Background

James Gamble Rogers was born in Bryants Station, near Louisville, Kentucky, United States, the second of five children, all of them sons. His father, Joseph Martin Rogers, a descendant of central Kentucky families, had attended Union College in Barbourville, Kentucky, and began his career in the law but within a few years moved to Chicago, where he eventually became the manager of an insurance brokerage. James Rogers' mother was Katherine Mary Gamble, whose family had also been natives of the central Kentucky area.

Education

James was educated in Louisville and Chicago public schools, graduating from West Division High School in the latter city in 1885. He enrolled in the School of Fine Arts at Yale University in the same year and graduated with the B. A. degree in 1889.

After four years in Chicago, Rogers went to Paris in 1893 to enroll in the Ecole des Beaux-Arts, where he was to remain for six years, leaving with a diploma par excellence in 1899. This long apprenticeship would have provided an adequate preparation for most architects but events of the succeeding decade suggest that Rogers was still not ready to play his own creative role in the profession.

Career

Returning to Chicago, he began his architectural career in the office of William Le Baron Jenney, but in little more than a year he took the position of superintendent of construction for the Ashland Block, an early steel-and-ironframed skyscraper. The architectural milieu of the city, however, was apparently uncongenial to the young man, very likely because his training at Yale had given him a strongly European orientation.

A long apprenticeship would have provided an adequate preparation for most architects but events of the succeeding decade suggest that Rogers was still not ready to play his own creative role in the profession. He returned to Chicago a second time and established an independent office but left once again after five years and moved to New York, where, with Herbert D. Hale, he entered into the short-lived partnership of Hale and Rogers in 1905.

The dissolution of their joint venture in 1908 marked the true inception of Rogers' own architectural career. In the quarter-century that followed he was to establish himself as the nation's leading designer of college and university buildings. He retained an active office in New York very nearly to the time of his death in 1947. The firm that he founded in 1908, having grown to one of the largest in the country, was transformed into a corporation in 1926, under the title of James Gamble Rogers, Inc. , and this was in turn superseded by the partnership of Rogers and Jonathan F. Butler, established in early 1947, a few months before the older architect's death. The beginning of Rogers' rise to prominence came in 1911, when he won the competition for the design of a new post office at New Haven, Connecticut This work was closely followed by commissions for other public and commercial buildings, most notably for the New Orleans Post Office; the Shelby County Court House and Brooks Memorial in Memphis, Tennessee, and the office headquarters of the Aetna Life Insurance and General Life Insurance companies of Hartford, Connecticut In style, these buildings were mostly variations on the Roman or Renaissance classicism fashionable at the time. In 1920 Rogers began an eleven-year association with Yale University, first as consulting architect (1920 - 1924) and then as architect-in-charge of the university's general plan (1924 - 1931), for which position he was appointed to the rank of professor. The chief buildings that he designed for the New Haven campus were the Harkness Tower, the Harkness Memorial Quadrangle, the Sterling Memorial Library, the Sterling Law School, the Sterling School of Graduate Studies, and six residential colleges-Berkeley, Davenport, Timothy Dwight, Jonathan Edwards, Pierson, and Trumbull. They brought him the reputation of the foremost authority on the modern "collegiate Gothic" style, a term-whether used pejoratively or in praise-with which his name was for years virtually synonymous. During the early part of his Yale association, beginning in 1922, Rogers received equally generous commissions from Northwestern University, including all the classroom and library buildings of the Chicago campus (Gary Law Library; Mayer Law School; and Thorne, Ward, and Wieboldt halls), Deering Library, Scott Hall, the sorority and women's dormitory quadrangles, and Dyche Stadium of the Evanston campus. The various buildings were constructed over the years from 1924 to 1932. Another major commission was the Columbia-Presbyterian Medical Center in New York City (1924 - 1928). Other lesser commissions fell into this same general period: the Butler Library (completed 1934) for Columbia's main campus; extensive parts of the campuses of Southern Baptist College in Louisville, Kentucky, Colgate-Rochester Divinity School in Rochester, New York; Sophie Newcomb College in New Orleans; the School of Education of New York University; and dormitories for Atlanta University. Outside the collegiate work the largest building from Rogers' firm was Memorial Hospital in New York (completed 1938). The three major institutions he served awarded him honorary degrees: Yale in 1922, Northwestern in 1927, and Columbia in 1928. Rogers' social, organizational, and domestic life was perfectly characteristic of a celebrated upper-class architect in an extravagant age.

Rogers held office in various organizations connected with his church, university, and professional associations: he was president of the Society of Beaux Arts Architects (1921 - 1923); associate fellow of Saybrook College at Yale (1933 - 1943); and trustee of the Madison Avenue Presbyterian Church, New York (1936-1938, 1940 - 1942). He belonged to a great many social and cultural organizations, notably the Sociate des Architectes Diplomas par le Gouvernement Fran17ais (Paris); the Chicago Art Institute; the Century, Pilgrims, University, Uptown, and Yale clubs of New York; the Onwentsia Country Club of Lake Forest, Ill. ; and the Yeoman's Hall Club of Charleston, S. C. Rogers died at the Harkness Pavilion of the Columbia-Presbyterian Medical Center after what the obituary notices designated simply as an illness of five days.

Achievements

• He established academic commissions at Yale University, Columbia University, Northwestern University and elsewhere.

Personality

Rogers' social, organizational, and domestic life was perfectly characteristic of a celebrated upper-class architect in an extravagant age.

To a very great extent, his major work was concentrated in a short period of time, coinciding with the building boom of the 1920's, and he never regained the authoritative position he had once held. Depression, war, and postwar adjustments brought a twenty-year hiatus to large-scale public and commercial building, and when the construction industry revived, changing architectural fashions had relegated much of Rogers' work to a discredited past. This fate grew out of modernist dogma and was wholly undeserved: although he was extensively dependent on late medieval forms, he adapted them with considerable skill to the complex requirements of large public buildings. His university designs continue to serve their respective campuses well, and some are distinguished by an innovative spirit working effectively within a traditional approach.

Connections

He married Anne Tift Day of Lake Forest, Illinois. , on October 12, 1901. Four children were born of this union: Katherine, Albert Day (who died in infancy), James Gamble, and Francis Day.

Wife:

Anne

He married Anne Tift Day of Lake Forest, Illinois., on October 12, 1901.