Nationality Rooms as Didactic Architecture: From Pugin and Paxton to Pittsburgh and Principia

Both A. W. N. Pugin’s Medieval Court at the 1851 Crystal Palace and the collection of exotic Fine Arts Courts at Sydenham three years later set the precedent for historically or culturally styled rooms, viewed as didactic architecture in public museums and schools during the twentieth century. One of the most famous examples of nationality rooms for classroom use is the group of thirty-one rooms in Charles Klauder’s neo-Gothic Cathedral of Learning in Pittsburgh installed between 1938 and 2018 and discussed by Mary Springer in volume 31 of ARRIS. Less well known are the eight nationality rooms installed in the 1960s in the School of Nations Building at Principia College, a 1958–59 modernistic classroom edifice designed by St. Louis architect Kenneth Wischmeyer.

At Principia College, the pedagogy of teaching the art and humanities of a nation in a building or room styled in that nation’s image is rooted in architect Bernard Maybeck’s 1924 description of his general plan for the college. Maybeck called for academic buildings to be designed in an architectural style that would reflect the discipline housed there. From this original concept, Principia’s School of Nations project evolved from design proposals in the 1920s and ‘30s by Maybeck, to a 1940s reiteration by Henry Gutterson in a neo-Gothic building, to the constructed modern classroom building of the late 1950s by Wischmeyer.

By this date, Maybeck’s classical English, French, and Spanish buildings had become eight nationality rooms that were installed in Wischmeyer’s School of Nations Building in 1960–61 and 1965: English, French, Spanish, German, Japanese, Arabian, Russian, and Indian. Based on watercolor sketches by art professor James Green, each nationality room was furnished with desks, seated furniture, and decorative arts reflective of the historic theme of the room. In doing so, the nationality rooms fulfilled an idea envisioned forty years earlier.