James Gamble Rogers (1867-1947)
James Gamble Rogers, the architect of our Fifty Vanderbilt club house, was a member of the Yale Class of 1889. He was a contributor to The Yale Record and a member of the Scroll and Key.
A proponent of what came to be known as Collegiate Gothic architecture, Rogers is responsible for many of the most important and memorable buildings at Yale.
After completing Fifty Vanderbilt in 1915, he designed Branford College (1917-1920). He then created a master plan for the University in 1924 and, over a twenty-year period between the World War I and World War II, designed most of Yale’s central campus. He is often credited with being the person who made Yale look like Yale.
His buildings on the Yale campus include:
• Sterling Memorial Library
• Harkness Memorial Tower
• 8 of the original 10 Colleges
— Branford, Berkeley, Davenport, Jonathan Edwards, Pierson, Saybrook, Timothy Dwight, and Trumbull
• Sterling Law Building
• Hall of Graduate Studies
• University Theatre and Drama School
• Beta Theta Pi
• Psi Upsilon, later the Fence Club
• Delta Kappa Epsilon
• Alpha Delta Phi
In New York City, he is responsible for buildings at Columbia and NYU, as well as Columbia Presbyterian Hospital, Memorial Sloan Kettering Medical Center, Union Theological Seminary, Our Church of All Angels, and Madison Avenue Presbyterian Church.
The James Gamble Rogers Papers, part of the Yale University Archives, are available for research.
