St. Paul's Chapel: Design
Exterior Design
Stokes designed St. Paul's Chapel in the space provided by McKim's master plan, creating a dynamic adaptation of Northern Italian Renaissance architecture. The building is clad in the same red brick and limestone as other campus buildings, but its special character is accented by the use of yellow and white marble highlights. The most prominent feature of the exterior is the dome, pierced by 16 arched windows. The dome's roof is clad in green ceramic tiles and is crowned by a terra-cotta lantern.
Visitors enter St. Paul's Chapel through a columned portico, above which is carved the Latin phrase Pro Ecclesia Dei (For the Church of God). The portico is embellished with an inlaid marble floor and Guastavino tile ceiling. Each column capital is adorned with a cherub's head by Gutzon Borglum, the sculptor who later carved Mount Rushmore. The chapel's central entrance is set within an enframement that is appropriately ornamented with grape vines. Above the doorway is carved Columbia’s motto In Lumine Tuo Videbimus Lumen (In Thy Light Shall We See Light). Magnificent Quattrocento-style bronze lamps, designed by Italian sculptor Arturo Bianchini, flank the portico. The lamp to the left has four statuettes representing prophets of the Old Testament, while that to the right has four apostles of the New Testament. The lamps stand in front of inset scallop shells, a symbol of welcome to pilgrims. On the side facades, Stokes planned four sculpted lunettes, but only sculptor Andrew O'Connor's southwestern lunette, a gift from Stokes, was ever carved. A gracefully curved apse dominates the rear elevation, overlooking Amsterdam Avenue.
Interior Design
The chapel is laid out on a Latin cross plan, stretching 120 feet from the entrance to the end of the chancel. The central dome rises to a height of 91 feet. Stokes succeeded in creating a unique interior where the beauty of the structural materials would be paramount, and there would be no applied plaster or paint. Stokes wrote his aunts that he had designed a building "with nothing false or deceptive, and everything — even the treatment of the interior decoration — structural and permanent." He carefully selected the salmon-colored Roman brick and designed subtle symbolic detail (vines, figs, shells, etc.) cast in terra cotta tinted to match. The most prominent terra-cotta features are insignias of the four Apostles in the center of the crossing arches, the work of sculptor Adolph Weinman. The terra cotta was manufactured by the Atlantic Terra Cotta Company of Tottenville, Staten Island.
The pink-hued tiles of the domes and vaults, laid in a herring-bone pattern, are one of the most significant installations of Rafael Guastavino's clay tiles. Guastavino was a Spanish immigrant who was influenced by the ancient Catalan technique of timbrel vaulting. After coming to America in 1881, Guastavino patented these structural tiles and established the Guastavino Fireproof Construction Company. The Guastavino tiles can be examined up close beneath the stairways of the chapel's side entrances. So successful was the use of the brick, terra cotta, and tile at St. Paul's that in 1907, the Craftsman Magazine declared that the chapel was "an epic in clay." Stokes also designed the chapel's floors, with their marble fragments laid in intricate patterns resembling those in the Early Christian churches of Italy; the patterns were purely decorative and had no symbolic meaning.