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Like the medieval English cathedrals that inspired it, the Princeton University Chapel is an architectural achievement designed to evoke wonder, awe, and reflection. This book is the essential illustrated guide to this magnificent architectural and cultural landmark. Now with new color photos throughout, the book traces the history of the chapel and describes its architecture, sculpture, woodwork, and furnishings. The author knew the building from its planning stages through its construction, dedication, and long use. This book offers unique insights into the vision of architect Ralph Adams Cram and the artistry of Charles J. Connick, who designed the chapel's breathtaking cycle of stained-glass windows. The book gives readers an opportunity to enjoy the chapel as both an aesthetically beautiful structure and a moving religious statement. It reveals how the building's composition is meant to provide spiritual access to as many seekers as possible and instill in them an extraordinary message of hope. The book is a guided tour of an inspiring structure that has served as the spiritual home to one of America's leading universities.

The vision of Utopia obsessed the nineteenth-century mind, shaping art, literature, and especially town planning. This book takes readers across centuries and continents to show how Utopian town planning produced a distinctive type of settlement characterized by its square plan, collective ownership of properties, and communal dormitories. Some of these settlements were sanctuaries from religious persecution, while others were sanctuaries from the Industrial Revolution. Because of their differences in ideology and theology, these settlements have traditionally been viewed separately, but this book shows how they are part of a continuous intellectual tradition that stretches from the early Protestant Reformation into modern times. Through close readings of architectural plans and archival documents, many previously unpublished, this book shows the network of connections between these seemingly disparate Utopian settlements—including even such well-known town plans as those of New Haven and Philadelphia. The most remarkable aspect of the city of refuge is the inventive way it fused its eclectic sources, ranging from the encampments of the ancient Israelites as described in the Bible to the detailed social program of Thomas More's Utopia to modern thought about education, science, and technology. Delving into the historical evolution and antecedents of Utopian towns and cities, this book alters notions of what a Utopian community can and should be.