Study for Art Building and Cloister, Oberlin College

By the time Cass Gilbert was commissioned to design a museum for Oberlin College, he was already a well-known architect, having built the Minnesota State House in Saint Paul, both the U.S. Custom House and Woolworth Building in New York City, and the Saint Louis Art Museum in St. Louis, Missouri. In 1908, he had contributed his first building to Oberlin’s campus, Finney Chapel, and in 1915 he presented this delicate, full-color study as part of his proposal for a building to exhibit the college’s already robust art collection. The facade today looks much like the one Gilbert envisioned, with its Tuscan Renaissance flourishes, though the set of cloisters to the right of the building was eliminated from the final design.