Join us as Eric T. Haskell, professor of French Studies and Humanities at Scripps College and director of the Clark Humanities Museum, speaks on “Scripps’ Lasting Landscapes and the Getty’s Campus Heritage Initiative.”
In 1926 when the Scripps College was on the drawing boards, architect Gordon Kaufmann and landscape architect Edward Huntsman-Trout, inspired by the vision of Ellen Browning Scripps, sought to create a unique environment for learning. Their dynamic collaboration produced an academic Eden whose scale was residential and whose hallmark was elegant simplicity. The unity between buildings and grounds was stressed, and their shared aesthetic vocabulary was from the outset intended to speak the same language. Miss Scripps words capture the essence of this unique vision of uncommon aesthetic power: “I am thinking of a college campus whose simplicity and beauty will unobtrusively seep into a student’s consciousness and quietly develop a standard of taste and judgment.”
Scripps College is a repository of 1930s architectural and landscape elegance. For example, its grand allée of American elms, designed in the early 1930s and planted in 1939, has framed college graduations since 1947.
Selected for inclusion in the National Register of Historic Places in 1984, Scripps College received a Getty Campus Heritage Initiative Grant in 2002.
Image: Scripps College, Claremont, CA.
