U of Chicago campus architecture

zapfino
Sat, 06 Jun 2009 20:44:17 +0000

I recently read a book on the architecture of the UC campus. It interested me to learn that the seals of various universities decorate the reading room of Harper Memorial Library and Hutchinson Commons. Both of these buildings wre built in the early 1900s. Seals of the following universities are found in Harper: Harvard, Yale, Johns Hopkins, Columbia, Michigan, Wisconsin, California, and Chicago, Oxford, Cambridge, Paris, Berlin, St. Petersburg, Bologna, Tokyo, and Calcutta. Seals of the following colleges and universities are found in Hutchinson: Dartmouth, Union, Brown, Amherst, Vanderbilt, Indiana, Harvard, Bowdoin, Michigan, Stanford, Johns Hopkins, Clark, Virginia, Catholic, Northwestern, Nebraska, Iowa, Kansas, Tulane. Wisconsin, Illinois, Pennsylvania, Cornell, Minnesota, Williams, Yale, Oxford (various colleges), Cambridge (various colleges), and West Point.
I’m assuming that the seals in Harper were an attempt to represent the historical pedigree of UC as one of the great universities. I’m not sure about the seals in Hutchinson. Were these colleges/universities considered academic peers of UC at the time? There are a number of notable universities that are not represented, e.g. California, Columbia, Princeton among the American universities and e.g., Heidelburg, Toronto, Uppsala among the foreign universities.
While some of these universities were obvious choices (e.g., Harvard), on what basis were the others chosen?
Does anyone know of other universities that incorporate seals of other universities into the architectural details of their buildings?