Dow Hall

Dow Hall (370 Temple Street) was built in 1899–1901 as the principal recitation and classroom building of the Sheffield Scientific School — a late-Sheff “big block” intended to consolidate dispersed teaching rooms into a single modern facility. It was funded in part by Lucius S. Dow, a New Haven industrialist, and designed by architect Kirtland Cutter in a restrained brick Renaissance Revival mode that signaled Sheff’s turn away from the flamboyant Victorian eclecticism of the 1870s and 1880s. For decades it functioned as a core high-traffic academic building for Sheff undergraduates until the Sheffield identity was gradually dissolved post-WWII and its spaces were repurposed for humanities instruction. Today, absorbed into the Humanities Quadrangle, Dow still reads clearly as a Sheff-era “classroom engine” — a major architectural marker of the Scientific School’s last generation of building before full integration into Yale College.  Today, the building houses the Yale Center for Language Study.