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When a civilization ends, it does not leave behind a tombstone. Instead, it leaves stackings of stones (i.e. buildings.) We lose the remembrance of individual people, the things they said, did, and wrote, but we remember what they built because those things endure for much longer. The Ancient Greeks and Romans tell us about themselves through their Classical Architecture. We remember the Medieval period in Europe from its castles and Gothic Cathedrals. We remember the early 20th century from the Art Deco buildings it left behind. The style tells us something about their priorities, what they believed, what they knew, and what their hopes were. In a sense, the buildings that a culture leaves behind are a kind of epitaph.
Let’s look through the structural epitaphs of our ancestors.
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Princeton University Graduate College (Princeton, New Jersey)
Some of the best architecture in the United States resides on university campuses. A lot of that is the result of a late 19th and early 20th century belief in Gothic Revival construction as the preferred aesthetic for higher learning. Gothic architecture on-campus became so popular that a subset of of Gothic Revival architecture was named in its honor: Collegiate Gothic.
Once you overcome the paradox of “Dark Ages” architecture being the template for what human striving should look like, it makes sense as a style choice. (Maybe just throw the term “Dark Ages” out of your mind and recognize it for what it is – a lie.) Gothic architecture conveys a sense of both great age and secret knowledge. That’s exactly what you want out of the place you go to for “higher” learning, right? It should be. Alas, the “modernist” architecture of later in the 20th century resulted in many great and beautiful buildings being torn down, with hideous replacements going up in their wake.
(For more on the collegiate gothic style, and its detractors, via wiki)
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 Cornell, Princeton, Vanderbilt, Washington University, and Yale.
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.”
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.
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.
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.
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. By the 1890s, the movement was known as “Collegiate Gothic”.
The Princeton University Graduate College building is one of the best still-standing Collegiate Gothic constructions in the United States. It’s gorgeous. The tallest tower (Cleveland Tower) houses one of the largest carillons in the United States. The tower and the instrument inside were built as a memorial to former U.S. President Grover Cleveland – who until very recently was the only U.S. President to serve two non-consecutive terms as President. The graduate college is also home to Procter Hall – wherein you will find some of the best stained glass in any U.S. university setting.
Procter Hall, Graduate College, Princeton University, ca.1913. Glass lantern slide. Gift of Mr. and Mrs. A. Perry Morgan. Graphic Arts Collection 2013- in process
The Graduate College Dining Hall: Roma Dining Hall meets Chapel aesthetic
This is definitely one of my favorite university buildings in the U.S. of A.
The Graduate College at Princeton University is a residential college which serves as the center of graduate student life at Princeton, separate from the seven undergraduate residential colleges. Wyman House, adjacent to the Graduate College, serves as the official residence of the current Dean of the Graduate School.
Thomson College, the central quadrangle now commonly known as the Old Graduate College, is a memorial to United States Senator John R. Thomson 1817 provided by a bequest left by his widow, Mrs. J. A. W. Thomson Swann, the Graduate College’s first benefactor.
It was dedicated on October 22, 1913, during the tenure of the first dean of the Graduate School, Andrew Fleming West, and was the first residential college in the United States devoted solely to postgraduate liberal studies. The group of Collegiate Gothic buildings was designed by Ralph Adams Cram and located on a hill, one-half mile west of the main campus. Its most prominent architectural landmark is the 173-ft-high Cleveland Tower, which features one of the largest carillons in the United States. Cleveland Tower adjoins the Old Graduate College, which also includes Procter Hall, the Van Dyke Library, Pyne Tower, and North Court. In 1962, the New Graduate College (colloquially, “new GC”) was built to expand the Old Graduate College to the south-west, although it features a more modern architectural style.
Pyne Tower
The Graduate College currently houses approximately 430 graduate students, mostly in their first-year of graduate study. The Graduate College’s Pyne Tower is also the home of the current administrator in residence. It has been featured in the films Admission and Runner Runner.
