Happy Birthday to Charles Follen McKim, who was born on August 24, 1847, in rural Pennsylvania to James M. McKim, a Presbyterian minister and fervent abolitionist, and Sarah Speakman McKim, a Quaker. After attending public schools in New Jersey and Philadelphia for three years, McKim entered Harvard’s Scientific School in 1866, dropping out within a year. Soon after he entered the École des Beaux Arts where he studied architecture and design for three years, from 1867 to 1870, becoming enamored of the Classical architecture of Europe. On his return to America, McKim began working in the architectural office of Gambrill and Richardson in New York City. Here McKim was shaped by the architectural giant Henry Hobson Richardson for two years before opening his own office in New York. His friend William Rutherford Mead soon joined him; they were joined by Stanford White in 1879 to form McKim, Mead & White.
The firm got its start designing large summer estates in Newport and the Berkshires for wealthy families and gained national recognition for their designs. McKim became known as an exponent of Beaux-Arts architecture applied to styles of the American Renaissance, employing Classical and Colonial motifs inspired by both his studies in Europe and excursions in New England. One of his most iconic designs is the Boston Public Library’s McKim Building (1895) on Boylston Street that drew heavily from the Sainte-Geneviève Library in Paris, where McKim likely spent much time studying architecture.
Sainte-Geneviève Library, likely McKim’s inspiration for Boston Public Library. 
Early model of Boston Public Library.
Although McKim only spent one year at Harvard, he was always considered a “Harvard Man.” Almost all buildings at Harvard during the 19th-century were underwritten by donors who selected their own architects with limited input from the Harvard president; two such McKim projects were the School of Architecture Building, Robinson Hall (1900), and the Harvard Union (1901). President Charles Eliot hired McKim to design his most important commission at Harvard, Johnson Gate. He was later commissioned to design many memorial gates and walls enclosing Harvard Yard. McKim selected coarse rejects and glazed headers from a local brickyard to emulate colonial-era masonry, directly contradicting the contemporary preference for perfectly finished, evenly toned brick surfaces. Almost every brick building Harvard put up thereafter, right through the 1980s, used these bricks, which the New England Brick Co. marketed nationally as Harvard Brick (Building Old Cambridge, pp. 774-775).
Before McKim was hired to design any Harvard buildings, he had been commissioned by Radcliffe College, a women’s college, to design a gymnasium for their new Radcliffe Yard between Brattle and Garden streets. Harriet Hemenway, the founder of the Massachusetts Audubon Society, donated roughly $50,000 to Radcliffe for the project, perhaps inspired by her husband’s gift to Harvard in 1878 for their all-men’s gymnasium (since demolished).
The three-story brick building adjacent to Fay House opened in 1898 and presented a Colonial style of architecture desired by Radcliffe. The symmetrical gymnasium building features a slate roof topped by an ornate cupola. At the central bay, the main entrance is framed by a portico supported by four Tuscan columns with a balcony with balustrade above. At the third floor gable, a massive fanlight is framed by a brick arch with Georgia marble accents.
The interior featured a basement level swimming pool and practical and utilitarian spaces such as locker rooms, bathrooms and a director’s office on the ground floor.
The gymnasium proper on the second floor features maple flooring with a suspended running track that frames the boundary of the room and is accessible by two flights of winding iron stairs. The track is just six feet wide and measures twenty-one laps to the mile. Its suspension by trusses allowed for open space on the gymnasium floor below.
The Radcliffe Gymnasium was renovated in 2005 by the Radcliffe Institute, which hired Bruner/Cott to preserve many interior features for its new use as an auditorium space. The basement area, formerly the swimming pool, was converted into a climate-controlled archives storage facility. Elegant marble, salvaged from the swimming pool, has been reused as terrazzo flooring, signage, and exterior paving. Radcliffe received a Cambridge Historical Commission Historic Preservation Award in 2007 for the work. In 2013, the building was renamed the Knafel Center in honor of Sidney R. Knafel and in recognition of the center’s increasing role in the promotion of intellectual exchange across Harvard and with the public.
