Talk:Collegiate Gothic

Before I start a slash and burn
Sherman's March across Georgia campaign here I thought I'd toss my premise out. My thought is that all Gothic Revival located on college campuses is not, by definition Collegiate Gothic. Some of it, stuff by Cram for example, is just Gothic Revival on a college campus. I've just been notified by my social director that I am out of here, so I am - but think about it. Einar aka Carptrash (talk) 19:06, 4 October 2011 (UTC)


 * It's an interesting question: What are the defining characteristics of Collegiate Gothic that distinguish it within the broader Gothic Revival style? I'm no expert in this matter, but my guess would be that Collegiate Gothic tends to be built in imitation of the medieval buildings at Oxford and Cambridge, and thus is more English than Continental in provenance and favors Perpendicular details and proportions over Early English and Decorated Gothic. Does this jibe with your understanding? 206.208.105.129 (talk) 19:19, 27 October 2011 (UTC)

I am getting back
to my point above (previous discussion) by removing this image. Because something is gothic and on a college campus does not make it Collegiate Gothic. Also, the whole thing about who the architect was makes this (opinion) not a good place to begin. We do need another starting picture, I'll do one at some point if you don't do it first. Carptrash (talk) 17:26, 13 July 2015 (UTC)


 * I think of Collegiate Gothic as equating to English Renaissance or Jacobethan (think Hampton Court Palace, with a lot of red brick and contrasting stone lintels). There is a lot on this page that is not that. We probably do need a good limiting definition of what is included. Dhtwiki (talk) 23:49, 13 July 2015 (UTC)


 * I added an image of Blair Hall (1896) at Princeton. The firm of Cope and Stewardson was an early (by 1890) and influential exponent of the Collegiate Gothic. If you want a red brick & stone example, I'd recommend the University of Pennsylvania's Quadrangle Dormitories (1895). == BoringHistoryGuy (talk) 22:45, 8 August 2015 (UTC)


 * That's a good photo; I've reduced the size of it, though. A not as good photo of the Quadrangle dorms is lower down, as well as a better one of Wash. Univ. Brookings Hall, another, early, turn of the previous century construction, and which had been the main image before the recent reshuffling. Dhtwiki (talk) 06:35, 9 August 2015 (UTC)


 * Here in Philadelphia, John Stewardson is considered the father of the Collegiate Gothic. The U of PA's Quad was initially conceived to be all stone, like C & S's Bryn Mawr and Princeton buildings, but Stewardson came back from an 1894 tour of England, and changed the walls to brick. Although the firm of Cope & Stewardson designed Washington University's campus (1900-09), it is unlikely that Stewardson himself had anything to do with it, having died in 1896.
 * But back to Carptrash's original point, I agree that Julian Abele's Duke University Chapel from the 1930s is not a good choice to illustrate the Collegiate Gothic style. == BoringHistoryGuy (talk) 22:02, 9 August 2015 (UTC)

And how about Charles Klauder's Cathedral of Learning? He is an important architect in the style and the building is some sort of Gothic and yes, it is on a college campus, but it is not in the collegiate gothic style and unless you convince me otherwise, I shall remove it. Carptrash (talk) 22:26, 20 August 2015 (UTC)


 * I agree with you about the Cathedral of Learning, as I did about Duke University Chapel. But one could argue that these were hybrids that morphed out of Collegiate Gothic. Better to make that point than to remove them. == BoringHistoryGuy (talk) 16:01, 21 August 2015 (UTC)


 * Unless we have a reliable source that makes evident as to why the Cathedral of Learning is not Collegiate Gothic, we should keep it. The books on Gothic architecture that I've seen don't make fine distinctions between sub-genres. The article currently makes only vague allusions to how Collegiate Gothic differs from other types, if it even does that. Dhtwiki (talk) 16:25, 21 August 2015 (UTC)

Definition of Collegiate Gothic
We don't have a good definition of Collegiate Gothic. But I like what Michael Lewis says about it in The Gothic Revival (London: Thames & Hudson Ltd., 2002):

"The finest arose in Philadelphia, where a strong local tradition of masonry construction offset the academicism that dried out so much of the bookish Gothic elsewhere. Beginning in the mid-1880s Walter Cope and John Stewardson developed a collegiate Gothic with a supreme sensitivity to site and materials. At Bryn Mawr they created a cloistered women's college in the Tudor style, expressed in the local mica schist rubble. For the University of Pennsylvania, in urban Philadelphia, the tone was more decorous, a festive mixture of Elizabethan and Jacobean motifs – "Jacobethan," as it was humorously called – rendered in brick. Oxford and Cambridge provided the details for these buildings but their composition and siting had a different, more local source: the picturesquely landscaped parks of F. L. Olmsted. Cope and Stewardson arranged them in loose and informal fashion, the quadrangles gently yielding to the line of the landscape and trailing off into groves of trees. The buildings never extended too far before they jogged at a right angle, allowing them to terminate in a bright range of windows, frequently illuminating a broad staircase. At a time when the geometric discipline of the Beaux-Arts was dominating American architecture, the collegiate Gothic was the most conspicuous exception."

"After the premature deaths of both Cope and Stewardson their work was developed further by Cram, Goodhue, & Ferguson and the Philadelphia partnership of Day & Klauder – all three of which contributed to the completion of Princeton University's campus. Cram was the principal planner and the strong sense of spacial poetry that distinguishes the campus is his achievement. He insisted that the organization of a university should not be instantly clear, as with the deadening axiality of the Beaux-Arts, but should reveal itself 'gradually, through narrowed and intensified vistas, the unforeseen openings out of unanticipated paths and quadrangles, the surprise of retirement, the revelation of the unexpected.' This Cram accomplished with a very restricted palate of materials, rough fieldstone walls with a sprinkling of crisp limestone trim in the Tudor drip labels, window mullions and the coping courses that capped the walls. His detail came from the end of the Middle Ages: crenellated parapets, ribbed brick chimneys and the occasional oriels that terminated a long horizontal range. Apart from this there was little explicit ornament – or pointed arches, for that matter. The Graduate College (1913-17) at Princeton is his finest academic design, culminating in the common room which is crowned by one of the most sumptuous hammer-beamed trusses of the entire revival."

"Princeton was surpassed by Yale, however, where a crowded urban context compelled much bolder experimentation. In 1917 James Gamble Rogers was commissioned to design the Memorial Quadrangle, a residential complex for 630 students. Confined to a large city block, with little opportunity for rambling composition, he was forced to manufacture his own picturesqueness. He first screened off his site by enclosing it with a range of dormitories, loosely composed and animated by an irregular play of gables and bays. Then he divided the interior into six courts of different scale, breaking down the vast complex into visually and socially comprehensible units. Finally, he placed Harkness Tower at one corner, a vertical exclamation that rose above the horizontal dormitories to give a visual coherence to the whole."

"Rogers also designed Yale's Sterling Library, a revolutionary design that placed sixteen levels of book stacks in a Gothic tower. This deviated sharply from the conventional classical library, in which the pristine clarity of regular geometry embodied classical learning. Instead Rogers used the restless and aspiring forms of Gothic architecture to portray knowledge as an active and growing process, not a finite corpus. At the University of Pittsburgh, which had an even more constrained site, this idea was made even more explicit. There Day & Klauder built the Cathedral of Learning, a forty-two-storey skyscraper whose towered form – its lines parallel and hence never meeting – was explicitly invoked as a metaphor for the unending nature of learning."

"The work of Rogers and Klauder breathed a different spirit from the poetic archaeology of Ralph Adams Cram. They were now working routinely with steel and had less call to look at actual medieval churches for their lessons. For them, as for Walpole and Wyatt in the eighteenth century, medieval architecture was interesting chiefly for its ornamental forms. In fact, the Gothic Revival was everywhere in headlong retreat during the early twentieth century. Cram and Klauder prospered only because they concentrated on building types which were fundamentally medieval in character and function: the church and the college. So long as a chapel, common room and refectory served as they did in the time of Henry VII, the Gothic presented no incongruity."

== BoringHistoryGuy (talk) 15:17, 22 August 2015 (UTC)


 * You're just saying that because most of it is from Philadelphia. Except, of course, for that New Haven orgy. Carptrash (talk) 19:16, 22 August 2015 (UTC)


 * You caught me red-handed. But how did Michael Lewis get a London publisher to swallow the story hook, line, and sinker? == BoringHistoryGuy (talk) 23:36, 22 August 2015 (UTC)


 * Thanks for the very full survey. However, it distinguishes Coll. Gothic from classical-Beaux Arts, not from other sub types of Gothic revival. So, are there any reasons for excluding any Gothic building from being included here (noting that the Cathedral of Learning is included), even non-academic? Dhtwiki (talk) 12:01, 23 August 2015 (UTC)
 * I think buildings that are Commercial Gothic Revival definitely do not belong. However I have been looking at some ecclesiastical Gothic revival from the teens and 20s that I would consider to be Collegiate GR if they were on a college campus, but because they part of a monastery or convent I have been inclined to NOT include them. Now that there are three of us we can discuss this because I am sort of fence sitting now and need to be tipped one way or another. PS I also feel that the Cathedral of Learning does not belong here.  It is  . . ... something else.  then there are the college chapels at Duke, Princeton, Chicago, probably more, that are gothic, but not in my opinion Collegiate Gothic. Carptrash (talk) 18:45, 23 August 2015 (UTC)


 * I deliberately stayed away from chapels on college campuses because bringing up Ecclesiastical architecture would just complicate things. This article from The Atlantic traces the same chronology as Michael Lewis and, I think convincingly, links Collegiate Gothic to Eurocentricism. Interesting, that the style arose in the same period when the DAR was founded, when immigration was perceived as out-of-control, and when the foundations of the WASP Protestant Establishment were first challenged. == BoringHistoryGuy (talk) 20:51, 23 August 2015 (UTC)