Collegiate Gothic in North America

Brookings Hall at
Washington University in St. Louis

A stone grotesque on a CCNY building from 1906, holding a model of Shepard Hall.

Collegiate Gothic is an architectural genre, a subgenre of Gothic Revival architecture.

History

The beginnings of Collegiate Gothic in North America date back to 1894 when Cope & Stewardson completed Pembroke Hall on the campus of Bryn Mawr College. At Bryn Mawr Cope & Stewardson combined the Gothic architecture of Oxford and Cambridge Universities with the local landscape to establish the Collegiate Gothic style.^[1] Commissions shortly followed for buildings on the campuses of the University of Pennsylvania, Princeton University, and Washington University in St. Louis, marking the nascent beginnings of a movement that transformed many college campuses across the country.

Harkness Tower, Yale University

The Collegiate Gothic movement gained further momentum when Charles Donagh Maginnis designed Gasson Hall at Boston College in 1908. Publication of its design in 1909, and praise from influential American architect Ralph Adams Cram, helped establish Collegiate Gothic as the prevailing architectural style on American university campuses for decades. Maginnis & Walsh went on to design buildings at some twenty-five other campuses, including the main buildings at Emmanuel College, the chapel at Trinity College and the law school at the University of Notre Dame.

Gasson Hall is credited for establishing the typology of dominant Gothic towers in subsequent campus designs, including those at Princeton (Cleveland Tower, 1913-1917), Yale (Harkness Tower, 1917-1921), and Duke (Chapel Tower, 1930-1935).

Architect James Gamble Rogers' extensive work at Yale University, beginning in 1917, may be the prototypical example of the genre. His designs lent an air of instant heritage and authenticity to the campus. Rogers was criticized by other prominent Gothic-revival Ameican architects, namely Cram, for his use of steel frames underneath stone cladding, and tricks such as splashing acid on stone walls to simulate age. Rogers was also criticized by the growing Modernist movement of the time. The 1927 Sterling Memorial Library came under especially vocal attack from Yale students for its historicist spirit and its lavish use of ornament.

Other notable examples of Collegiate Gothic include Charles Klauder's steel-frame skyscraper on the University of Pittsburgh's campus, the Cathedral of Learning, and the extensive and consistent collection of designs at the University of Chicago.

Architects who designed in the style

James Gamble Rogers' Montgomery Ward Memorial Building for the Northwestern University Medical School (1927).^[2]

• Cope & Stewardson
• Julian Abele
• Ralph Adams Cram
• James Gamble Rogers
• Charles Klauder
• Pond and Pond
• Horace Trumbauer
• York and Sawyer
• David Webster
• Guilbert and Betelle
• William Augustus Edwards

Examples

Quadrangle Dormitories, University of Pennsylvania (1895)

The University of Chicago's Mitchell Tower (left), modeled after Oxford's Magdalen Tower (right).

Suzzallo Library (1926), University of Washington in Seattle

• Altgeld's castles, a set of buildings in five Illinois universities (1896-1899)
• Boston College. specifically Gasson Hall, Devlin Hall, St. Mary's Hall, and Bapst/Burns Library
• Bryn Mawr College, Pembroke Hall (1894) [1]
• City College of New York
• Cornell University
• Duke University, Chapel (1930) and West Campus
• Florida A&M University
• Florida State University
• Fordham University
• Grinnell College
• Indiana University-Bloomington
• John Marshall High School (Los Angeles, California)
• Lehigh University
• Loyola University New Orleans, Marquette Hall (1910)
• The Mary Louis Academy
• McGill University
• McMaster University
• Michigan State University
• Northwestern University
• Princeton University, Blair Hall (1896) [2]
• Rhodes College, Memphis, Tennessee
• Purdue University
• Sewanee: The University of the South, Sewanee, Tennessee
• University of Arkansas
• University of Chicago
• University of Denver
• University of Florida
• University of Idaho
• University of Michigan, Law School (1924)
• University of Oklahoma
• University of Pennsylvania, Quadrangle Dormitories (1895)[3]
• University of Richmond
• University of Saskatchewan
• University of St. Thomas (Minnesota)
• University of Toledo, University Hall and Memorial Field House
• University of Toronto
• University of Washington in Seattle, Suzzallo Library (1926)
• Washington University in St. Louis, Brookings Hall (1900) and Danforth Campus
• The University of Western Ontario
• West Chester University
• Yale University, Sterling Memorial Library, Harkness Tower and the Memorial Quadrangle

References

1. ^ "Collegiate Gothic". Bryn Mawr Library. http://www.brynmawr.edu/library/exhibits/thomas/gothic.html. 
2. ^ Timeline 1900–1949, History, About, Northwestern University

Loyola University of Chicago

See also

• Gothic architecture
• Gothic revival architecture
• Hokie Stone