Athenaeum at Caltech

The Athenaeum is a faculty club and private social club on the California Institute of Technology campus in Pasadena, California.

Building

The Athenaeum was designed by Gordon Kaufmann in the Mediterranean Revival style, with landscape design by Florence Yoch and Lucile Council, and opened in 1930. It includes a restaurant, a private hotel with several named suites (e.g. The Einstein Suite, where Albert Einstein lived while at Caltech), and serves as Caltech's Faculty Club.^[1]

Members

Membership includes Caltech faculty, staff, graduate students, undergraduate seniors, alumni, trustees, and Associates of the California Institute of Technology, and staff of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL), the Palomar Observatory, and the Huntington Library and Art Gallery.^[2]

Notable regulars at the Athenaeum Round Table have included:

• David Baltimore,^[3]
• Robert Christy,^[3]
• Lee Alvin DuBridge,^[4]
• Richard Feynman,^[3]
• William Alfred Fowler,^[5]
• Scott Fraser,^[3]
• Jesse L. Greenstein,^[6]
• Charles Christian Lauritsen,^[5]
• Maarten Schmidt,^[7]
• Vishnu Ramaswamy,^[5]

See also

• List of American gentlemen's clubs

References

1. Bates, Colleen Dunn; Gillis, Sandy; Ganon, Jill Alison (2006). Hometown Pasadena: The Insider's Guide. Prospect Park Publishing. pp. 46–47. ISBN 9780975393918. Retrieved 6 February 2016.
2. The Athenaeum website
3. John M. Broder (March 7, 2004). "When These Friends Get Together, the Talk Is Rarely Small". The New York Times. The Caltech discussions could be compared to the celebrated Round Table at the Algonquin Hotel in New York, where leading literary wits of the 1920's traded quips and well-crafted insults. But the round table at the Athenaeum is a more sober and discursive affair. The discussions are notable for their spirit of inquiry, lack of intellectual pretension and absence of verbal one-upmanship.
4. Jesse L. Greenstein. "Lee Alvin Dubridge". National Academies Press Biographical Memoirs.
5. Donald D. Clayton (January 1996). "William Alfred Fowler (1911-1995)". Publications of the Astronomical Society of the Pacific.
6. Robert P. Kraft. "Jesse Leonard Greenstein". National Academies Press Biographical Memoirs.
7. Alan Zarembo, interview with Maarten Schmidt (June 16, 2008). "1942: A space odyssey - Celebrated astrophysicist traces passion to WWII sky". The Journal Gazette. Archived from the original on 2011-05-22.

Coordinates: 34°08′13″N 118°07′18″W / 34.136838°N 118.121679°W