From its inception, The Templeton Honors College has desired a home—a singular, unifying place that embodied its commitment to tradition and beauty, supported its focal practices of hospitality and inquiry, and strengthened its vocation as a formative academic community rooted in the Christian intellectual, literary, and artistic tradition. These values—tradition, beauty, hospitality, inquiry, and community—guided our architectural vision for Templeton Hall. When you walk through and around Templeton Hall, we hope you will see and feel how these ideals are woven into its very structure and materials.
We were committed to preserving many of the distinctive features of the original Workman Hall (formerly known as both “Eltonwood” and “Ivy Hall), a Provençal-style home designed by Tilden, Register, and Pepper to be a warm and welcoming family home. These include original stone and hardwood flooring, arched doorways, staircase railings, built-in bookcases, a bay window, and fieldstone walls. This decision aligns with Templeton’s institutional commitment to steward the best of the inherited tradition both intellectually and materially. Likewise, the new construction was designed to converse with the old, similar to what happens when contemporary and classical authors meet in our curriculum. Thus rounded and peaked arches feature throughout and new fieldstone and mortar were carefully selected to match the original. Our goal was to create an integrated “harmony of the parts” not often seen when new and old structures are brought together. Thus beauty and tradition.
Central to our design process was also a commitment to creating spaces that naturally foster friendship and formative community. For example, faculty offices were placed on the first and third floors, while the faculty and student common rooms were intentionally situated side by side at the heart of the second. Note that these are not “lounges,” but “common rooms.” Words matter because they name and create reality and, hopefully in this case, nurture practice. Beyond these, we also created informal gathering spaces adjacent to seminar rooms and faculty offices—because, as any Old Templeton (OT) knows, real conversations transcend the arbitrary boundaries of class times and so need spaces in which their wandering and weaving can continue. Further still, a quiet internal courtyard, with fountain and flowers, and three outdoor patios, furnished with Adirondack chairs (a nod to the ADK camping trip), offer students and faculty spaces in which they can enjoy the leisurely pursuit of friendship, contemplation, and a common life under the heavens. Thus community.
Of course, Templeton Hall also has three dedicated seminar rooms, each complete with a central wooden table, inviting students and faculty to gather not unlike a family around a dinner table. One additional seminar room has been designed especially for our “Art & Beauty” course and which may, in time, also double as a small studio space. These rooms are intended to be places real embodied human beings want to gather, unlike so many university classrooms that resemble a doctor’s sterile examination room more than a home’s comfortable living room. In the same spirit, the Boehlke Library and the Austin Ricketts Reading Room are designed to be welcoming places for the kind of reading, study, and conversations that are central to the Templeton experience. Thus hospitality and shared inquiry.
Among Templeton Hall’s most prominent features is Clemens Hall, a 150-seat recital and lecture venue, which will host Templeton’s Honors Forums, Matriculation Service, Film Series, and Speaker Series, as well as the Music Department’s choir, orchestra, and ensemble rehearsals and performances. After attending one of these events in Clemens Hall, you will naturally flow into the reception hall, where you can sit by the fireplace and look through the glass walls into the Claritas Courtyard or meander around the corner to the Merriman Art Gallery or down the hall to Ed Knippers’ 8’ x 12’ mural, “The Good Samaritan.” This powerful image echoes Christ’s enduring call to care for the vulnerable as well as our own motto: cum gratia officium—“with grace, duty”—drawn from Christ’s words in Luke 12: "From everyone who has been given much, much will be demanded; and from the one who has been entrusted with much, much more will be asked."
As you wander through the building, you will also see our commitment to natural materials like wood, stone, and textile, not least seen in the refurbished church pews, oak barrister bookcases, sturdy antique dining tables, and solid old desks sourced from the greater Philadelphia region. In each case these pieces were less expensive and more beautiful than newly manufactured furniture and witness to our commitment to steward both our resources and the tradition we have inherited.
In sum, Templeton Hall is more than a building; it is a home, a home for The Templeton Honors College, for the Departments of English, History, and Philosophy, for Music students, and for all those within and beyond our university who hear the call of tradition, beauty, hospitality, inquiry, and community.
You are warmly invited to visit our new home—perhaps at the opening Artists’ Reception with Bruce Herman and Ed Knippers in the Merriman Gallery on August 30 at 4:00 p.m., or at our 25th Anniversary Gala celebrations with Malcolm Guite on November 8. Whenever you come, may you join us in giving thanks to God for this beautiful place that, we pray, will endure as a hospitable and formative home for generations to come.