City and Campus

04/16/2024

"Published by Notre Dame Press, Stamper’s book arrives just as the city is crafting a new 20-year plan for downtown, a project that will involve the University. Notre Dame recently acquired the century-old former South Bend Tribune building, but hasn’t yet announced plans for it. University officials intend to work with city leaders and residents to repurpose the building and develop a comprehensive plan for the surrounding area."

Read the feature about CITY AND CAMPUS by John Stamper in Notre Dame Magazine!

The late architecture professor John Stamper documented the buildings that have come and gone, and pondered the future, of town and gown intertwined in South Bend.

02/06/2024

In City and Campus, John W. Stamper paints a narrative portrait of South Bend and the campuses of the University of Notre Dame and Saint Mary’s College from their founding and earliest settlement in the 1830s through the boom of the Roaring Twenties. Industrialist giants such as the Studebaker Brothers Manufacturing Company and Oliver Chilled Plow Works invested their wealth into creating some of the city’s most important and historically significant buildings.

Famous architects, including Frank Lloyd Wright, brought the latest trends in architecture to the heart of South Bend. Stamper also illuminates how Notre Dame’s founder and long-time president Father Edward Sorin, C.S.C., recruited other successful architects to craft in stone the foundations of the university and the college at the same time as he built the scholarship. City and Campus provides an engaging and definitive history of how this urban and academic environment emerged on the shores of the St. Joseph River.

This book is now available for preorder!

City and Campus tells the rich history of a Midwest industrial town and its two academic institutions through the buildings that helped bring these places to...

02/05/2024

The book trailer of City and Campus gives an illustrative overview of the rich architectural history that is beautifully enlivened in this coming book.

CITY AND CAMPUS tells the rich history of a Midwest industrial town and its two academic institutions through the buildings that helped bring these places to...

02/05/2024

Following the great depression, there came a shift in the architectural mentality towards modernism, commonly known as the International Style. There was a movement away from ornamentation that led to simple geometric shapes, with flat roofs, horizontal bands of windows, and generally asymmetrical massing. An Italian palazzo facade, for instance, was no longer a valid design option for a steel-frame office building. The Hesburgh Memorial Library is the most prominent Modernist building on the Notre Dame campus. It is also the University's first high-rise structure, reaching 215 feet in 14 stories. Designed between 1964 and 1965 by Ellerbe Associates of Bloomington, Minnesota, it was the largest library in the world when it opened. The focal point of the building is its 132-foot-high mural, The Word of Life, designed by artist Millard Sheets, and is composed of eighty-one different kinds of stone from sixteen different countries.

02/05/2024

Still under the influence of the City Beautiful movement, both Notre Dame and St. Mary's were turning increasingly to the popular Collegiate Gothic style for classroom and dormitory buildings alike. The Notre Dame Law school pictured here demonstrates the architectural elements that swept across both campuses following the first World War up to the 1930's. Designed by the architectural firm Maginnis and Walsh, this building features an entrance tower with a lancet-arched doorway and matching lancet-arched windows on the upper stories that indicate the elegant reading room of the Law Library.

02/01/2024

The year 1921 saw the design of South Bend’s most magnificent theater, the Palace Theater, now a civic auditorium. Designed by J. S. Aroner from Chicago, it is an elaborate Spanish Renaissance design with three colossal round-arched windows rising above the entrance doors and marquee. Framed with brightly colored, carved decorative reliefs, they mark one of South Bend’s most memorable architectural images. Edward Eichenbaum designed the interior of the building to reflect the lavish and regal elements of its architectural style. The Palace Theater has a lobby that features three bronze-and-crystal chandeliers, its wall are finished in a gold-and-rose color scheme with ivory and touches of blue, and the gilded ceiling displays an elliptical dome colored in sea green.

02/01/2024

Though the influence of the Neoclassical style in South Bend’s residential architecture lasted for a brief period of time, it resulted in some of the city’s most distinguished residences. The Solon Rider House was built in 1906 during a time period marked by interest in the architecture of America's colonial period. This house was designed by George Selby, who at that time was the supervising architect of the third county courthouse. Featured on this house is an imposing entrance portico, wood-paneled doors with sidelights and transom, a bracketed balcony above, and all of which is framed within two pairs of Corinthian columns.

02/01/2024

The Melan-arch bridge was developed in 1890s by the engineer Josef Melan. It was designed during a period when bridge building was taking a turn towards elegance. This philosophical movement in thinking about American architecture was influenced by the ongoing City Beautiful Movement. This is the first of the Melan-arch bridges built in South Bend and was constructed between 1906 and 1907 at Jefferson Boulevard, with its eastern approach bordering the southern edge of Howard Park. This bridge in particular was designed by city engineers Hammond and Moore, displaying four concrete spans of graceful white arches accentuated by classical balustrades and a winding staircase staircase leading down to the park.

02/01/2024

In 1900, South Bend's population had begun to exceed thirty-five thousand and needed a new city hall to accommodate the growing number of residents, but the city was was unable to fund the project. James Oliver's interest in the well-being of South Bend drove him to fund the project himself and lease the building to the city for use. Through a closed competition between four architects, Oliver decided to hire Feyermuth and Maurer, who were currently in the process of designing St. Joseph Hospital. With a combination of French Renaissance and Châteauesque style, South Bend City Hall featured a round-arched, recessed entrance with limestone trim, a third-floor balcony, a circular window, and a clock face in the tower.

02/01/2024

Pictured here is the South Bend Public Library. In 1895, its construction began in order to give this institution its own quarters by relocating it from the fourth floor of the Oliver Building. It was designed by the office of Wing and Mahurin of Fort Wayne, an architectural firm responsible for designing numerous courthouses and libraries across the state of Indiana. The architectural style they used here belongs to the Richardsonian Romanesque tradition. Its Romanesque features are depicted elegantly through its turrets, pinnacles, gables, and large windows.

01/29/2024

A man with a national if not international reputation, admired by others of his class and social standing, Clement Studebaker built a great mansion that represented his success not only to the world outside of South Bend, but also to the city’s residents. In 1886 Clement commissioned Chicago architect Henry Ives Cobb to design this mansion which was named Tippecanoe Place in honor of President William Henry Harrison and the Battle of Tippecanoe. Cobb would go on to design many of the original buildings on the campus of the University of Chicago, as well as the Chicago Opera House, Chicago Athletic Club, Chicago Historical Society, and the Old Post Office.

01/29/2024

The Watts Sherman House is an example of the Queen Anne style, prevalent in South Bend from 1885 to about 1905. This style of residential architecture was first made popular by Boston architect Henry Hobson Richardson as well as the New York firm of McKim, Mead and White. Many of the Queen Anne features were evident in Gothic Revival architecture of the mid-nineteenth century. However, this style changed the scale and proportions of domestic architecture and considered ornamentation to be purely decorative. This house was designed by Richardson and purchased by James Oliver in 1886. Oliver then enlarged and remodeled it before giving the deed to his daughter, Josephine, and her husband, George Ford who, at that time, was a U.S. Congressman. Richardson’s design of the Watts Sherman House influenced many architects across the country, including those in South Bend.