Facility Description

Sage Chapel followed Sage College as part of Cornell's informal brick group. In this area of the campus -- influenced by Frederic Law Olmstead, advocated by first president Andrew Dickson White, financed by Henry Williams Sage, and designed by Charles Babcock -- informal, naturalistic landscaping blended with asymmetrical red brick, High Victorian Gothic buildings. Babcock was the university's first professor of architecture but also an Episcopalian priest and held the preachership of this chapel. His parsonage was east of the apse. Based on the English parish church, Sage Chapel features asymmetrical massing and entrances and a high, hammer-beam roof. The chapel has been changed many times, all but the last nave extension eastward in 1940 under the direction of Charles Babcock. The original was an L-plan with nave and side chapel. The decoration was plain. In 1882, a memorial chapel for the university's founders was added to the north side with funds from the estate of Jennie McGraw Fiske. The apse and transepts were added in 1898 and the elaborate interior decoration was installed five years later.