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Nathan Clifford Ricker: Establishing Architecture at the University of Illinois

Professor Paul Kruty

In 1922, when Dr. Nathan Clifford Ricker was feted with a convocation in his honor, he could look back on almost fifty years of service to the University of Illinois. He taught there from 1872 until 1917, chairing the Department of Architecture between 1873 and 1910 and serving as dean of the College of Engineering from 1878 to 1905. Not only did he create a department and a curriculum that influenced generations of American architects, but he shaped the physical form of the university in its first half century, as did no other single person.

Not until early in 1867 did Ricker travel west to Illinois, from New England, to visit an uncle who lived in La Harpe, in Hancock County, near the Mississippi River at Nauvoo. Ricker had been born in 1843 on a farm near Acton, a tiny community in Maine on the New Hampshire border. In 1856 the family moved to nearby Springvale, where Clifford’s father built a mill in which the young man worked long hours. But the ambitious youngster longed for a liberal education. Supplementing his local schooling with a self-appointed regimen in mathematics and Latin, he was by his eighteenth birthday in a position to replace a country schoolteacher and, with his supplemental income, buy more textbooks in the sciences and humanities. When he turned twenty-one, Ricker took a job making piano cases, apparently reveling in the application of practical skill while he continued along his personal path of learning. In 1867, after joining his uncle at La Harpe, Ricker took up making wagons in a blacksmith’s shop in which he bought a half interest.

The events that brought Ricker to study architecture in America’s heartland have attained a kind of legendary status at Illinois. They began late in 1869, when Ricker encountered a student of the new Illinois Industrial University, which had recently been established in Urbana. When the student extolled his first semester’s experience, Ricker decided that this serendipitous event signaled his own professional calling. The transplanted Yankee sold his business for $750 and set off across the state of Illinois for Champaign County. He arrived there on January 2, 1870, during the semester break of the second season of instruction at the fledgling university.

Public institutions of higher education had taken form slowly following Thomas Jefferson’s concept of a public university for each state—a concept exemplified by Jefferson’s architectural masterpiece, the University of Virginia, which opened in the mid-1820s. In fact, the Northwest Ordinance of 1789 had established that two townships (i.e., two land parcels each measuring six by six miles) be set aside in every state for public university level education. In Illinois this did not begin to materialize until 1862, when Congress passed the College Land Grant Act, popularly known as the Morrill Act, after its proponent, Justin S. Morrill. Under the terms of the act, states were awarded the profits from the sale of selected public lands to be used to build schools of higher learning.

The Illinois Industrial University began offering classes in 1868, after the selection of a site located between the villages of Urbana and Champaign. They were held in a building at Wright Street and University Avenue, constructed in 1861 for the Champaign and Urbana Institute, an institution that soon become defunct. (The building was demolished in 1881.) The new university was intended to provide a technical and practical education. A board of trustees appointed in 1867 was charged with managing the new university so as “to teach, in the most thorough manner, such branches of learning as are related to agriculture and the mechanic arts, and military tactics, without excluding other scientific and classical studies.” The charter further stipulated that “no student shall at any time be allowed to remain in or about the university in idleness, or without full mental or industrial occupation.” No fear of any of those from the new candidate. Young Ricker was ready to devote himself, both mentally and industrially, to completing his education.

What had particularly intrigued Ricker in the circular that his friend from La Harpe had brought by was a description of the new university’s program in architectural design. The idea of offering college instruction in architecture was exceedingly novel. Architects in America were taught by other architects, not by instructors at institutions of higher learning. The first architectural curriculum in the country had only recently been established, in 1868, at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). The Illinois curriculum in architecture was the nation’s second such program. When Ricker requested more information about the new architectural program at Illinois, he discovered that he was the first student to inquire about that offering. He was placed in a program of mathematics, German, and drawing, the latter administered by James W. Bellangee, a Chicago architect. When Bellangee left at the end of the 1870–71 school year, he was replaced by another Chicago architect, the Swedish-born Harold Hansen, who had studied in Berlin at the famous Prussian school, the Bauakademie. Ricker found Hansen a stimulating mentor, and he responded well to the practical, if rigorous, course of instruction based on the German model.

Through exemption by examination for several courses, and by sheer hard work, Ricker would have been eligible to graduate in June 1872 had his studies not been interrupted in October 1871 by an assignment from his unit of the Illinois National Guard: he was asked to help restore order in Chicago after the Great Fire. He further delayed his graduation by working for an architect in Chicago during the spring and summer of 1872.

On returning for the fall 1872 semester, Ricker discovered that Hansen, who also had gone to Chicago to help rebuild the city, had decided to remain there. Ricker and three newer students in the program found themselves in a difficult position until President John Milton Gregory allowed Ricker to oversee his own education—to create courses, study the material, and administer exams to himself and his three colleagues! On March 12, 1873, Ricker was granted a graduation certificate. Because MIT’s commencement for its first class of architecture students was not held until June 1873, Ricker was the first graduate of any architectural program in the United States.

President Gregory had additional plans for Ricker. He offered to send the thirty-year-old to Berlin to study at the Bauakademie during the remainder of the spring and for the following summer, on the condition that Ricker would return in the fall and take control of the Illinois university’s architecture program. Ricker agreed. And so Illinois’s first architecture graduate became the guiding force in creating the school’s curriculum. By late March, Ricker was on his way to Europe, where he made visits to England, Belgium, and France. Study in Berlin was followed by a European tour to the Vienna Exposition of 1873, where Ricker was particularly impressed with a demonstration of the Russian system of incorporating “shop” practice into design studies. Ricker’s vision for the new Illinois program in architecture drew on his travels and studies abroad, as well as on his personal mastery of the critical literature and his innately pragmatic and persevering approach to life itself.

Ricker’s perspective developed over the next few years. He came to believe that an architect should, first and foremost, be a safe and economical builder, and, second, a capable businessman. Lastly, he should be a designer of pleasing forms. In 1899 Ricker explained his pedagogical goal in Inland Architect magazine as creating builders of “good architecture,” which he explained, “must largely consist of good and honest construction, obtaining the best results possible for the means available for the purpose, employing all improvements in the system of construction and materials, and in the protection of the life and health of inmates of the buildings.” Regarding the relative importance of aesthetics in design, he noted, “The highest perfection of style is demanded by comparatively few buildings.”

Ricker worked to create a course of study that would promote this point of view. Because of the individual nature of his instruction, Ricker could find no suitable textbooks for many of his courses. He solved the problem by making “blueprint” copies of his notes to be distributed to students. These eventually amounted to more than 2,000 pages. An outline of the school’s curriculum published in 1887 reveals how Ricker’s particular emphases were put into practice. Students took classes during their first year in mathematics and structural forces (a course called “graphic statics”—the visual representation of forces—which was Ricker’s favorite teaching method of structure); study of materials in the second year; chemistry, physics, and architectural history the third year; and architectural design only in the fourth year. The students’ final assignment was to combine every aspect of the profession, from initial conception to construction documents, in a single project. Clearly, the entire method was derived from Ricker’s personal values and his exposure to the Germanic principles, as taught by Hansen and espoused at the Bauakademie. Ricker’s method was diametrically opposed to the more popular French system being taught in Paris at the Ecole des Beaux Arts, with its emphasis on design, representation, and rendering, a system followed at MIT and the majority of new American architecture schools created in succeeding decades.

In 1871, the university had commissioned the architect John Mills Van Osdel, Chicago’s first important designer, to create a new building that was to house Ricker’s new program. But it was not yet ready in the fall of 1873 when the program started. Not until early 1874 was the new University Hall, a large classical structure with elements of the fashionable “Second Empire” style, ready for occupancy. (University Hall would be demolished in 1938 and replaced in 1941 by the Illini Union.)

Ricker had to realize his program within the dilapidated halls of the Champaign and Urbana Institute, but after only one semester in the old Institute building, Ricker and the six students of his first class, the Class of ’77, moved into University Hall. They occupied the third floor of the northeast tower. The program remained here for twenty years, even while Architecture and Engineering periodically expanded into more and more space. Among the students of the next class, that of ’78, was Mary L. Page, who became the first woman to be awarded an architecture degree in the United States. Henry Bacon, who later designed the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, D.C., attended classes in Ricker’s department in 1884–85.

No sooner did Ricker start teaching than he began helping with the university’s physical plant, serving as consultant, occasional designer, and general factotum. In 1878, the year the university became known as the University of Illinois, Ricker designed the first of five campus buildings.

The Chemistry Building (now Harker Hall) was created as a complement to Van Osdel’s University Hall. After a hiatus during the 1880s, Ricker provided four more designs in the 1890s: the Drill Hall (Armory—Kenny Gym Annex) in 1890; Natural History, immediately east of University Hall, in 1892; Mechanical Engineering (“Aeronautical B”) in 1895, the only Ricker building to be demolished; and the Library Building, “Altgeld Hall” (now the Mathematics Library), built west of University Hall in 1895–97. Ricker was able to incorporate the creation of Altgeld Hall into his teaching. Not only did his students produce presentation drawings for the various versions of the building presented to the trustees, but the actual working drawings for the final version were produced as a class project.

Ricker’s life became entwined with that of the growing university. In 1875 he married Mary Carter Steele (Class of ’75) of Galesburg, Illinois. Their only child, Ethel, was born in 1883. In 1890 the family moved into a handsome shingled house designed by Ricker at 612 W. Green Street. The building was lovingly restored in 1999 by Urbana-Champaign’s Preservation and Conservation Association. Growing up in a college town, Ethel attended the University Academy and stayed to earn a professional degree in architecture in 1904. After Mary Ricker’s death in 1910, Ethel remained with her father in the Green Street house until his death in 1924.

By 1893 the university was ready to accede to Ricker’s urgent requests for a new building for the College of Engineering. This proposal was even bolder than is immediately evident. When Engineering Hall opened in the fall of 1894, it was the first building in the country to be dedicated solely to engineering. The proposed site faced the existing buildings that were picturesquely grouped along the south side of Green Street—University Hall and Ricker’s Chemistry and Natural History buildings. The design was to be selected by invited competition. The invitations were sent only to the most promising practitioners among the five dozen graduates of Ricker’s program. Just as President Gregory was able to trust Ricker with the completion of his own education, so now the university adopted Ricker’s belief that the very best architects available for the kind of building he wanted were to be found among his own students.

Ricker wanted a structure that would include the latest developments in building technologies (including lighting, ventilation, and heating), and he would make these elements as freely visible and understandable as was practically possible. (One hundred years later, Ralph Johnson [Class of ’71], the designing architect of the Chicago firm of Perkins & Will, was given a similar charge in creating the Architecture program’s fifth home, Temple Hoyne Buell Hall.) The competition guidelines called for a substantial building with only minimal decoration and, perhaps recalling the cramped quarters in University Hall, with no freestanding towers.

Sixteen alumni submitted designs. The first prize was awarded on June 9, 1893, to George W. Bullard (Class of ’82), who had established a practice in Tacoma, Washington. Following Ricker’s guidelines, Bullard’s design placed the Department of Architecture on the top floor, its four studios lit by enormous skylights above the exposed trusses. Engineering Hall was completed in a single year; its cornerstone was laid on December 13, 1893. Classes were using the building in the fall semester of 1894 . The official dedication took place on November 15, 1894. Architecture remained on the fourth floor of Engineering Hall until January 1928, when it was separated from the College of Engineering to become part of the new College of Fine and Applied Arts in Charles Platt’s building created for “Architecture and Kindred Subjects.”

In the fall of 1894, Ricker moved into a building that had everything he had hoped for—design studios, seminar rooms, a lecture hall, photographic and blueprint rooms, a museum, and a library. In addition to 300 plaster casts of sculpture and architectural fragments, the museum held numerous scale models of different structural systems and examples of various building materials. Among the thousands of blueprints in the collection available to students was a complete set of structural drawings of the buildings of the 1892 World’s Columbian Exposition, given to the school by Ricker’s friend, the engineer Edward Shankland. Typically, Ricker brought important structural engineers, including Shankland, William Sooy Smith, and Louis Sullivan’s partner Dankmar Adler, rather than famous architects, to deliver major lectures at the school. Architects were not slighted, however; records indicate that such nationally and internationally significant Chicago architects as Sullivan, Frank Lloyd Wright, Walter Burley Griffin, George W. Maher, and Irving K. Pond were among the guests of the department.

The great glory of the new building was its architectural library. Ricker had felt the need for appropriate texts since his first teaching semesters. His reverence for the printed word dated back to his earliest desire to expand his own understanding of the world through books. At first he used his own salary to pay for important publications; later he dedicated a substantial part of his budget to this goal. As the years went by, it became increasingly clear how unusual the collection had become under his guidance. In 1917 the library was officially named after him. Today the Ricker Library of Architecture and Art is a nationally known repository of important and rare nineteenth-century material.

At the same time that Ricker argued for the importance of having technical, historical, and theoretical information available in the library for his students, he realized that foreign languages might prove a barrier for many of them. In 1880 he translated the first of more than thirty French and German books into English—an undertaking that extended over the next forty years. The majority of his translations appeared within a few years of the works’ original publication. Thus, Illinois students were reading Rudolph Redtenbacher’s 1883 classic Architektonik der Modernen Baukunst in Ricker’s 1884 translation as The Architectonics of Modern Architecture: an aid in the solution of architectural problems before most American architects had ever heard of it. Ricker admired the French architect E. E. Viollet-le-Duc’s emphasis on structural analysis in understanding architectural design and its history. Viollet’s twenty Discourses had been translated into English shortly after their publication in 1872; however, his encyclopedic Dictionary of Medieval Architecture remained unavailable in English. Ricker translated many entries from this work through the years and set about completing his translation of the entire text after his retirement. When completed in 1919, the eleven volumes of typed pages contained the first English translation of this seminal work of medieval scholarship. In 1902 one of Ricker’s many translations became available nationally in published form. The second (1898) edition of Moderne Architektur by the Austrian modern architect and pedagogue Otto Wagner was published by Rogers and Manson of Boston as Modern Architecture, following its serial appearance in Brickbuilder magazine in 1901.

Ricker’s own research involved the improvement of roof trusses. His lectures on the use of graphic statics in understanding such forms led to the publication in 1885 of his first book, Elementary Graphical Statics and Construction of Trussed Roofs. It was followed in 1912 and 1913 with two books, his Treatise on Design and Construction of Roofs and Simplified Formulas and Tables for Floors, Joists and Beams; Roofs, Rafters, and Purlins. By joining his practical inclinations with his scholarly ambition, Ricker the carpenter, piano maker, and blacksmith had been re-created as doctor, dean, and professor.

Ricker’s five buildings and Bullard’s Engineering Hall, substantial as they were, were not the extent of Ricker’s influence on the campus infrastructure. During the expansive years just after the turn of the nineteenth century and following the precedent of Engineering Hall, Ricker’s former students regularly returned to campus as architects of new buildings. Thus, Joseph C. Llewelyn (among Ricker’s first students in the Class of ’77), returned from a flourishing practice in Chicago in 1899 as architect of the College of Agriculture building (Davenport Hall), while Nelson S. Spencer (Class of ’82) designed the new chemistry building (Noyes Hall), which opened in 1902. Spencer also designed the wood shop, formerly at Springfield and Burrill, in 1901. In 1906 Clarence Blackall (also from the original Class of ’77), a well-known Boston architect who had created a campus plan in 1905, provided a fitting southern termination to the emerging main quad with his auditorium (now Follinger), modeled after the ancient Roman Pantheon and Thomas Jefferson’s library at the University of Virginia. By this time buildings had begun to appear that were not by Ricker or his students, including McKim, Mead and White’s Women’s Building, as well as a group by the Illinois state architect, William Carbys Zimmerman, including Lincoln Hall and the administration building. Yet Ricker’s influence continued in the form of James M. White (Class of ’90), Ricker’s right-hand man during his later years, who served not only as architect of Smith Music Hall and a number of additions to existing buildings, including Altgeld Hall, but who also was campus supervising architect for the eastern designer, Charles Platt, during the comprehensive expansion plan of the 1920s.

Having set the standards for a professional architectural education in America, Ricker was greatly concerned about raising the general level of professional competence in architecture. He joined forces with Dankmar Adler to promote a state law to license architects. On June 3, 1897, after numerous attempts made over many years, the Fortieth General Assembly of the State of Illinois passed into law “[a] bill for an act to provide for the licensing of architects, and regulating the practice of architecture as a profession” to become effective on January 1, 1898. Illinois had become the first state in the nation to require licenses for its architects, and thus had led the way to what would eventually become a standard part of an architect’s career, much like that other nineteenth-century novelty for architects, so dear to Ricker, the completion of a university degree. The first article of the new bill called for “the appointment of a State Board of Examiners, to be composed of a faculty member from the University of Illinois, and four Illinois architects with experience of at least ten years.” Ricker was immediately appointed to the first board, convened in the fall of 1897. Not only was he on the faculty of the university, he was certainly the reason that such a stipulation had been added to the bill. Ricker also served as board president from 1899 to 1916.

In its annual reports, the Illinois board evaluated the effects of the licensing law and its various clauses. For Ricker, the law was a personal vindication of his life’s work to establish what was perhaps the country’s most thorough and rigorous course of architectural education. In 1901 he proudly reported, “The Board has had every opportunity to see the beneficent results of the establishment of the School of Architecture at the University of Illinois, which was one of the earliest, and the forerunner in making architecture a part of university education, an example that has been followed by many other states.” As Ricker’s main teaching focus at Illinois had always been on structure and technology, so the Illinois law stressed these aspects in assessing professional competency.

Among the many successful architects who had attended the University of Illinois by the World War I were a surprising number of the major players in Chicago’s modern movement, the famous prairie school. These included three of Frank Lloyd Wright’s most trusted draftsmen: Walter Burley Griffin (Class of ’99), William Drummond (Class of ’98-’99), and Harry F. Robinson (Class of ’06). But the father of the prairie school and Wright’s own teacher, Louis Sullivan, benefited as well, employing William L. Steele (Class of ’96) and Parker Berry (Class of ’07-’08) after their studies at Illinois. A dozen peripheral players in America’s first architectural attempt at modernism were schooled at the drafting tables of Illinois’ land grant campus. Spurred by Sullivan’s antiacademic rhetoric (he was schooled at MIT and the Ecole des Beaux-Arts in Paris), many of these architects routinely denied that their education at the university had taught them anything useful, yet they all carried the knowledge of practical things that made their later creative work possible.

By 1900 design at the school began to move in the direction of a modified Beaux-Arts method involving competitions, program analysis, and stylistic suitability. Because Ricker stressed a scientific and rational approach to architecture, these Beaux-Arts methods continued to be subordinate in the overall education of students to the intense examination of structure and materials. While classicism was the expected language in which architectural thoughts would be expressed, style was not the primary emphasis of the program of instruction. This point of view profoundly shaped the prairie school students’ approach to architecture, perhaps more than they themselves realized. It provided them with an approach to design and construction that allowed them later to cast off what they considered the thin veneer of the historical design styles and reveal what they could argue was a modern, rational kind of architecture, stressing the practicality of their plans and an economic use of materials. Such an argument echoed Ricker’s fundamental beliefs.

In 1912 when Walter Burley Griffin won the international competition for the design of “Canberra,” the proposed new capital city of Australia, American Contractor reported that his success as an Illinois graduate “serves naturally to call attention to this school and its remarkable growth and services to the country.” The magazine reporter pondered such a turn of events. “If anyone had picked out thirty years ago the most unfavorable place in the United States for the location of a course in architecture, no one would have made a mistake in putting it upon the banks of the Boneyard stream in the city of Urbana, in Illinois, far removed from any specimens of architecture that were worthy of study, with no collections worth visiting within a thousand miles.”

How, then, had this unexpected development transpired? The reporter felt the answer lay with one person: Professor Nathan Clifford Ricker. “Summer and winter, rain or shine, in storm and quiet, he has persistently hammered away to lay broad and deep the foundations of the school and rear its superstructure high until it has become one of the four greatest schools of architecture in the new world, and has an attendance during the present year exceeding that of any other school of architecture in this hemisphere. It has become a source of inspiration in every county in the commonwealth, and the traces of its influence are to be seen in the buildings going up throughout this state.” Praising Ricker’s efforts on behalf of the licensing law, the reporter continued: “He has done much to set standards and elevate the general level of the profession,” and, hoping to catch the ear of Springfield legislators, he concluded, “The school has certainly made good and justified in every respect the expenditures which the state has made for its support.” Indeed those “expenditures” allowed Nathan Clifford Ricker to alter the course of architectural education, to elevate the standards of architectural practice, giving form to his alma mater’s campus, and to guide successive generations of young people toward the creation of America’s built environment.

Selected References

Allen, Lynn Monical. “Nathan Clifford Ricker and His Students: A Legacy in Architectural Education.” Master’s thesis, Western Illinois University, 1971.

Alofsin, Anthony. “Tempering the Ecole: Nathan Ricker at the University of Illinois, Lanford Warren at Harvard, and their Followers.” In The History of History in American Schools of Architecture, ed. Gwendolyn Wright and Janet Parks, 73–88. New York: Temple Hoyne Buell Center for the Study of American Architecture, 1990.

Baker, Ira O. “Makers of the University, VI: Nathan Clifford Ricker.” Alumni Quarterly 6 (April 1912): 97–101.

Bannister, Turpin C. “Pioneering in Architectural Education: Recalling the First Collegiate Graduate in Architecture in the U.S.A.: Nathan Clifford Ricker.” Journal of the American Institute of Architects 20 (July–August 1953): 3–8, 76–81.

Charney, Wayne M., and John W. Stamper. “Nathan Clifford Ricker and the Beginning of Architectural Education at Illinois.” Illinois Historical Journal 74 (1986): 257–66.

“Distinguished Graduates from Architectural School.” American Contractor 33 (July 13, 1912).

Geraniotis, Roula. “The University of Illinois and German Architectural Education.” Journal of Architectural Education 38 (Summer 1985): 15–21.

Kruty, Paul. “A New Look at the Beginnings of the Illinois Architects Licensing Law.” Illinois Historical Journal 90 (Autumn 1997): 154–72.

——— . “Walter Burley Griffin and the University of Illinois.” Reflections 9 (1993): 32–43.

Laing, Alan K. Nathan Clifford Ricker, 1843–1924: Pioneer in American Architectural Education. Champaign, Ill.: Building Research Council, 1973.

Newcomb, Rexford. “Doctor Nathan Clifford Ricker: A Pioneer in Architectural Education in America.” Western Architect 31 (June 1922): 78–79.

O’Donnell, Thomas E. “The Ricker Manuscript Translations, I–IV.” Pencil Points 1 (November 1926): 665–67; 8 (March 1927): 156–62; 8 (May 1927): 286–92; 8 (August 1927): 477–82.

Quinn, Chris. “Nathan C. Ricker at the University of Illinois.” Humanities Collections 1 (2001): 47–75.

——— . “Nathan Clifford Ricker: Translator and Educator.” Arris 11 (2000): 40–54.

Ricker, Nathan Clifford. “Teaching Style in Architecture.” Inland Architect 33 (July 1899): 46.

——— . “The Story of a Life.” 1922, manuscript, archives, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

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A Brief History of Architecture at Illinois

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Professor Paul Kruty

University of Illinois Press