The Court of Honor is a 900-feet-long by 200-feet-wide green rectangle with mature Elm trees -- some over 100 years olf -- growing in a lawn. Its library resides over an enclosed green sanctuary while the chapel and dining hall anchor the ends of a cross axis, with classrooms, residences, administration offices, and a gymnasium flanking both sides. The Court is punctuated with a home built in 1834 by the Wheaton family. Since 1907, this home has served as the College's President's House and a symbolic homestead for the Wheaton Seminary, which would later be widely known as Wheaton College.
Photographing, sketching, and taking measurements to record the architecture and the Classical Orders of key buildings, the students mapped the Cram campus. Measured drawings of selected floor plans, facades, building sections (cut through significant public rooms), and interior architectural decoration were included in the students’ scope of work. They will document in parallels of key facades, key rooms, and the classical orders in each composition. By drawing multiple buildings at the same scale, the students will better visualize the appropriate scale and character of the new building they will design.
The purpose of these students' immersive learning experience is to understand a culture and its manifestation in built forms. This contextual underpinning is intended to inspire the students to design a new building that serves the president and the campus community, respects this college’s traditions, while supplying its current needs and aspirations for its future.
