Caltech: A World of Science Housed in Architectural Beauty

Einstein slept there, as did Madame Curie.

There, where geology is a serious discipline, the boulders that for years adorned the campus garden were . . . fake.

There, a statue of Apollo, modeled after one in the Vatican, was dusted off after decades in storage and displayed in the Braun Athletic Center--after repairs that included sculpting new private parts.

It all happened at Caltech in Pasadena, best known to outsiders as home to those who tell us after each quake just how badly the Earth was shaking, and where professors collect Nobels like ordinary folk collect Beanie Babies.

But to Romy Wyllie it is an architectural treasure, worthy of the two years she spent writing and researching “Caltech’s Architectural Heritage: From Spanish Tile to Modern Stone,” a lavishly illustrated coffee-table book from Balcony Press.

An interior designer who guided restoration of the campus Athenaeum, Wyllie was co-founder in 1985 of Caltech Architectural Tour Service, affectionately known as CATS, an endeavor that earned her honorary alumna status. She is also one of the guides who conduct weekly campus tours.

To see Caltech through her eyes is to see every corbel and cornice, every gargoyle and Gothicism on the Romanesque-Spanish-Byzantine buildings erected early last century in keeping with the master plan of noted New York architect Bertram Goodhue, who was hired in 1916. Of the 50 buildings on campus, 18 were constructed before World War II.

But her book is not all bricks and mortar. It is spiced with sprightly historical footnotes dating from the founding of Caltech as Throop Polytechnic in 1891 by one Amos Gager Throop, a transplanted New Yorker.

The book’s genesis, Wyllie explained over lunch in the clubby Athenaeum on campus, with famed physicist Stephen Hawking dining not far away, was twofold: An archive had evolved as a result of research by CATS on campus buildings. And, Thomas E. Everhart, who retired as university president in 1997, “had money left over in a discretionary fund and thought [the book] would be a nice legacy.”

So, with about $100,000 from that fund, Wyllie set about the task. She unearthed early correspondence between campus leaders and architects. She came across some delightful nuggets about the school and those who built it.

Who knew that during World War I trenches were dug on the then 22-acre campus for military exercises?

That the since-demolished 10-foot wind tunnel in Caltech’s Guggenheim Laboratory was used during World War II by the major aerospace companies to test model aircraft?

That the Einstein Suite above the Athenaeum was so named because Albert Einstein and his family stayed there during his stint as a visiting professor in 1932-33? It was originally built as an apartment for lumber baron and institute benefactor Arthur Fleming, who, learning that he would have to pay for the wood paneling in the sitting room, opted for cheaper white mahogany over walnut.

That the suite, once occupied by Madame Curie, and other guest rooms occupy a space that earlier was an open, unheated loggia rented to grad students for $10 a month--until someone decided that such “low-quality housing” was inappropriate for the university?

That one of the early landscapers, one Beatrix Caldwalader Jones of New York, whose clients included Roosevelts and Rockefellers, was never paid for her work at Caltech because the school’s endowment fund plummeted in the stock market crash? (Refused her requested annual fee of $100, she declined the school’s offer to make her a Caltech associate instead).

As for those faux rocks in the Throop garden pools designed by A. Quincy Jones, founder Throop’s great-granddaughter in 1985 gave the college a grant to replace them with the real thing. A Caltech professor headed a rock search team that found specimens flushed out of the San Gabriel Mountains. (Two phony rocks remain, housing pumps for the waterfall).

Waxing Poetic Over Fixtures and Fountains

As we tour the now 124-acre campus, Wyllie waxes poetic over a light fixture designed to look like the planet Saturn; a carved stone fiddler crab that adorns a side of the building known as Kerckhoff II; a fountain with tiles arranged to mimic the computer circuitry used in researching how owls hear their prey; a marble Art Deco birdbath from England.

She knows every pilaster and parapet, colonnade and Corinthian capital. Her favorite spot? An interior dome outside the Gates Annex library with eight circular stained-glass windows in a snowflake pattern.

She explains how the postwar Booth Computing Center lost its circular exterior bumps, an ill-conceived design element.

“The students began calling it Mammary Hall, so the trustees had them hammered off,” Wyllie says.

As we pause at the Arnold and Mabel Beckman Laboratory of Chemical Synthesis, she recites a short history of the beaux-arts Calder arches, sculpted by Alexander Stirling Calder, father of Alexander Calder, abstract sculptor of mobiles. Removed from Throop Hall when it was razed in 1989, they were given to the city of Pasadena, which found no use for them. Placed in open storage, they had grass growing over them before they were rescued and given a new home.

At Throop, they’d been installed with a mask representing the arts and an anvil representing science transposed.

“I’ve often wondered if Calder noticed,” Wyllie said. That little error was corrected the second time around.

Stopping at the Norman W. Church Laboratory for Chemical Biology, Wyllie relates a favorite bit of campus lore about racehorse breeder Church. It seems he’d been accused of doping one of his racehorses and, eager to absolve himself, asked a Caltech scientist--”It was either Linus Pauling or Arnold Beckman”--to test the animal. When the horse was found drug-free, “supposedly Church was so grateful that he turned around and gave this building to Caltech.”

We do not stop at the Robert A. Millikan Memorial Library, a hideously incongruous nine-story black and white modern tower designed in the ‘60s by L.A. architects Flewelling and Moody. How did it get there?

“It was a really terrible time,” Wyllie says. “Almost all the people connected with the Goodhue period had died or retired. A lot of people wanted to tear down the old buildings and start over.”

Ornate revivalist architecture had fallen out of fashion. Modern was de rigueur.

Indeed, when she set out to write her book, there were those who asked, “How are you going to explain the library?”

The best explanation, Wyllie says, is that the trustees “had tried for 10 years to get a donor” when finally Dr. Seeley G. Mudd offered $2.4 million. He chose the architects. “He wanted complete control. There were a lot of protests,” but up it went.

As Vincent Scully (no, not that Vin Scully), professor emeritus of art history at Yale University, commented in reviewing Wyllie’s book: “Failing one of the institution’s famous explosions, nothing much can be done about the library.”

Scully, in a phone interview from his New Haven, Conn., home, lamented the failure of Caltech to follow the Goodhue master plan.

“It really was pretty wonderful . . . really brilliant.” In that era, he added, people “knew how to put buildings together to make a community.” The library, in his view, is “much too big and out of scale and primitive in its forms, compared to the wonderful richness of the forms Goodhue and those people were able to use. It’s very sad.”

The art historian, who spent a year at Caltech in the mid-’90s, was struck by how the overall campus plan “seems a natural outgrowth of the structure of the town. In so many college towns, you get the campus, which is one thing, and often more coherent than the rest of the town. But in Pasadena, basically the grid of Caltech fits right in. It’s very beautifully related to Pasadena.”

A Beautiful, Tragic Kind of Place

Despite the Millikan Library and other postwar buildings that “completely destroyed the scale” of the master plan, Scully still finds the campus “a very beautiful place. It’s also kind of a tragic place,” symbolic of what happened to L.A.-area towns when “people began to build where it would have been better if they hadn’t.”

Historic preservationist and lifelong Pasadenan Tim Gregory agrees. The ‘60s buildings are “way off kilter,” he says. But, he adds, “I can’t blame Caltech. That was happening everywhere, wanting to be modern.”

Gregory researches histories of houses for a living as the Building Biographer--the name of his one-man business--and very recently found a Pasadena residence thought to be the only one in the city designed by Goodhue. Once quite grand, it was split in two in the ‘50s and one half moved to another site.

Gregory says, “Way back in the ‘20s, Pasadena liked to call itself the Athens of the West. Caltech, I think, epitomizes the self-image of Pasadena and what Pasadena wanted to become.” Despite its architectural blips, he feels the campus--thanks in part to its splendid landscaping--works as a whole.

Nor is he critical of all that is new, citing as “very nicely done” the Avery House, a Mediterranean-style housing complex, and the Sherman Fairchild Library of Engineering and Applied Science, both of which were designed in the ‘90s by Santa Monica architects Moore Ruble Yudell.

“You don’t want to slavishly imitate old styles,” he says, “but you want to echo them in the new buildings.” Still, functional is probably the kindest description for most of the earlier post-World War II buildings.

“Blocky,” says Wyllie, somewhat dismissively.

The saving grace? That lush, carefully planned landscaping that disguises what she diplomatically calls “the dichotomy between old and new.”

Dr. Robert Winter, professor emeritus of history at Occidental College and a Pasadena resident, is less diplomatic. “Caltech kind of got off on these strange kicks,” he says. “It depresses you because they had such a wonderful model,” the Goodhue plan, which included a grand domed library building. After Goodhue, Winter says, it “sort of fell apart.”

The Millikan Library got built, Winter says, in a period when “it was rare that anybody thought about the relationship of one building to another. It was in a day when we thought we had to have modern architecture.”

But Winter greatly admires the Goodhue buildings that have survived and considers them “architecturally and historically significant. The Athenaeum is beautiful, and the two dorms [adjacent] are just sensational.”

The Beckman Auditorium, a circular white building with a conical roof designed by famed architect Edward Durell Stone and completed in 1964, is hardly in keeping with the Goodhue vision. Nevertheless, Winter views it as one of the newer buildings that “show some sensitivity.”

As for another postwar building on campus, Winter suggests that the ornamentation must have been modeled after “that tube that’s inside toilet paper.”

Wyllie’s book, with its color photographs of wide arcaded loggias, shaded courtyards and ornately carved facades, is a reminder of what was done right.

“Nobody expects an institution of science and technology to have beautiful architecture,” she says.

* Architectural tours of the campus are offered by reservation at 11 a.m. the third Thursday of each month except in July, August and December: (626) 395-6327. Wyllie will give an illustrated lecture and sign books at 7 p.m. Aug. 3 at Vroman’s bookstore in Pasadena.