGIBLE] umbrella.

AB: Have you ever heard of that?

AH: Oh, yeah. Well, all right. As the University moved south, and as the Madison community began to grow, we recognized, of course that, there was an enormous 01:20:00problem with regard to the student traffic moving back and forth between the ah Hill campus, and then the campus south of University Avenue, and that this would present some problems, with regard to pedestrians and vehicles getting in each other's way.

And so an idea came forward. Well, let's lower University Avenue from Park Street to the railroad crossing, roughly, and then we'll build all of these pedestrian overpasses. And building south of University Avenue will all contain a plaza level, which will be interconnected connected from roughly the site of the present Chemistry Building to Vilas Hall.

And if you look at Vilas Hall today, and the Humanities building, there are the outlines of that pedestrian plaza there. We never went west, but we have a sample of that. So you can come off of Bascom Hill, take the over pass at Park Street, and go all the way to the University Square shopping center, without crossing the street. And that is part of that plan that never subsequently got developed, because we didn't develop the a pedestrian plaza area west of Park Street, to speak of.

RALPH: That's exactly what I wanted.

BT: Anything else?

RALPH: Nope, that's it.

BT: I think we can just play that!

AH: Yeah. You said you wanted to talk about some of the people [UNINTELLIGIBLE]? 01:22:00You want to bring that in? Well, I mean what do you want to know about them?

BT: We just wanted to get some of these people mentioned, and I think you've mentioned all of them, but there's one person, we are missing, come to think of it, and that's A.W. Peterson.

AH: Well, he is-- he's not that tied into the building program. Although we do have the administration building named after him. And he is the architect of our whole business enterprise here.

BT: Now, here's one thing we can talk about, for just a minute, and then we really are going to call it quits. And that's, again, I think of it only because our listening to Jim Watrous and his wonderful talk the other day. Talk, just for a moment, as you did about Memorial Union, talk about the Elvehjem Arts Center, the development of that. Do you feel like you can do that? The funding behind it and the idea? OK, go.

AH: One of the things about buildings is they're a place for storing things. And 01:23:00through the years, the University had acquired, in a kind of random, haphazard way, number of important works of art. And there weren't too many people that thought much about that, except Professor James Watrous, who was a member of the Art faculty, originally, and then subsequently the faculty of the Department of Art History.

And being an artist himself, and of course being interested in the cultural heritage of our civilization, he was concerned about the well-being of these artworks. And the University had, of course, been one of the first institutions, college and university institutions in the country, to acknowledge the 01:24:00importance of art by the appointment of John Stewart Currie as Artist in Residence in the late 1930s.

And so we were kind of talking out of both sides of our mouth here, and Professor Watrous, over a number of years, spearheaded a drive to provide the University with an art museum. Now, this art museum would not be just place to hang the paintings that were otherwise neglected. It would also be a principal instructional facility. So through Jim Watrous's leadership, and through the generosity of many of our alumni, principally the Brittingham family, and through the ultimate leadership of President Conrad Elvehjem, we did get 01:25:00constructed, on campus the Elvehjem Museum of Art, which provides us with an art gallery, it provides us with an instructional and research facility, and it provides us with one of the premier college art libraries in the country. So we're very fortunate to have this cultural facility as part of the lower campus development area.

BT: Cut! Great. Thank you. I'm glad I remembered that. Such a nice--