Portals to Eden

This is matriculation season at American colleges and universities, which means that on many campuses, it is a season of gates—specifically, the ritual of passing through them (or posing in front of them) to celebrate the rich range of possibilities and relationships associated with the life of the mind.  The passage, crucially, is spatial as well as temporal. Gates aren’t mere entrances and exits—neutral dividers between town and gown, street A and quad B. At their best, from Harvard’s Johnston Gate to the University of Chicago’s Cobb Gate to Berkeley’s Sather Gate, they’re extraordinary objects and stirring thresholds, charged with powerful meaning and leavened by campus lore.

Many ungated European universities, like the Sorbonne in Paris, are interspersed with the business and busyness of city life. Other institutions, however, are tranquil refuges. At Trinity College, Oxford, one enters through delicate iron gates flanked by muscular stone piers. Affording a view of the college’s lush lawns and picturesque buildings, Trinity’s Broad Street gates are at once an imposing portal and an inviting picture frame. In the same vein, at Harvard, the formidable brick piers and lacy ironwork of Johnston Gate frame an enticing view of the Edenic precinct of Harvard Yard. The broad outlines are similar enough to the Trinity portal to make you wonder whether it influenced the Harvard gate’s architect, Charles McKim of the celebrated McKim, Mead & White firm.

Almost all gates, of course, exist for practical reasons. Railroads need them to prevent trains from colliding with vehicles and pedestrians. Ranchers need them to keep livestock in. The reverse was true at rural American institutions in the mid-19th century; some built utilitarian gates and fences to keep livestock out, lest roving cattle chew up campus lawns. Then, as America urbanized in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, city campuses may have sought to build gates to shield their placid, leafy quadrangles from screeching streetcars and other hurly-burly. But in all likelihood, there was more to it than that.

The campuses themselves were being transformed from small, colonial-era colleges into huge, modern research institutions. Their old borders—at Harvard, a simple post-and-rail fence—no longer expressed their identity and aspirations. Campuses needed a new architectural declaration—not just monumental buildings within their boundaries, but impressive entryways at their edges. The impulse behind this shift dates back to the time of ancient walled cities, when gates, by virtue of their prominence, assumed heightened, symbolic significance. Consider that when Moses reiterated God’s commandments to the Israelites in Deuteronomy 6:6–9, he urged not only that the commandments be obeyed but also that they be put on public display: “Write them on the doorframes of your houses and on your gates.”