Collegiate Gothic is an architectural style subgenre of Gothic Revival architecture, popular in the late-19th and early-20th centuries for college and high school buildings in the United States and Canada, and to a certain extent Europe. A form of historicist architecture, it took its inspiration from English Tudor and Gothic buildings. It has returned in the 21st century in the form of prominent new buildings at schools and universities including Princeton and Yale.

Ralph Adams Cram, arguably the leading Gothic Revival architect and theoretician in the early 20th century, stated the appeal of the Gothic for educational facilities in his book Gothic Quest as, “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.”

History
Beginnings
Gothic Revival architecture was used for American college buildings as early as 1829, when “Old Kenyon” was completed on the campus of Kenyon College in Gambier, Ohio. Alexander Jackson Davis’s University Hall (1833–37, demolished 1890), on New York University’s Washington Square campus, was another early example. Richard Bond’s church-like library for Harvard College, Gore Hall (1837–41, demolished 1913), became the model for other library buildings. James Renwick, Jr.’s Free Academy Building (1847–49, demolished 1928), for what is today City College of New York, continued in the style. Inspired by London’s Hampton Court Palace, Swedish-born Charles Ulricson designed Old Main (1856–57) at Knox College in Galesburg, Illinois.

Following the Civil War, idiosyncratic High Victorian Gothic buildings were added to the campuses of American colleges, including Yale College – Farnam Hall (1869–70), Russell Sturgis, architect; the University of Pennsylvania – College Hall (1870–72), Thomas W. Richards, architect; Harvard College – Memorial Hall, (1870–77), William Robert Ware and Henry Van Brunt, architects; and Cornell University – Sage Hall (1871–75), Charles Babcock, architect. In 1871, English architect William Burges designed a row of vigorous French Gothic-inspired buildings for Trinity College – Seabury Hall, Northam Tower, Jarvis Hall (all completed 1878) – in Hartford, Connecticut.

Tastes became more conservative in the 1880s, and “collegiate architecture soon after came to prefer a more scholarly and less restless Gothic.”

Movement
Beginning in the late-1880s, Philadelphia architects Walter Cope and John Stewardson expanded the campus of Bryn Mawr College in an understated English Gothic style that was highly sensitive to site and materials. Inspired by the architecture of Oxford and Cambridge universities, and historicists but not literal copyists, Cope & Stewardson were highly influential in establishing the Collegiate Gothic style. Commissions followed for collections of buildings at the University of Pennsylvania (1895–1911), Princeton University (1896–1902), and Washington 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 of Shepley, Rutan & Coolidge created a master plan for a Collegiate Gothic campus for the fledgling University 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 the City College of New York’s new campus (1903–1907) at Hamilton Heights, Manhattan, in the style.

The style was experienced up-close by a wide audience at the 1904 Louisiana Purchase Exposition in St. Louis, Missouri. The World’s Fair and 1904 Olympic Games were held on the newly completed campus of Washington University, which delayed occupying its buildings until 1905.

The movement gained further momentum when Charles Donagh Maginnis designed Gasson Hall at Boston College in 1908. Maginnis & Walsh went on to design Collegiate Gothic buildings at some twenty-five other campuses, including the main buildings at Emmanuel College (Massachusetts), and the law school at the University of Notre Dame.

Ralph Adams Cram designed one of the most poetic collections of Collegiate Gothic buildings for the Princeton University Graduate College (1911–1917).

James Gamble Rogers did extensive work at Yale University, beginning in 1917. Some critics claim he took historicist fantasy to an extreme, while others choose to focus on what is widely considered to be the resulting beautiful and sophisticated Yale campus. Rogers was criticized by the growing Modernist movement. His cathedral-like Sterling Memorial Library (1927–1930), with its ecclesiastical 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.

Hale’s article is frequently cited, but can seen as narrow minded and unsophisticated work of an undergraduate. It is worth noting that other acclaimed and highly capable 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 significantly to Yale’s particular version of collegiate gothic. and

Following McMaster University’s decision to relocate to Hamilton, Ontario, Canadian architect William Lyon Somerville designed its new campus (1928–1930) in the style.

Origins of the term
American architect Alexander Jackson Davis is “generally credited with coining the term” documented in a handwritten description of his own “English Collegiate Gothic Mansion” of 1853 for the Harrals of Bridgeport, Connecticut. The movement was known as “Collegiate Gothic” in the 1890s.

1904 commentary
In his praise for Cope & Stewardson’s Quadrangle Dormitories at the University of Pennsylvania, architect Ralph 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 of scholasticism. 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; of Oxford and Cambridge, not of Padua or Wittenberg or Paris. 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 before Manila and on San Juan Hill was the same blood that flowed at Bosworth Field, Flodden, and the Boyne. Therefore the British base of the design is indispensable, for such were the racial foundations.
Hybrids
Collegiate Gothic complexes were most often horizontal compositions, save for a single tower or towers serving as an exclamation.

At the University of Pittsburgh, Charles Klauder was presented with a limited site and opted for verticality. The Cathedral of Learning (1926–37), a steel-frame, limestone-clad, 42-story skyscraper, is the world’s second tallest university building and second tallest Gothic-styled building. It has been described as the literal culmination of late Gothic Revival architecture. The tower contain a half-acre Gothic hall whose mass is supported only by its 52-foot (16 m) tall arches. It is accompanied by the campus’s other Gothic Revival structures by Klauder, including the Stephen Foster Memorial (1935–1937) and the French Gothic Heinz Memorial Chapel (1933–1938).

21st Century Revival
A number of colleges and universities have commissioned major new buildings in the Collegiate Gothic style in recent years. These include Princeton University’s Whitman College (Porphyrios Associates, 2007), Yale University’s Benjamin Franklin College and Pauli Murray College (Robert A.M. Stern Architects, 2017), and University of Southern California’s USC Village (Harley Ellis Devereaux, 2017).

Architects of the Collegiate Gothic style
Julian Abele
Snowden Ashford
Allen & Collens
Cope & Stewardson
Ralph Adams Cram
William Augustus Edwards
Philip H. Frohman
Bertram Grosvenor Goodhue
Guilbert and Betelle
Charles Klauder
Pond and Pond
James Gamble Rogers
Horace Trumbauer
Dan Everett Waid
David Webster
York and Sawyer

Examples
Altgeld’s castles – a set of buildings within five Illinois universities (1896–1899)
Augustana College (Illinois), Rock Island, Illinois – The Old Seminary, the Ascension Chapel, and Founders Hall (1923)
Berry College – Ford buildings
Boston College – specifically Gasson Hall, Devlin Hall, St. Mary’s Hall, and Bapst/Burns Library
Bryn Athyn Cathedral of Bryn Athyn College
Bryn Mawr College – Pembroke Hall (1894)
Carleton College
Central Commerce Collegiate, Toronto
Central Technical School, Toronto
City College of New York (1903), George Browne Post, architect
College of Wooster – Kauke Hall
Columbia University: Teachers College
Cornell University
Danforth Collegiate and Technical Institute, Toronto 1922–1923
Dobbs Ferry High School, Dobbs Ferry, New York (1934)
Duke University – Duke Chapel (1930–1935), and West Campus, arch.
Eastern Commerce Collegiate Institute, Toronto, Canada 1925
Eastern Senior High School (1923), Washington, D.C.
Emma Willard School
Florida A&M University
Florida State University
Fordham University – Rose Hill Campus
Fordson High School, Dearborn, Michigan
Franklin & Marshall College – Old Main, Goethean Hall, and Diagnothian Hall (1854–1857)
Georgia Tech
Grinnell College
High Point Central High School (1926), (High Point, North Carolina)
Hillsborough High School (Tampa, Florida)
Indiana University-Bloomington
Isaac E. Young Middle School, New Rochelle, New York
John Carroll University
John Marshall High School, Los Angeles, California
Kenyon College
Knox College – Old Main (1857)
Lehigh University
Loyola University Maryland
Loyola University New Orleans – Marquette Hall (1910)
McGill University, Montreal, Canada
McKinley High School, St. Louis, Missouri
McMaster University, Hamilton, Ontario, Canada
The Mary Louis Academy, Jamaica Estates, New York (1937)
Michigan State University
Milliken Public School, Markham – façade only (1929)
New Jersey Institute of Technology – Central King Building, the old Central High School of Newark (1911)
North Toronto Collegiate Institute 1912 – demolished
Northwestern University
Northwest Missouri State University – Administration Building
Oglethorpe University, Atlanta, Georgia
Parkdale Collegiate Institute, Toronto 1929
Princeton University – Blair Hall (1896)
R. H. King Academy, Toronto – destroyed in fire and only arch from girls’ entrance from original building remains (1922)
Reed College, Oregon
Rhodes College, Memphis, Tennessee
Purdue University
Saint Joseph’s University, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania
Sewanee: The University of the South, Sewanee, Tennessee
Trinity College, Connecticut
United States Military Academy, West Point, New York
University of Arkansas
University of Chicago
University of Denver
University of Florida
University of Idaho
University of Iowa
University of Michigan – U of M Law School (1924), Martha Cook Building (1915)
University of Notre Dame
University of Oklahoma
University of Pennsylvania – Quadrangle Dormitories (1894–1911), Medical School (1904, 1928), Veterinary School and Hospital (1906, 1912), Law School (1900)
University of Pittsburgh (Cathedral of Learning, Heinz Chapel, Stephen Foster Memorial, Clapp Hall)
University of Richmond, Virginia
University of St. Thomas, Minnesota
University of Saskatchewan, Canada
University of Southern California – Wallis Annenberg Hall
University of Tennessee at Chattanooga
University of Toledo – University Hall and Memorial Field House, Ohio
University of Toronto – St. George campus, Canada
University of Washington in Seattle – Suzzallo Library (1926)
The University of Western Ontario, London, Ontario, Canada
Washington University in St. Louis – Brookings Hall (1900), and the Danforth Campus
Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University
West Chester University
Western Technical-Commercial School, Toronto (1927)
Williams College, Thompson Memorial Chapel
Yale University – Sterling Memorial Library, Harkness Tower, and the Memorial Quadrangle; arch. James Gamble Rogers.
York Memorial Collegiate Institute, Toronto (1929)

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