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Memorial Quadrangle


The Memorial Quadrangle is a residential quadrangle at Yale University in New Haven, Connecticut. Commissioned in 1917 to supply much-needed student housing for Yale College, it was Yale's first Collegiate Gothic building and its first project by James Gamble Rogers, who later designed ten other major buildings for the university. The Quadrangle has been occupied by Saybrook College and Branford College, two of the original ten residential colleges at Yale.

The building was donated by Anna M. Harkness to memorialize her son, Yale College graduate Charles W. Harkness, who died in 1916. Charles' brother, Edward Harkness, became the primary benefactor of Yale's residential college system fifteen years later, a scheme which required a partial reconfiguration of the Memorial Quadrangle to create its two colleges. Harkness Tower, a large masonry tower on the building's west side, was named in memory of Charles Harkness, a memorial to whom is found in the tower's chapel.

Construction began in 1917, the bicentennial of Yale's first building in New Haven, and was completed in 1921. As initially built, the Quadrangle contained dorm rooms for 630 students, a dining hall, and seven courtyards. Dry moats with low walls, a frequent architectural motif at Yale, were first used by this building and were planted with ivy, flowers, and trees by landscape architect Beatrix Jones Farrand with an eye to both increased privacy and street beautification. The Memorial Room in Harkness Tower contains the first fan vault ceiling built in the United States and it the first built since the 1200s.


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