Yale Plans New 10th Unit in College Plan; Fight Over Architecture Looms

Financed by the late Frederick W. Vanderbilt, Yale University plans to erect early next spring a new addition to the nine residential college now standing. The structure will be called Silliman College, after the famous Yale scientist of the first part of the 19th contury.

Similar to the Harvard House Plan, Yale's college plan formulated in 1928 and financed by Edward S. Harkness, donor of the Harvard buildings, will be completed by the addition of Silliman. At present, there is raging in New Haven a controversy over the architectural appearance of the projected unit. The Yale Daily News, in an editorial printed Friday, cried "Save Silliman!"

Yale's Last Gasp

"Yale is afforded a last gasp to redeem herself architecturally," says the News, referring to the off-criticized mongrel variety of Yale's architecture. "Grimly we recognize the implausibility of a functional building in the midst of Gothic-Georgian-Renaissance-Egyptian settings, but if we must have our new college unit in one of these outmoded and clumsy styles, let us at least have it all of one piece."

The projected college is flanked on one side by the Colonial-type Timothy Dwight college, and on the other by the Dwight college, and on the other by the Gothic Van-Sheff buildings, with the result that it is feared in New Haven that a combination of the two styles will be employed, as it has been in Davenport College.

Gothic Prison?

"According to Plans... Silliman College would have a handsome brick front facing the Georgian-federalist Timothy Dwight, tapering off to a forbidding-looking Gothic prison facade to match the present Van-Sheff unit," says the News."... Would that it were possible for Yale to build her latest... in accordance with functional requirements, instead of again indulging in her quaint whims such as that of a gymnasium designed as a medieval fortress or a library as a cathedral."

A dispatch yesterday from the News revealed that speculation must continue to run riot on Silliman's structural possibilities, for even the building architects, Messrs. Eggers and Higgins, successors to the late great John Russell Pope, were unable to shed any light towards a solution of this mystery.

The new college should go far toward solving Yale's housing problem for, like Harvard, the Elis have 400 Sophomores yearly who are not included in the colleges.