History of the Santa Fe Campus of St. John’s College

St. John’s College, founded as King William’s School in Annapolis, Maryland in 1696, is the third oldest college in the United States after Harvard and the College of William and Mary. A coeducational liberal arts college with no religious affiliation, St. John’s in 1937 instituted a program of study recognized in the eight decades since for both its radicality and its traditionalism: an all-required curriculum devoted entirely to the reading and discussion of the core foundational texts of Western civilization. This curriculum—four years of twice-weekly seminars (literature, philosophy, political science, and religion), four years of language (Ancient Greek and French), four years of mathematics, three years of laboratory science, and one year of music—continues unchanged to this day. Due to its singularly demanding reading list and approach (approximately 200 primary works spanning 3,000 years of Western thought), the St. John’s College Program is widely held to be the most rigorous undergraduate education in America.

In 1960, faced with increasing numbers of applications for admission to its Annapolis campus, the College made a second radical decision. Rather than expand the original campus to accommodate greater numbers of students and thereby sacrifice the sense of community this College seeks to foster, it elected instead to open a second campus in a new location, with the very same curriculum. The ensuing search for the most suitable location brought invitations from 30 different cities and communities around the country. In the end, Santa Fe easily won for its welcoming environment and its long and rich literary, artistic, and cultural tradition. The Santa Fe campus of St. John’s College opened in the fall of 1964 on land donated primarily by John Gaw Meem, a local architect revered both then and now for his influential Pueblo Revival style and his work towards preserving the distinctively traditional architectural character of Santa Fe’s Downtown Historic District. Although Meem was at this point retired and did not himself design the St. John’s College campus buildings, he exercised considerable influence over the original construction.

This included recruiting California landscape architect Garrett Eckbo to be the campus’s landscape designer. It also included bringing in Alexander Girard to serve as the interior designer.

Alexander Girard’s Work at St. John’s College

At the time of the St. John’s College campus’s construction (1962-1964), Girard was in his fifties and at the very height of his renown and productivity as a fabric, textile, furniture, interior, and industrial designer. In the 1950s he and his wife Susan had fallen in love with the Southwest and purchased a home in Santa Fe, from which he continued his work for iconic American home furnishings company Herman Miller and his many other clients. In 1961 Girard had just completed his high-profile design of the La Fonda del Sol restaurant in New York’s Time-Life Building. He was also working, concurrently with the St. John’s campus project, on a 180' x 8' keynote mural for the Eero Saarinen-designed John Deere and Company headquarters in Moline, Illinois (1964). And, very soon thereafter (1965), he was to begin his famed design work for Braniff Airlines, which included wholesale logo and palette redesign of everything from the ticket counters and the flight attendant uniforms to the colors of the very planes themselves.

Girard’s assignment at St. John’s College was to design the interior of the Pritzker Student Center, the campus’s central and most frequented building. This included a cafeteria, coffee shop, bookstore, auditorium, art gallery, hallways, and various meeting spaces. The Girard-designed Student Center interior ultimately combined many of the trademark threads of Girard’s work: furniture design, murals, bright colors, and a distinctively whimsical playfulness. The president of St. John’s College at the time, Richard Weigle, described Girard’s work in the Student Center as follows:

Simplicity of design was the keynote. The effects achieved in the student center were most pleasing. Square bricks were used to advantage in certain walls and simple vertical paneling in others. Chandeliers were imaginatively designed for the dining hall. Most of the furniture, executive and student desks, dining room and coffee shop tables, and common room furniture, were designed by Girard and constructed locally. Use of laminated wood block tops throughout resulted in significant economies and produced a harmony of appearance. Walls were painted white, except for bright colors here and there. On the first floor of the student center a door, a fire extinguisher, and a register were hidden by the way the wall was painted into sections, each part filled by some appropriate educational symbol, such as the Mendelian inheritance formula, Shakespeare’s signature, Einstein’s famous formula, an Egyptian eye, and the like. Paneled doors were painted in bright colors so that they added life to the interiors. All of this Girard accomplished well within the budget that had been given him.
–The Colonization of a College, 1985