Pomona College

Pomona College, founded in 1887 in Pomona and relocated to the adjacent town of Claremont in 1889, is the oldest of the Claremont Colleges and one of the principal liberal-arts institutions in southern California. The campus grew up at the eastern edge of the San Gabriel Valley, on land that had been part of the Mexican-era Rancho San Jose, the holding of the Palomares and Vejar families, and the surrounding citrus and college landscape replaced the rancho economy during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

The college's early-twentieth-century building program drew heavily on the Spanish Colonial Revival and Mission Revival vocabularies that were transforming southern California civic and institutional architecture in the decades after the 1894 California Building at the Midwinter Exposition and the 1915 Panama-California Exposition. Successive campus master plans, including the long planning collaboration with Myron Hunt and Sumner Hunt and later work by Wallace Neff and others, applied stucco wall surfaces, low-pitched red clay tile roofs, arched arcades, towers, and shaded courtyards to the classroom, library, and residential buildings, in deliberate reference to the older mission and rancho architecture of the surrounding region.

The wall surfaces of the principal campus buildings are stucco over masonry or wood frame rather than true adobe construction, but the formal vocabulary is drawn directly from the lime-plastered adobe and tile traditions of the older Spanish California building. Defining features include patio plans, arched colonnades around principal quadrangles, ceramic tile ornament around major entries, and bell or clock towers anchoring principal axes.

The campus continues in active institutional use and is open to the public for self-guided architectural visiting, with its central quadrangles among the more cohesive Spanish Colonial Revival academic landscapes in southern California. Within the broader California adobe tradition, the early-twentieth-century Pomona College campus represents the institutional adoption of the mission-revival idiom, in which the visual language of the old presidio and mission adobes was scaled up to organize a modern educational community.