Dan Grantham
Viewpoints Editor
If you toured Wooster during your college selection process, your tour guide probably told you that the 42-year-old McGaw Chapel was supposed to be built entirely underground.
“The school should have listened to the geology department,” the tour guide probably said, pointing to the seven towers as the only thing that should have been visible of the structure. Perhaps the campus should listen to a historian, because the legend of the College’s most galvanizing structure is not entirely true. The truth is more than a pleasant anecdote about hitting bedrock, something that likely did in fact happen. It is rather an architectural legacy of the College’s struggle to define itself in the wake of the 1960s and to save a buck on what would have otherwise been an incredibly expensive project.
According to various sources in the College of Wooster Archives, located in Special Collections, McGaw today looks very much like the design created by Victor Christ-Janer, the architect who proposed the structure to the Board of Trustees on Dec. 7, 1968. Its unique design was based on Christ-Janer’s theoretical approach to religious architecture, which privileged a sense of experimental awe over iconography and symbolism related to the religion of a given space of worship.
But it was not simply religious awe that Christ-Janer was attempting to capture in McGaw’s white towers.
“Certainly one is in awe as you look about the campus and sense the kind of youth and the kind of things we are listening to,” Christ-Janer said to the Board.
At that time, Wooster, as well as the whole of American society, had been in awe of itself and how dramatically tradition had given way to the counter-cultural influence of American youth. In the years before and after the construction of McGaw, Wooster had transitioned from a Presbyterian School owned by the Church to a school that is its own entity. Now linked only to Presbyterianism by tradition rather than institution, McGaw can be thought of as a testament to the secularization of Wooster in that its construction created a structure that was a Chapel in name but an auditorium in function.
Many of the trustees at that time would have been more traditional in comparison to the student body. Therefore this theoretical approach to McGaw might have been dismissed out of hand if not for the fact that Christ-Janer had created a building that was dirt cheap to construct. McGaw became one of the few buildings that Wooster had completely paid off by the time its doors opened in the fall of 1971. Compared to most auditoriums, which cost about $6,000 for every seat in them, McGaw was $700.
Read through Christ-Janer’s proposal for McGaw, and you will also discover how the myth of a completely underground McGaw emerged. When presented with renderings of the designs, Christ-Janer said that even though it was not the intent of his plan to create a Wooster equivalent of the Anglo-Saxon landmark, McGaw nevertheless “looked like Stonehenge.” Moreover, the idea that McGaw was meant to be entirely underground evokes the fact that at one point, the building’s roof functioned as a massive rooftop garden. The roof was removed in the mid-2000s after wear and tear had caused the roof to leak, but this makes the idea that McGaw was supposed to be underground plausible to classes who were never aware of its former rooftop garden space.
In short, McGaw is not so much a glaring mistake as a legacy of the past. As the building has aged ungracefully, it becomes easy to forget that when it opened, even those who didn’t completely understand its design praised it for its bravery and pragmatism. While it is certainly not the Wooster landmark that Kauke and Kenarden have become, it is a mile marker in the history of the College.