Valparaiso University’s Chapel of the Resurrection is more than the most famous building on campus. It’s also a crown jewel of midcentury modern architecture.
Gretchen Buggeln, Duesenberg professor of Christianity and the arts, created a walking tour and led a symposium on midcentury buildings on campus Friday.
The mid-1900s is when VU expanded east and built a lot of structures on what is now the main campus area, she said.
That was a boom time for higher education enrollment nationwide, surging from 1.5 million in 1940 to 8 million in the 1960s, said Lindsay Shannon, associate professor of art history at North Central College in Naperville, Illinois.
The GI Bill after World War II, the Cold War emphasis on STEM and diversified programs, compared to the 19th-century emphasis on the classics, all caused a higher education boom.
“Housing was just desperately needed by the 1940s,” Buggeln said.
Building dorms was a priority. Architect Charles Stade alone was responsible for four of them – Scheele Hall in 1961, Brandt Hall in 1962, Lankenau Hall in 1964 and Alumni Hall in 1966.
Architect Michael Hall designed Dau and Kreinheder, a series of octagonal buildings that revolved around a central cafeteria. The current fitness center was the original cafeteria for that complex. The dorms themselves were razed in 1955.
Edward Jansson designed Guild and Memorial, two women’s dorms, which opened in 1946 and 1947, respectively. He also designed a very different Wehrenberg Hall dorm in 1960.
The higher education boom after World War II caused colleges and universities to scramble to meet demand.
“The number of higher education campuses doubled between 1963 and 1975,” including satellite campuses and community campuses, Shannon said. Others, like VU, expanded quickly.
“Lutheran university education kind of grew up in the midcentury modern era,” said Brian Beckstrom, VU’s vice president for mission, church and ministry.
Temporary housing sprang up on just about every Lutheran college campus. Lutheran schools also built immense chapels, trying to establish themselves as unique and new while retaining a connection to the past, he said.
Beckstrom quoted O.P. Kretzmann, who was VU president at the time: “So, if at some dim and distant time we might have a faculty, students and administration who no longer believe in the purposes of this chapel, it will still be necessary for them to come to terms with what this chapel represents. They can never quite get away from this silent witness to our faith.”
Ironically, even as Lutheran universities built those large chapels, they began no longer requiring students to attend worship services there, Beckstrom said.
Buggeln noted “the excitement, the commotion, the constant building that was going on” in that midcentury era.
She imagines the planners pondering, “Where are we going to put the chapel so people driving by on U.S. 30 can see it?”
That building was like nothing they had ever seen before.
The seating capacity of the chapel isn’t easy to calculate. The 18-inch-wide seats that were once used have been replaced with 22-inch-wide chairs. “It is by some counts the largest college chapel in the country,” Buggeln said. If not, it’s at least in the top three.
The Athletics and Recreation Center, built in 1939 and expanded multiple times since, staked the first claim on the eastern campus. But it was a pair of 1959 buildings that brought modernism to create a series of midcentury modern buildings on campus.
The chapel was joined by Linwood House, which Stade also designed. Linwood House showed Stade’s infatuation with Frank Lloyd Wright’s prairie style architecture and its flat roofs.
“Frank Lloyd Wright was notorious for having leaky roofs,” said Blake Swihart of Indiana Landmarks. The Northwest field office, which he directs, is now housed at Linwood House.
Swihart shared a Wright quote: “If a roof doesn’t leak, the architect wasn’t creative enough.”
Stade’s creativity included not having ugly eavestroughs or gutters cluttering up the look. “Great idea. It doesn’t work,” Swihart said.
“When we ripped off the roof, underneath there were some sections of decking that were completely rotted out,” Swihart said.
Linwood House was originally intended to be the home for VU’s president. Kretzmann not only used the 3,500-square-foot house for his family but also to entertain students and faculty. Incoming freshmen were invited to the home for a mixer.
When Alan Harre took over as VU’s president, he chose to purchase a private home off campus. “Being on the campus as a president is hard,” Buggeln said. That meant being more accessible than some presidents’ wives wanted.
Near the ARC, Kroencke Hall, built in 1951, is now a weight training facility for athletes and a dance studio. It’s all that’s left of a cluster of midcentury modern academic and administrative buildings. Three of them were destroyed by fire and razed in 2024.
That includes a student-built engineering lab erected in 1948. The students built the structure so they could finish the last two years of their engineering degree at VU instead of transferring to Purdue University to finish up.
Buggeln led a tour of the campus Friday that included a stroll through Mueller Hall, built in 1970 to house Christ College, VU’s honors college. Originally, the plan called for dorms and dining facilities. Cost overruns and concerns about isolating the honors students would kibosh the housing. The cafeteria wasn’t used long for students; it served a while as a faculty dining room before that, too, ended.
Mueller Hall has a large lounge with a fireplace. “It was intentionally trying to create community,” Buggeln said. Now, in addition to being a relaxing area for students and faculty, some classes meet there from time to time.
Moellering Library, demolished in 2005, showed Stade’s preference for low-lying flat-roofed buildings with large windows, Buggeln said.
“We take for granted now that campus buildings have a lot of light,” she said, but that didn’t used to be the case.
Other buildings have popped up on campus since that midcentury era, and their architecture is vastly different. Buggeln appreciates the variety. “I believe campuses should have that organic quality,” she said.
“Buildings were treated more like sculpture on a plaza,” rather than copying the style of previous buildings, with modernism, Shannon said. Eclectic building styles can now represent the diversity of programs of study.
Doug Ross is a freelance reporter for the Post-Tribune.