Scripps College

Scripps College, founded in 1926 as the women's college of the Claremont consortium in eastern Los Angeles County, occupies one of the more coherent ensembles of Spanish-colonial and Mediterranean revival architecture in southern California. The campus was endowed by newspaper publisher Ellen Browning Scripps and designed under a master plan that drew on the regional mission and rancho tradition.

The principal early buildings of the campus were designed by Gordon Kaufmann in the late 1920s and early 1930s, with later additions by other architects and by Edward Huntsman-Trout for the landscape. The buildings were constructed of reinforced concrete and stuccoed masonry rather than true adobe, but were detailed in the Spanish-colonial revival idiom that flourished in southern California in the period. Plain plastered walls in warm earth tones, low-pitched red clay tile roofs, arcaded loggias, deeply recessed window openings, and wrought-iron balcony railings together evoked the formal vocabulary of the colonial missions and Mexican-era residences. The campus plan organized residence halls, academic buildings, and the library around enclosed courtyards and formal gardens.

The landscape design integrated olive trees, cypress, citrus, and Mediterranean plantings into the architectural framework, producing a campus that came to be regarded as a refined example of the regional revival applied to an educational institution. The college's founding generation explicitly drew on the imagery of the California missions to express a sense of place and continuity with the older Spanish-colonial heritage of the southern California foothills.

The campus remains in active use as a private liberal arts college and is held in institutional ownership. The historic core of the campus, including its principal courtyards and revival-era buildings, has been preserved and continues to define the college's architectural identity.

Within California's adobe and revival traditions, Scripps College is a particularly refined application of the Spanish-colonial revival idiom to an academic setting, translating the older adobe and tile vocabulary into a coherent twentieth-century institutional landscape.