Charles Zeller Klauder was an American architect. At the beginning of his career, he worked as a draftsman and as an associate for many prestigious Philadelphia firms and later became a partner in the firm of Frank Miles Day & Brother.
Background
Charles Zeller Klauder was born on February 09, 1872 in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, United States in a family of modest means but high aspirations. His father, Louis, a wood carver and cabinetmaker of Osthofen in the Rhineland, and his mother, Anna Caroline Koehler, of Württemberg, Germany, came to Philadelphia immediately after their marriage, he to become a partner in a furniture factory set up by his two older brothers. Charles was the third son and the youngest of five children, but his two brothers died young, and he was eleven years younger than his nearest sister. His father died when the boy was only two years old.
Education
Charles had no education beyond the public grammar school and a short period at what later became the Philadelphia Museum School, where he studied drawing. In 1921 Princeton University awarded him an honorary degree.
Career
On his fifteenth birthday Klauder entered the office of Theophilus P. Chandler, then the most respected architect in Philadelphia. Although engaged as office boy, he seized every opportunity to make drawings and to copy details made by the draftsmen. He was soon admitted as one of them, for he proved an apt pupil, with an unusual gift for expressing himself with pencil. For fifteen years he worked successively in the offices of Philadelphia's most successful architects--Joseph M. Wilson, Walter Cope and John Stewardson, Frank Miles Day, and Horace Trumbauer. In these offices he was associated with work of high quality, in the design of which he was gradually allowed to take more and more responsibility because of his native gifts. In addition he read widely, especially in history, and attended lectures and meetings of the T-Square Club and later of the Philadelphia chapter of the American Institute of Architects.
In 1898 he spent six months in Europe with Herbert C. Wise, a friend who later was his assistant for many years, bicycling from Berlin to Italy, where he became particularly interested in the picturesque groupings of the hill towns, of which he made many sketches and photographs. At the beginning of 1911 Klauder became a partner in the firm of Frank Miles Day & Brother, for which he had been working since 1900. In 1913 the firm became Day and Klauder; following Day's death in 1918 Klauder carried on under his own name. During his last five years Day had traveled frequently in Europe, so that much of the responsibility for the design of the many college and preparatory school buildings entrusted to the firm fell to Klauder.
College architecture was a field Klauder made peculiarly his own. The list of his institutional work is enormous including: the Dining Hall-Holder Hall group at Princeton (1916); the men's dormitories at Pennsylvania State College (later University), designed in Georgian colonial style rather than in his favorite Gothic (1931); a group of buildings for the University of Colorado at Boulder (the first completed in 1922), where he used as inspiration the massing of the hill towns of Italy; and three buildings at the University of Pittsburgh, including the famous "Cathedral of Learning" (1934). He also designed several buildings for the University of Pennsylvania, among them the Hutchinson Gymnasium (1926 - 1927).
His College Architecture in America, written in collaboration with Herbert C. Wise, was published in 1929. Always a first-rate draftsman, Klauder was particularly expert in perspective views of projected buildings, and he came to do much of his architectural design by means of perspective studies. He thought of architecture primarily as exterior or interior composition, which he always made interesting, though the floor plans, arranged to fit these compositions, were usually less successful. In an era of eclectic architecture he was one of the best of those who did "Collegiate Gothic" work, though he also designed excellent Georgian buildings (as at the University of Delaware) and some Italian Renaissance (as in the Drexel & Company bank building, Philadelphia).
Klauder felt that his design came by inspiration from God. He was a modest, almost shy man, to whom architecture was a passion, pursued with an indomitable will. He enjoyed the artisanship of masonry, frequently laying up samples of ledge-stone wall to demonstrate to masons the effects he desired. Part of the success of the fine Dining Hall group at Princeton was due to this use of native ledge stone, for the first time on that campus. For avocation he designed and built furniture and model yachts; the yachts he raced in the lake at League Island Park. He died suddenly at his home in Philadelphia of a coronary thrombosis and was buried in West Laurel Hill Cemetery there.
Achievements
Charles Zeller established himself as a talented architect and became recognized for his designs of the university and campus buildings. Among his best-known works was the Dining Hall-Holder Hall group at Princeton (1916), for which he received several awards, including a special gold medal from the American Institute of Architects (1921).
Klauder was made a fellow of the American Institute of Architects in 1913 and an Associate of the National Academy of Design.
Connections
On February 27, 1901, Klauder married Fredericka Mathilda Bower, by whom he had two children, Elfrieda Marie, and Charles Zeller, who also became an architect.
