Stanford Memorial Church
Stanford Memorial Church is located on the Main Quad at the center of the Stanford University campus in Stanford, California, United States. It was built during the American Renaissance by Jane Stanford as a memorial to her husband Leland. Designed by architect Charles A. Coolidge, a student of Henry Hobson Richardson, the church has been called "the University's architectural crown jewel".
Designs for the church were submitted to Jane Stanford and the university trustees in 1898, and it was dedicated in 1903. The building is Romanesque in form and Byzantine in its details, inspired by churches in the region of Venice, especially, Ravenna. Its stained glass windows and extensive mosaics are based on religious paintings the Stanfords admired in Europe. The church has five pipe organs, which allow musicians to produce many styles of organ music. Stanford Memorial Church has withstood two major earthquakes, in 1906 and 1989, and was extensively renovated after each.
Stanford Memorial Church was the earliest and has been "among the most prominent" non-denominational churches on the West Coast of the United States. Since its dedication in 1903, the church's goal has been to serve the spiritual needs of the university in a non-sectarian way. The church's first chaplain, David Charles Gardner, began a tradition of leadership which has guided the development of Stanford University's spiritual, ethical, and academic relation to religion. The church's chaplains were instrumental in the founding of Stanford's religious studies department, moving Stanford from a "secular university" at the middle of the century to "the renaissance of faith and learning at Stanford" in the late 1960s, when the study of religion at the university focused on social and ethical issues like race and the Vietnam War.
History
Early history
Stanford Memorial Church is located at the center of Stanford University, and is "the principle building that is seen as the visitor approaches the university along Palm Drive from Palo Alto". It sits the middle of the long southern range of the school's Main Quad. The church was commissioned by Jane Stanford as a memorial to her husband, Leland Stanford. The Stanfords had intended that a church should become "the centerpiece of the university complex". They were deeply religious, and for their day and social standing, "open-minded ecumenicalists", so Jane Stanford was determined that a church built on campus be a "nondenominational—if essentially Protestant—house of worship". Robert C. Gregg, who was chaplain of Memorial Church during the 1980s and 1990s, stated that the Stanfords had two objectives in building the church: to ensure that Stanford students had an opportunity to develop their ethics as well as their studies, and to provide comfort and strength to the community.Leland Stanford died in 1893; legal disputes tied up the Stanford estate and prevented the completion of the university for several years. When the disputes were settled in Jane Stanford's favor, she was finally able to put into motion her wish for a church. In 1898, she and the university trustees requested design submissions for the church. In 1890, Jane Stanford visited her friend Maurizio Camerino in Venice, an artist with a reputation for producing high-quality mosaics; she and her husband had met him years earlier during one of their many trips to Europe. Stanford commissioned Camerino and his company, the Antonio Salviati studios, to produce mosaics for the church. Stanford was involved in every part of the church's design and construction. She was determined that the quality of the stonework of Memorial Church should equal the medieval churches she admired in Europe. According to Memorial Church chaplain Robert C. Gregg, "The grandeur of the church, articulated in its details, greatly occupied Jane Stanford—the structure was to be without flaw".
Groundbreaking for the church took place in May 1899; construction began in January 1900. After a delay of almost a year, Stanford Memorial Church was dedicated on January 25, 1903, with "impressive ceremonies". Demonstrating Jane Stanford's goal of ecumenicism, Rabbi Jacob Voorsanger of San Francisco's Congregation Emanu-El read the first Bible lesson. The church's pastor, Heber Newton, gave the sermon. A second service was held later that day, and D. Charles Gardner, the chaplain, gave the sermon. Stanford Memorial Church's first christening was held between the two services.
Jane Stanford once remarked: "While my whole heart is in the university, my soul is in that church". She died in 1905, and so did not live to see the damage caused by the 1906 San Francisco earthquake. Her funeral took place in the church, which was called one of her most important accomplishments and "the truest reflection of her visionary leadership", in March 1905. Clergy from several religious traditions, including a Rabbi, a Presbyterian minister, a Methodist minister, an Episcopal bishop, and a Baptist minister, officiated at the service.
Earthquakes
Stanford Memorial Church has suffered two major earthquakes, in 1906 and in 1989. Although extensively damaged, the church was restored after each. The 1906 quake wrecked much of the church, felled the spire, cracked the walls, and "injured beyond repair" the mosaics and Carrara marble statuary in the chancel. The main cause of the severity of the damage was that the church's original construction failed to attach the crossing structure to the surrounding masonry and roof structures. When the earthquake hit the church, the crossing structure moved independently from the rest of the building, gouging gaping holes in the roofs over the east and west transepts, the nave, and chancel. Its original 12-sided, 80-foot spire and its adjoining clock tower fell on top of the chancel roof, destroying the tower dome's "frescoed Victorian interpretation of God's eye—complete with tear—surrounded by cherubs and shooting star". The debris hit and destroyed the marble sculptures of the twelve apostles that decorated the altar.The spire was never repaired and the tower was removed and replaced by a simpler structure; however, the clock was saved and preserved in a temporary structure behind the church before eventually being placed in another building on campus, the Stanford Clock Tower. University trustees considered re-building the tower, and even looked at possible designs, but eventually chose not to rebuild it because they could not agree on its design, and chose instead to replace the tower with a domed skylight. The crossing structure also pushed the roof of the nave forward. The roof's weak connection to the church's front facade caused the facade to fall into the Inner Quad courtyard; as mosaic expert Joseph A. Taylor put it, "its wondrous mosaic was blown out and totally destroyed". The only mosaics not destroyed in the quake were the four angels that decorated the crossing. The back of the church, with several hundred feet of arcades, was also completely leveled because it too was not joined to the rest of the building.
Repairs of the earthquake damage began in 1908, despite misgivings from some university administration regarding its cost; it was closed between 1906 and 1913 while it was repaired. The university president had to postpone academic projects to pay for the church's restoration, as well as the restoration of the entire campus. Ultimately, they chose to repair Memorial Church because they recognized that it was "integral to the identity of the young university". The church and the Old Chemistry building were the only two buildings in the university's Inner Quad that were repaired. The extent of the damage was such that the church had to be completely rebuilt. The entire church, except for its surviving crossing structure and offices, was dismantled stone by stone, which, along with the windows, were labelled and stored, and were later relaid in their original positions. According to architecture historian Willis L. Hall in his 1917 book about the church, "In reconstruction great care has been taken to assure permanence". The stones were securely bolted to each other, "making the whole structure practically one massive hollow rock on a great steel foundation skeleton". The tile floor was replaced with cork. The building's crossing received a tiled hipped roof and an oculus, which lit the interior of the church, and was added above the renovated dome, which had a frescoed ceiling decorated with bronze designs as opposed to the gold leaf present before the earthquake. The original rose window above the front facade was replaced with one with a simpler arch shape because it was more similar to the style of the rest of the buildings in the Inner Quad.
The dedication, which was engraved in large letters below the facade mosaic, was replaced by a smaller dedication plaque placed at the lower left of the facade, a choice the university alumni magazine called "a tremendous improvement". Camerino's design of the mosaics that were to fill in the empty space created by the removal of the original dedication, which he offered free of charge, were rejected in favor of a simple version created by John K. Branner in 1914. Camerino, who did not appraise the damage until 1913, restored the interior mosaics. He had saved the original drawings in Venice, so he removed and re-fabricated the chancel mosaic, and redesigned the entire exterior mosaic. The Stanford alumni magazine, in early 1917, after the completion of the interior mosaics, declared the renovation complete, stating that "the church, for almost the first time since it was begun, is finished". Its appearance after the renovation was "significantly transformed".
In 1989 the church was damaged again, in the Loma Prieta earthquake. Although the damage was not as serious as the '06 earthquake, it "spurred intricate strengthening and restoration work" to protect further damage from future earthquakes. The Stanford Quake ‘06 Centennial Alliance stated that the damage was not devastating, even though the building did not fulfill the more stringent earthquake codes in place in 1989, because of the previous renovation after the '06 earthquake. The Alliance also stated that if the earthquake had been stronger or lasted longer, the damage would have been more extensive. The integrity of the structure remained, but the crossing structure, the only major part of the building that was not dismantled and replaced after the 1906 earthquake, buckled and caused several stones in the north and west arches to slip as much as.
The four mosaic angels in the pendentives, which decorated its high rounded walls directly below the church's dome and served as the setting beds for hundreds of thousands of tesserae, were severely damaged. Parts of the fallen mosaics were stolen, but later returned anonymously. The angels' damage caused large chunks of mortar and glass to fall to the floor below, while other sections "were left hanging by the sheer geometry of their arched shape". An eight-foot mosaic section of an angel's left wing in the church's northeast corner fell to the floor. Several stones from the east arch wall fell onto pews in the balcony, and the organ-loft railing collapsed inward. Although the damage was minor, the church remained closed until 1992 while restoration, as well as a bracing project to protect the building from future earthquakes, without changing the building's decorations, was carried out. The university hired a team of contractors, structural engineers, architects, and conservation specialists to develop a renovation plan, which was paid for by a $10 million fundraising drive. Many donations came from undergraduates, and the university's board of trustees approved the plan before its funding was in place because they recognized the church's importance to Stanford.
In this restoration, the entire crossing was strengthened by bracing it behind the dome and securing it to the superstructure of the building. The restoration team evaluated every decoration in the church and made improvements and changes as necessary, in order to preserve the building's interior elements. They also discovered that the crossing's four large arches were hollow; they also found remnants of the steel frame that supported the original clock tower within a 20" void space in the church's arched walls. They had to fill the void with more than 470 tonnes of concrete and several layers of reinforcing steel in order to improve the walls' stability, an accomplishment the Alliance called "one of the most challenging retrofit feats implemented at Stanford".
The roofs, which had not been replaced since 1913, were rebuilt with plywood diaphragms, 30,000 new red clay tiles were installed, and the stones from the decorative arches were reinserted. The wing of the damaged angel was restored; Stanford University hired William Kreysler and Associates to create a new backing system to secure this angel and three other mosaic angels to the base of the dome, which included replacing the original bonding materials, with steel angles that anchored the mosaics to the walls and with a stronger polymer resin. The renovators found a piece of the original mosaic from the vestibule wall, which had a Chi Rho design, in the foundation, and inserted it into the Communion Table in the chancel, linking the current building with the pre-1906 church. The Victorian chandeliers were repaired and rewired, and the transept balconies, which had been closed for twenty years because they were declared unsafe, were reopened, after the false doors on the south side of each balcony were replaced by emergency exits and connected to existing staircases on the other side of the wall. A new sprinkler system and a new audio system was also installed. Stanford Memorial Church was rededicated by chaplain Robert C. Gregg on November 1, 1992.