expansion. Roger's campus plan called for the library to sit on a new main courtyard, now called Cross Campus. Originally, he planned to balance the courtyard with a 5,000-seat chapel facing opposite the library. With the end of compulsory undergraduate chapel services in 1926 and the lack of a financier, the chapel was never built. Expanding on Goodhue's tower concept, Rogers proposed the library take the form of a cathedral, which, in his own words, would be "as near to modern Gothic as we dared to make it." He modeled the library's entrance hall to resemble a vaulted nave and commissioned extensive stained glass and stone ornament to decorate the building's exterior and interior. The library's footprint would take up more than half a city block. Twenty buildings were cleared for its construction, many of them private homes. Although excavation began in the fall of 1927, the construction site was not fully secured until July 1928, when the final holdout homeowner agreed to sell. While the new library was planned and constructed, Yale began soliciting gifts from its alumni for the new library. By 1931, the collection had grown to nearly 2 million volumes, many of them rare books and manuscripts. Among the most important of these acquisitions was a Gutenberg Bible donated by Anna Harkness. The bible became the centerpiece of the new library's Rare Book Room, which allowed students and researchers to browse the most valuable books in the university's collection for the first time, a function later subsumed in part by the Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library. At the time of its construction, the choice of cathedral architecture attracted criticism. Like much of Yale's revivalist construction of the same era, the new library was criticized as expensive and retrograde. William Harlan Hale, writing in The Nation, scorned it as a "cathedral orgy," criticized the library's bastardized cathedral aesthetics and the university's timid anti-modernism. Many students of architecture leveled similar criticisms. Others asserted that the project was either sanctimonious or sacrilegious for merging academic purpose and religious architecture. Later critics have praised the building's ambition, beauty, and pragmatism. Building The library is situated on Yale's Cross Campus, the central quadrangle of the university. Surrounding buildings, including Berkeley College, Trumbull College, and Sterling Law Building were designed by Rogers and built in the same period and Gothic Revival style as the library. Nave The entrance hall of the