Ralph Adams Cram, arguably the leading Gothic Revival architect and theoretician in the early 20th century, wrote about the appeal of the Gothic for educational facilities in his book The 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."[3]
Tastes became more conservative in the 1880s, and "collegiate architecture soon after came to prefer a more scholarly and less restless Gothic."[9]
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.[10] 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.
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.[11] Rogers was criticized by the growing
Modernist movement.[12] 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.[13]
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.[14][15]
American architect
Alexander Jackson Davis is "generally credited with coining the term"[16] documented in a handwritten description of his own "English Collegiate Gothic Mansion" of 1853 for the Harrals of Bridgeport, Connecticut.[17] By the 1890s, the movement was known as "Collegiate Gothic".[18]
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.[19]
Culmination
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 commissioned by
University of Pittsburgh chancellor
John Gabbert Bowman to design a tall building in the form of a Gothic tower.[20] What he produced, the
Cathedral of Learning (1926–37), has been described as the literal culmination of late Gothic Revival architecture.[21] 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.[22] The tower contain a half-acre Gothic hall supported only by its 52-foot (16 m) tall arches.[23] 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, designed by
Porphyrios Associates, and
Benjamin Franklin College and
Pauli Murray College, both designed by
Robert A.M. Stern Architects, at Yale University.[24] The University of Southern California's USC Village[25] was created as an inexpensive post-modern nod to collegiate revival. (Harley Ellis Devereaux, 2017).
R. H. King Academy, Toronto (formerly Scarborough High School/Collegiate Institute) – partially demolished and main entrance arch from original building remains (1922)
^"Brookings Hall". Washington University in St. Louis. Retrieved 2023-02-03.
^Slipek, Edwin J. Jr., Ralph Adams Cram, The University of Richmond and the Gothic Style Today, Marsh Art Gallery, University of Richmond, 1997 p. 19
^Rev. Norman Nash designed the building. Architect
Charles Bulfinch was asked to review the plans, and designed the steeple. Marjorie Warvelle Harbaugh, "Charles Bulfinch", The First Forty Years of Washington DC Architecture, (Lulu, 2013), p. 362.
[1]
^Daniel Coit Gilman, "The Library of Yale College", The University Quarterly (October 1860), p. 9.
[2]
^Kenneth A. Breisch, Henry Hobson Richardson and the Small Public Library in America, (MIT Press, 1997), p. 60.
^
ab"The WPI Campus". WPI Tech Bible. Worcester Polytechnic Institute. Retrieved 26 November 2020. The impressive academic Gothic Revival structure that Earle designed is believed to be the first gothic collegiate building in the United States. Thus, this Institute is proud to claim that the tradition of gothic "old main" college buildings in America started with Boynton Hall.
^Paul Goldberger, "The Sterling Library: A Reassessment", On the Rise: Architecture and Design in a Post Modern Age, (Penguin Books, 1985), pp. 269–71.
^William Harlan Hale, "Yale's Cathedral Orgy", The Nation (April 29, 1931), pp. 471–72.
^Bloomer, Kent C. (2000). The Nature of Ornament: Rhythm and Metamorphosis in Architecture. New York: W. W. Norton & Company. pp. 187–185.
ISBN9780393730364. Retrieved 4 April 2014.
^Toker, Franklin (2009). Pittsburgh: A New Portrait. Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press. p. 327.
ISBN978-0-8229-4371-6.
^Stern, Robert A. M.; Shapiro, Gideon Fink (2018). The New Residential Colleges at Yale : a Conversation Across Time. Paul Goldberger, Melissa DelVecchio, Graham S. Wyatt, Arianne Kouri. New York, New York: Monacelli.
ISBN9781580935043.
OCLC986817299.
^"USC Village". USC – University of Southern California. Retrieved October 8, 2018.