Hodges Hall (Huntington, West Virginia)

 dormitory  Add category

Current use:Men’s residence building.
Location: Eastern side of the inner campus, besides the Community College.
Designers:Meanor & Handloser, Architects.
Completed: 1937, renovated in 1969
Name: For Thomas E. Hodges, who served as president of Marshall College from 1886 to 1896.

It is a three-story building, very similar to its neighbor, the Laidley Hall. As other buildings of the depression period (1930-1939), it shows the current tradition of well-built, reliable buildings, of classical-American conception, that did not yet received the influence of the European modern architecture. As this influence began in Chicago’s Illinois Institute of Technology, with Mies Van der Rohe, and in Harvard, with Gropius and Breuer, it was not dominant in the middle of the 1930’s decade. The building is expressed in a sober, perhaps conventional conception, using masonry walls carefully rendered, and a consistent fenestration with sandstone ledgers and lintels with flat arches with keystones. The corners of the building have been visually reinforced through rows of slightly protruding bricks, which suggest the idea of a pilaster or buttress, without fall back on formal, detailed pilasters. This restrained classical language, united to a rationally developed plan, point out a high standard architecture, but lacking a bit of renovation that would be present in the post World War II years.