Sage Hall

Sage Hall was built more than a century ago, financed by an Ithaca businessman, Henry W. Sage, to advance a revolutionary concept at the time. "When you are ready to carry out the idea of educating young women as thoroughly as young men," Sage told his friend, Ezra Cornell in 1868, "I will provide the endowment to enable you to do so."

Construction started four years later, and in 1875 Sage College welcomed Cornell's first 25 female students, making the university a pioneer in coeducation and attracting a swarm of applications. Early graduates included two college presidents, Julia Josephine Thomas Irvine (Wellesley) and Martha Carey Thomas (Bryn Mawr); a prominent women's suffragist, Harriet May Mills; a publisher and author, Ruth Putnam; and the noted Cornell professor and scientist, Anna Botsford Comstock.

The building was designed by Cornell's first architecture professor, the Rev. Charles W. Babcock. A founding member of the American Institute of Architects, Babcock equipped Sage College with a swimming pool, gym, botanical conservatory, and the highest quality furnishings and facilities in those earliest days of indoor plumbing.

After 130 years as home to a residence hall, a dining hall, classrooms, and offices, the building was offered to the Johnson School in 1996. Thus ended the school's quest for new quarters and began an ambitious architectural and fund-raising effort to completely retrofit the structure for the 21st century.

A firm specializing in historic restoration, the Hillier Group, of Princeton, New Jersey, was asked to design the new Sage Hall, and Alan Chimacoff, a Cornell alumnus and former architecture instructor, became the lead architect. As the first Sage Hall had been 125 years before, this was to be a Cornell building designed by one of the university's own architects. The Hillier Group's inventive approach would prove more than worthy of Babcock's legacy.

To preserve the landmark structure while, in effect, custom-designing a new building to meet the evolving needs of graduate management education, Sage Hall had to be gutted. But Chimacoff and his team were able to preserve much of the original exterior, even re-creating a long-gone tower and finial, linking new and old in a manner that has proven pleasing to see, comfortable to inhabit, and exciting to use.