Collegiate Gothic is anarchitectural style subgenre ofGothic Revival architecture, that first became popular in the late-19th and early-20th centuries for college and high school buildings in theUnited States andCanada, and to a certain extent Europe. A form ofhistoricist architecture, it took its inspiration from English Tudor and Gothic buildings.

Ralph Adams Cram, arguably the leading Gothic Revival architect and theoretician of the movement, wrote about the appeal of the Gothic for educational facilities in his bookThe Gothic Quest: "Through architecture and its allied arts we have the power to bend men and sway them as few have who depended on the spoken word. It is for us, as part of our duty as our highest privilege to act...for spreading what is true."^[1]

Gothic Revival architecture was used for American college buildings as early as 1829, when "Old Kenyon" was completed on the campus ofKenyon College inGambier, Ohio.^[2] Another early example wasAlexander Jackson Davis's University Hall (1833–37, demolished 1890), onNew York University'sWashington Square campus.Richard Bond's church-like library for Harvard College,Gore Hall (1837–41, demolished 1913), became the model for other library buildings.^[3][4]James Renwick Jr.'s Free Academy Building (1847–49, demolished 1928), for what is todayCity College of New York, continued in the style. Inspired by London'sHampton Court Palace, Swedish-bornCharles Ulricson designedOld Main (1856–57) atKnox College inGalesburg, Illinois.^[5]

Following theCivil War, manyidiosyncraticHigh Victorian Gothic buildings were added to the campuses of American colleges. Examples includeWorcester Polytechnic Institute (Boynton Hall, 1868, byStephen C. Earle);^[6]Yale College (Farnam Hall, 1869–70, byRussell Sturgis); theUniversity of Pennsylvania (College Hall, 1870–72, Thomas W. Richards);Harvard College (Memorial Hall, 1870–77,William Robert Ware andHenry Van Brunt); andCornell University (Sage Hall (1871–75,Charles Babcock). In 1871, English architectWilliam Burges designed a row of vigorous French Gothic-inspired buildings forTrinity College –Seabury Hall, Northam Tower, Jarvis Hall (all completed 1878) – inHartford, Connecticut.^{[citation needed]}

Tastes became more conservative in the 1880s, and "collegiate architecture soon after came to prefer a more scholarly and less restless Gothic."^[7]

Beginning in the late-1880s, Philadelphia architectsWalter Cope andJohn Stewardson expanded the campus ofBryn Mawr College in an understated English Gothic style that was highly sensitive to site and materials. Inspired by the architecture ofOxford andCambridge universities, and historicists but not literal copyists, Cope & Stewardson were highly influential in establishing the Collegiate Gothic style.^[8] Commissions followed for collections of buildings at theUniversity of Pennsylvania (1895–1911),Princeton University (1896–1902), andWashington University in St. Louis (1899–1909), marking the nascent beginnings of a movement that transformed many college campuses across the country.

In 1901, the firm ofShepley, Rutan & Coolidge created a master plan for a Collegiate Gothic campus for the fledglingUniversity of Chicago, then spent the next 15 years completing it. Some of their works, such as the Mitchell Tower (1901–1908), were near-literal copies of historic buildings.

George Browne Post designed theCity College of New York's new campus (1903–1907) atHamilton Heights, Manhattan, in the style.^{[citation needed]}

The style was experienced up-close by a wide audience at the 1904Louisiana Purchase Exposition inSt. Louis, Missouri. TheWorld's Fair and1904 Olympic Games were held on the newly completed campus ofWashington University, which delayed occupying its buildings until 1905.^{[citation needed]}

The movement gained further momentum whenCharles Donagh Maginnis designedGasson Hall atBoston College in 1908. Maginnis & Walsh went on to design Collegiate Gothic buildings at some twenty-five other campuses, including the main buildings atEmmanuel College (Massachusetts), and the law school at theUniversity of Notre Dame.^{[citation needed]}

Ralph Adams Cram designed a series of Collegiate Gothic buildings for thePrinceton University Graduate College (1911–1917).^{[citation needed]}

James Gamble Rogers did extensive work atYale University, beginning in 1917. Some critics claim he tookhistoricist fantasy to an extreme, while others choose to focus on what is widely considered to be the resulting beautiful and sophisticated Yale campus.^[9] Rogers was criticized by the growingModernist movement.^[10] His cathedral-likeSterling Memorial Library (1927–1930), with itsecclesiastical imagery and lavish use of ornament, came under vocal attack from one of Yale's own undergraduates:

A modern building constructed for purely modern needs has no excuse for going off in an orgy of meretricious medievalism and stale iconography.^[11]

Other architects, notably John Russell Pope and Bertram Goodhue (who just before his death sketched the original version of Yale's Sterling Library from which Rogers worked), advocated for and contributed to Yale's particular version of Collegiate Gothic.^[12][13]

WhenMcMaster University moved toHamilton, Ontario, Canadian architectWilliam Lyon Somerville designed its new campus (1928–1930) in the style.^{[citation needed]}

American architectAlexander Jackson Davis is "generally credited with coining the term"^[14] documented in a handwritten description of his own "English Collegiate Gothic Mansion" of 1853 for the Harrals of Bridgeport, Connecticut.^[15] By the 1890s, the movement was known as "Collegiate Gothic".^[16]

In his praise for Cope & Stewardson'sQuadrangle Dormitories at theUniversity of Pennsylvania, architectRalph Adams Cram revealed some of the racial and cultural implications underlying the Collegiate Gothic:

It was, of course, in the great group of dormitories for the University of Pennsylvania that Cope and Stewardson first came before the entire country as the great exponents of architectural poetry and of the importance of historical continuity and the connotation ofscholasticism. These buildings are among the most remarkable yet built in America ...

First of all, let it be said at once that primarily they are what they should be: scholastic in inspiration and effect, and scholastic of the type that is ours by inheritance; ofOxford andCambridge, not ofPadua orWittenberg orParis. They are picturesque also, even dramatic; they are altogether wonderful in mass and in composition. If they are not a constant inspiration to those who dwell within their walls or pass through their "quads" or their vaulted archways, it is not their fault but that of the men themselves.

The [Spanish-American War Memorial] tower has been severely criticized as an archaeological abstraction reared to commemorate contemporary American heroism. The criticism seems just to me, though only in a measure. American heroism harks back to English heroism; the blood shed beforeManila and onSan Juan Hill was the same blood that flowed atBosworth Field,Flodden, andthe Boyne. Therefore the British base of the design is indispensable, for such were the racial foundations.^[17]

Collegiate Gothic complexes were most often horizontal compositions, save for a single tower or towers serving as an exclamation. Gamble designed the skyscraper Collegiate Gothic academic building atNorthwestern University's downtown Chicago campus in the 1920s, completed in 1926. This was in the wake of the international 1921Tribune Tower competition, which out of more than 200 entries from well-known architects, famously chose a neo-Gothic design by Howells and Hood for their commercial skyscraper.

At theUniversity of Pittsburgh, Charles Klauder was commissioned byUniversity of Pittsburgh chancellorJohn Gabbert Bowman to design a tall building in the form of a Gothic tower.^[18] What he produced, theCathedral of Learning (1926–37), has been described as the literal culmination of late Gothic Revival architecture.^[19] A combination of Gothic spire and modern skyscraper, the steel-frame, limestone-clad, 42-story structure is both the world's second tallest university building and Gothic-styled edifice.^[20] The tower contain a half-acre Gothic hall supported only by its 52-foot (16 m) tall arches.^[21] It is accompanied by the campus's other Gothic Revival structures by Klauder, including theStephen Foster Memorial (1935–1937) and the French GothicHeinz Memorial Chapel (1933–1938).

A number of colleges and universities have commissioned major new buildings in the Collegiate Gothic style in recent years. These include Princeton University'sWhitman College, designed byPorphyrios Associates, andBenjamin Franklin College andPauli Murray College, both designed byRobert A.M. Stern Architects, at Yale University.^[22] The University of Southern California's USC Village^[23] was created as a less expensivepost-modern nod to Collegiate Gothic revival. (Harley Ellis Devereaux, 2017).

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• 
  University Hall (1833–37),New York University,Alexander Jackson Davis, architect.
• 
  Free Academy Building (1847–49),City College of New York,James Renwick Jr., architect.
• 
  College Hall (1870–72),University of Pennsylvania, Thomas W. Richards, architect.
• 
  Memorial Hall (1870–77),Harvard University,William Robert Ware &Henry Van Brunt, architects.
• 
  Sage Hall (1871–75),Cornell University,Charles Babcock, architect.
• 
  Seabury Hall, Northam Tower, Jarvis Hall (1871–78),Trinity College,William Burges, architect.
• 
  Thompson Memorial Library (1903–1905),Vassar College,Allen & Collens, architects.
• 
  Shephard Hall tower (1903–1907),City College of New York,George Browne Post, architect.
• 
  Gasson Hall, Boston College
• 
  Holder Hall,Princeton University (1909–1911).
• 
  Suzzallo Library (1922–1926),University of Washington in Seattle,Charles Bebb andCarl F. Gould, architects
• 
  Cathedral of Learning (1926–1937),University of Pittsburgh,Charles Klauder, architect.
• 
  Heinz Chapel (1933–1938),University of Pittsburgh, Charles Klauder, architect.
• 
  Duke Chapel (1930–1932) on West Campus ofDuke University,Julian Abele andHorace Trumbauer, architects
• 
  Old Main Building,University of Texas, Austin, Texas (1882-1934);Frederick Ernst Ruffini, architect;Abner Cook, contractor

• Gothic architecture
• Gothic Revival architecture
• Carpenter Gothic

• Bergin, T. G.Yale's Residential Colleges; the First Fifty Years. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1983.
• Duke, Alex.Importing Oxbridge. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2006.ISBN 0300067615
• Lewis, Michael J.,The Gothic Revival (London: Thames & Johnson Ltd., 2002).ISBN 0-500-20359-8
• Robinson, Deborah and Edmund P. Meade. "Traditional Becomes Modern: the Rise of Collegiate Gothic Architecture at American Universities." Conference paper presented at 'Second International Congress on Construction History', Queens' College, Cambridge University; 2006.

• Media related toCollegiate Gothic architecture at Wikimedia Commons

• Collegiate Gothic architecture
• Gothic Revival architecture
• Gothic Revival architecture in Canada
• Gothic Revival architecture in the United States
• 19th-century architectural styles
• 20th-century architectural styles
• American architectural styles
• Revival architectural styles

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