Campus Master Plan

Story House and Parents Field, 1951. This land centered around the former Bixby Smith estate was identified as the site of a third college nearly a decade before CMC's founding.

The Intercollegiate Council Report of 1936-1937 identified land east of Pomona College on the former home and estate of Sarah Bixby Smith as the site for a proposed third college. In 1946, the land was ceded to the trustees of Claremont Men’s College to provide the beginning of the campus. Between 1946 and 1950, the CMC campus assumed its basic plan and architectural style. Twenty years earlier, the Scripps College campus had been built with equal rapidity. Yet that was the 1920s, when there was plenty of money, and the luxuriance of Gordon Kaufmann’s elegant Spanish Romanesque cloister and quadrangles exuded the charm and assurance of a well-planned, well-endowed venture at a time of flourishing architectural taste. The 1920s, in fact, represented the high-water mark of Mediterranean Revival throughout Southern California. It was a decade in which it seemed almost impossible to erect a bad public building. The 1940s, by contrast, prized efficiency and cost-effectiveness over solidity and historical reference. The very years in which the architecture of CMC was selected and its buildings constructed were years of housing crisis in Southern California and the rest of the United States. Arising in such circumstances, the architecture of CMC was characterized by a certain restraint–austerity, even–destined to remain a defining characteristic of both the College and a society eager to get on with the task of housing and servicing exuberant post-War growth.  

In an almost representative scenario, in which architecture directly expressed history and social process, CMC began its existence anchored in the romantic Craftsman past represented by Story House, so expressive of Claremont in the Progressive era, when the Group Plan was first envisioned. The wood and steel prefabricated units that followed embodied the dislocations and transformations of the wartime era. By the end of the decade, the serviceable presence of Appleby, Green, Boswell, and Wohlford Halls bore witness to the overnight actualization of CMC. In the colonnades of Pitzer Hall, the last building of the 1940s, Claremont Men’s College gestured toward an assured and prosperous future touched by the metaphor of Southern California.

Campus plan for Claremont Men's College by Allison and Rible.

To house students, the Los Angeles architectural firm of Allison and Rible provided a simple, straightforward design that was at once functional and in dialogue with the Monterey colonial style of old California. President Benson and the trustee building committee worked closely with Allison and Rible on every detail on what rapidly turned into a four-dormitory quadrangle. Benson understood the promotional value of this first dormitory as a prototype for campus development and, by the end of 1947, arranged a sketch of the entire projected campus to be used for fundraising. By the end of the following year, Allison and Rible had completed a campus master plan, which included a quadrangle of dormitories and a forthcoming dining hall. Benson also took an active interest in the landscaping of the campus, which was to be planted in sturdy, self-sufficient native shrubs and trees.

A view of the North Quad area of Claremont Men's College looking west across campus towards Honnold Library, circa 1952-1953.

Following a period of measured, yet sustained campus growth through the early 1950s, CMC was quickly approaching the tenth anniversary of its founding. To celebrate this milestone and to accelerate CMC into its second decade of expansion, the trustees launched an ambitious Tenth Anniversary Building Program, budgeted at $800,000. Over the next five years, nine major construction or improvement projects were successfully completed. The financing and construction, and consequent debt, once again pushed the resources of CMC to the limits. It also resulted in a level of cost-cutting that seriously curtailed building amenities–a characteristic, it must be pointed out, that was typical of much of the 1950s boom-era construction in Southern California. Despite their shortcomings, the buildings of this second decade created a campus that was more or less complete by the early 1960s, a mere fifteen years following the opening of the College. The era also saw CMC’s move away from a joint athletics program with Pomona College and Benson and the trustees embarked upon a program of land acquisition and construction to support a new three-tier program of physical education courses, intramural sports, and varsity competition. First on the agenda was the remainder of the undeveloped area east of Mills Avenue between Sixth and Ninth Streets, which Benson desired as an athletic field. Pomona owned the property, but after negotiations CMC was able to acquire the desired real estate through a series of complicated land exchanges.

Returning from a tour of East Coast colleges and universities, President Benson noted that many of the institutions had an emphasis on residential programs and desired to establish something similar at CMC. More and more CMC students preferred to live on campus; there was a noticeable shortage of dormitory space as the student body increased in size. Anticipating both present need and future expansion, the trustees approved in quick succession the construction of four new dormitories in the academic year 1959-60. While not completed until the next decade, the four new dormitories–Phillips Hall (1961), Berger Hall (1962), Benson Hall (1963), and Marks Hall (1964)–owed their construction to the building momentum of the Tenth Anniversary Building Program and established the Mid Quad residential district. CMC managed to construct fourteen major facilities between 1953 and 1964 and in a mere eighteen years since its founding, the College had created a commodious campus surrounded by landscaped playing fields.

The Claremont Men's College campus in 1966. Photograph by Van Webster '67.

In the 1960s, CMC attained new levels of fund-raising and development–in its physical plant, its faculty, its endowment, the size and academic achievement of its student body–through exhaustive planning and equally effective follow-through. After receiving a $5 million Ford Foundation challenge grant in 1964, which challenged the Claremont Colleges to raise $86 million over the next seven years, a joint faculty, trustee, and alumni committee drafted a twenty-page, single-spaced “Plan for Distinction: A Statement of the Case for Claremont Men’s College,” which presented the distilled institutional identity and development goals of CMC. The Plan for Distinction was also a fund-raising document calling for the raising of $7 million within three years and $13 million over the next seven years with three central goals: to raise faculty salaries, establish endowment for scholarships, and continue to develop the physical plant. As funds poured in, the expansion of the campus plant accelerated its pace and CMC doubled its physical plant in the 1960s, which included additions to and expansion of athletics facilities, as well as the construction of five new dormitories and Bauer Center.