The Regis High School

History and architecture

The Regis High School is five stories high, built of stone, and functionally designed to meet the needs of urban education. It presents an appearance of classic monumentality because of the rows of Ionic columns that enrich its facades.

Regis occupies a site that runs through from 84th Street to 85th Street between Madison and Park Avenues. To make maximum use of the available space and to provide the quiet and seclusion that are so desirable for effective education, the architects planned their building around a central courtyard with most of the classrooms opening on it. Because the building is located at mid-block, only the two facades on the cross streets can be seen on the exterior, and it is on these that the designers demonstrated their ability to apply the classical idiom to a modern high school.

On the 84th Street side, the first story, which one enters through an imposing central door, is occupied by administrative offices. This story also serves as a base for the monumental, engaged Ionic columns that rise through four stories. The result is an appearance of great strength and serenity. But even here the architects kept in mind the fundamental purpose of the building and designed the columns with a spacing wide enough to provide the light and air needed for a library, and for the classrooms and activity rooms that are located on this side of the building. An imposing entablature carries the inscription "Deo Et Patriae Pietas Christiana Erexit". ("Christian Devotion Built This for God and Country''.) An attic story surmounts the cornice.

On the 85th Street side, the architects faced the problem of designing another exterior wall in the classical manner to enclose a large auditorium on the first three stories and laboratories on the top two. They solved it by expressing two stairways in slightly projecting end bays with imposing doors at. street level and with a large expanse of blank wail, broken only by a high row of small frameless windows, in front of the auditorium. Tins wall also provides a strong base for a handsome row of Ionic columns which screens the laboratories and classrooms on the upper two stories. The entablature carries the Jesuit motto: "Ad Maiorem Dei Gloriam". ("To the Greater Glory of God'.)

Regis High School is nationally known for its scholastic achievements and is the only Jesuit high school in the country which, because of its endowments, charges no tuition.