Wyneken
Auditorium

Concordia Seminary
Clayton, Missouri 63105
www.csl.edu

At the time this campus opened in 1926, it was called the largest and most costly theological seminary group owned by any Protestant church body in the nation. Concordia Seminary had begun instruction in 1839 in a log cabin in Altenburg, Perry County. It was founded by Germans from Saxony who had arrived two years previously. The seminary moved to St. Louis in 1849, where it was located on Jefferson Avenue near Lutheran Hospital and Holy Trinity Lutheran Church.

The present site was acquired in 1921. The new buildings were designed by the Philadelphia firm of Day & Klauder, who had inherited the reputation of Cope & Stewardson (another Philadelphia firm and designers of Washington University) as the foremost practitioners of the Collegiate Gothic, a style based primarily on the fifteenth and sixteenth century transitional Gothic-Renaissance buildings of Oxford and Cambridge. Charles Z. Klauder (1872-1938) was a native of Philadelphia and became a partner of Frank Miles Day in 1911. His most famous work is the Cathedral of Learning, a Gothic skyscraper at the University of Pittsburgh. His work is often distinguished by a sensitivity to materials, and here he chose an unusual combination of stone, including four shades of red from Boulder, Colorado, gray from Ste. Genevieve, Missouri, white from St. Louis, and yellow from Wittenberg, Missouri.

The top stages of the 120-foot Luther Tower were finally completed in 1966 by Froese, Maack & Becker. The Chapel of St. Timothy and St. Titus, to the west of the quadrangle, was designed by Ware Associates of Rockford, Illinois, and was dedicated in 1992, diverting services from the old chapel, which now became known as Wyneken Auditorium. In remembrance of the 50th anniversary of the D-Day Landings in France, the women of the Chorus performed a concert here on June 5, 1994.

Notes by Esley Hamilton and Philip Barnes