FOCUS SIDEBAR: Over the years, this room has housed it all

Room 200. In its earliest years, it housed the University's chapel, combining three ceiling arches, detailed tiling and majestic stained glass windows. The massive room, which has been most recently used as a lecture hall, is located directly above the entrance to College Hall, the University's oldest building. But between its chapel era and its lecture hall era, room 200 has worn many different hats. Immediately after the ornate room was used as a chapel, its stained glass windows were taken out and replaced with clear panes of glass, said Project Manager Bill Wilkinson. The stained glass was removed to provide more light in the room, which was used as a drafting studio for the University's architectural students. "Its somewhat ironic that you would take away some of the architectural beauty of a building for the purpose of providing light for an architectural studio," Wilkinson said. But what ever happened to the stained glass windows? According to Graduate Art History Chairperson David Brownlee, no one is really sure what happened to the windows, but a popular story has been circulated for a number of years. "The story I've heard is that the stained glass windows were stored in the basement of Hare Hall [which was razed to make way for Williams Hall]," Brownlee said, "and Hare was demolished right on top of the windows." The west side of the room, when it was first built, was closed off to house a convening room for University Trustees. And the janitor's closet in the southwest corner used to be home to a staircase that led to the first floor. Urban Studies and Historic Preservation Lecturer George Thomas said photographs of room 200 as an architectural studio show that the walls were covered with graffiti. "People thought that the architecture was terrible," Thomas said. "So they just wrote all over it." At some point in the 1930s, Thomas explained, the room was split into two stories of classrooms, in order to make more efficient use of the space. Sometime in the 1960s the second floor was taken down. The 120 year-old wooden supports in the ceiling of room 200 are currently being replaced, Wilkinson said. Although the 50-foot long beams of Eastern Spruce that make up the support trusses are still strong, all of the trusses above the ceiling are in need of replacement – a fact that has been known since the 1920s. "Someone caught on to the fact that the building wasn't the best," said Wilkinson. The reinforcement "wasn't done really well and in some cases was probably counterproductive." In order to replace the wooden trusses with more efficient steel ones, a scaffolding insurance system is being built from the basement all the way up to support the building during the renovations. The top of the building will be lifted and the old trusses will be pulled out to make room for new ones. But Wilkinson believes that, despite the trouble, anything is worth it for room 200. "People today just don't seem to put value into this type of room," he said.