In memory of two Princeton fathers, Minot C. Morgan Jr. and Edward A. Myers, classes of 1935 and 1938.
William Richards and Allen Myers read parts of the manuscript and made valuable suggestions.
Any writer is only as good as his publishing team. Abbeville Press Lauren Orthey, Colette Laroya, and Misha Beletsky skillfully shepherded Academia into print. And, as always, to Carolyn for editing, supporting, and sharing the journey.
William Morgan
AB o U t t H e AU t H o R
w illi A m m o R g A n , an architectural historian, has taught at Princeton, the University of Louisville, and Brown. He studied at Jesus College, Oxford, and was a visiting lecturer at Åbo akademi, Finland’s Swedish-language university. He is the author of Collegiate Gothic: The Architecture of Rhodes College, The Almighty Wall: The Architecture of Henry Vaughan, and American Country Churches, among other titles.
F R ont c ove R
University of Michigan Law Library, interior. See p. 104.
B A ck cove R Rhodes College, Halliburton Tower. See p. 136.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data available upon request
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int R od U ction : tH e g ot H ic Q U est 7
i Early Gothic at American Colleges 23
ii Unbridled Exuberance: Victorian Gothic Interlude 31
iii Oxbridge in America: The Anglicized Campus 37
iv The Legacy of Henry VIII’s Divorce: Roman Catholic Colleges in the Gothic Style 77
v “For God, for Country and for Yale” 87
vi Pinnacles in the Hinterlands: Collegiate Gothic across America 115
vii Southern Gothic 125
viii Pray for the Peace of Jerusalem: The Gothic Prep School 143
ix Twilight of the Quads: Postmodern Collegiate Gothic 167
Recession A l 185 notes 190
i ll U st RAtion cR edits 195 s elected Bi B liog RAPH y 196 i ndex 197
American college campus as a dream, a utopia, and a flowering of Romanticism. The pinnacled, ivy-covered, puddingstone chapels, libraries, and quadrangles, under the aesthetic and spiritual mentorship of Oxford and Cambridge, represent a remarkable architectural achievement.
More important, these places are expressions of a nation’s character. Considerable design capital (to the tune of billions of dollars) was spent crafting powerful manifestations of a suddenly grown-up and newly imperialist United States. Whether or not they
Yale University, Branford and Saybrook Colleges Harkness Tower at Branford marks the apogee of the Collegiate Gothic style in America: a reminder of Oxford, but larger and better.
Saint Joseph’s University, Barbelin Tower
The Philadelphia Jesuit University is identified and dominated by an American version of the English Perpendicular style; including a spireless tower that graces other Roman Catholic institutions, such as Boston College.
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United States Military Academy at West Point, Cadet Chapel, interior
The vaulted nave of the chapel culminates in the giant sanctuary window, built “To the Glory of the God of Battles and in Faithful Memory of the Departed Graduates.”
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St. George’s School Chapel
on the Atlantic shore not far from Newport, Rhode Island, the chapel of St. George’s School is the epitome of a New England preparatory school in the Collegiate Gothic. Seen from a distance, the chapel could easily be mistaken for a fifteenth-century parish church in England’s West Country.
Brown University, University Hall
Like its similar mid-eighteenth-century contemporaries at Harvard, Dartmouth, and Princeton, University Hall at Brown typifies the single-building college of the day. These eminently practical and economical structures essentially grand houses were the largest buildings in the American colonies.
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University of Virginia, Thomas Jefferson’s Academical Village
The University of Virginia campus was revolutionary on many levels. The architecture consists of ten pavilions, each based on a different Roman temple, all flanking a library rather than a chapel modeled on the Pantheon. The plan was open at one end, a conscious rebuttal of the enclosed, cloistered English college.
Cambridge University, St John’s College, tower gateway
The gateway to the Second Court at the College of St John the Evangelist is a prime example of Tudor style, the last phase of English Gothic of which many of its significant monuments were constructed of economical brick. St John’s, which produced seven prime ministers and a dozen Nobel laureates, was a popular model for American campuses.
Unbridled Exuberance: Victorian Gothic Interlude
First religious and moral principle, second gentlemanly conduct, third academic ability.
Thomas
Arnold, headmaster, Rugby School
The post–Civil War era in the United States witnessed considerable growth in the development of existing campuses and the construction of new ones. The Morrill Land-Grant Agricultural and Mechanical College Act of 1862, signed by Abraham Lincoln, established technical and engineering universities across the country, about one per state. These may not seem like the generally older, private, and putatively exclusive colleges that we associate with Collegiate Gothic, but eventually Anglo-informed buildings will appear on campuses as far apart as the Universities of Florida and Idaho. Even the 104-foot Beaumont Tower at Michigan State University, which marks the site of the first building in the United States erected for the teaching of agricultural science, is an exercise in 1920s English Perpendicular Gothic. (Of the main stylistic categories of English Gothic Norman, Early English, Decorated, Perpendicular, and Tudor Perpendicular is the only uniquely English style. Perpendicular continued to be built long after medieval architecture was replaced by the Italian Renaissance in continental Europe. Its introduction was synonymous with the Black Death, and as a result Perpendicular buildings tended to have simplified window tracery and far less sculptural ornament. Besides being arguably England’s great contribution to world architecture, Perpendicular was especially suited to academic buildings, with larger windows, spireless towers, and less complicated plans.)
Before we reach the English ascendancy in Collegiate Gothic, academic institutions in both Britain and the United States were struggling against the strictures of Gothic
Oxford University, Keble College, rooftop detail Except for the occasional stone gargoyle, the details and texture at Keble College are provided by the varied brickwork Butterfield’s constructional polychromy. While many twentiethcentury Oxford undergraduates perceived Keble as intentionally ugly, the college is now appreciated for its color, inventiveness, and even whimsy.
Rugby School Chapel
William Butterfield’s chapel for Rugby, home of Tom Brown’s Schooldays, defied the conventions of Gothic Revival in England by drawing from nonEnglish sources and introducing a riot of color. The goalpost in this photograph is a reminder of the sport to which the school gave its name.
Revival as laid down by antiquarians and high churchmen. Experimental Victorian-era architects looked to sources in Spain and Italy, even Byzantium, to enliven their palettes. Yet, the most radical of all, William Butterfield, who introduced combinations of all sorts of colors, materials, and textures (“streaky bacon” as its critics were wont to point out), remained a darling of the high church establishment.
Butterfield’s Rugby School in Warwickshire and Keble College, Oxford, were a bit exotic, even shocking, after restrained earlier academic buildings. Aside from its students picking up of the soccer ball and running with it, thus founding the eponymous sport, Rugby’s headmaster Thomas Arnold was a reformer of the English public school. Arnold’s time at Rugby (1828–41) is best remembered in the 1857 novel Tom Brown’s School Days by Thomas Hughes, published a decade before Butterfield began working there. The 1940 movie based on the book claims to have been shot at the Warwickshire school, yet no Butterfield is evident; the sets are much more what the audience would have expected of an English schoolboy’s lair, with lots of Tudor arches and smokey oak paneling (Rugby was founded in 1567, during the reign of Queen Elizabeth I).
Butterfield’s vigorous and colorful Keble makes George Gilbert Scott’s dryly historicist and monochromatic chapel for Exeter College, Oxford, completed a decade earlier in 1856, seem anemic by comparison. Keble’s use of brick was, in part, intentional, as this was not a college for wealthy public-school men, but a hoped-for training ground for Anglican clergymen. Tastes change, and during the height of modern architecture in the
1960s, there was, purportedly, an Oxford committee for the demolition of Keble College in which members were to remove a brick whenever they passed Keble, until the college collapsed.
Edward Tuckerman Potter, best known for the Mark Twain House in Hartford, Connecticut, created the Nott Memorial Library at Union College in Schenectady, New York, an intriguing, even unique, building. Union (standing for the union of all faiths) was one of the first nonsectarian American colleges. It was also the first planned campus, back in 1813, designed with a recreation of the Pantheon at the heart of the symmetrical layout. But despite the neoclassical plan of the campus, the Nott, which was constructed in 1858–79, was the only sixteen-sided building in America, bringing to mind circular and polygonal medieval and Renaissance baptistries in Italian cities such as Siena and Florence, and even Early Christian examples like Santa Constanza in Rome. Potter, the son of an Episcopal bishop, refers to the Nott as Venetian Gothic, which reveals his indebtedness to the art critic and design influencer, John Ruskin. Ruskin’s admiration for the Adriatic republic’s mixture of Italian Gothic and “Eastern” sources was best illustrated by Woodward and Deane’s Oxford University Museum of Natural History, nearing completion when the Nott was begun. Advised by Ruskin and built as an homage to him, the Oxford Museum has a large central space made possible by the use of iron. The Nott’s soaring interior space is similarly predicated on the use of iron, the modern era’s new material.
Oxford University, Keble College Chapel
A new college for Oxford, and a prime example of the once-derided “streaky-bacon” style of Butterfield and the Victorian Gothicists. The form and plan derive from medieval college chapels, but brick was used instead of stone for reasons of economy. The decoration was created by employing different colors and patterns in the brickwork.
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Princeton University, Pyne Library/East Pyne Hall
Two decades after his undertaking in Italian Gothic, Potter built an expanded library for Princeton in a chastened style its brownstone is monochromatic, and its plan is quadrangular. This dramatic transformation from the same architect’s pencil demonstrates the evolution of collegiate architecture to more historically accurate Oxbridge sources.
The square configuration of East Pyne wrapped around an interior courtyard, and only traversed by ducking through protective archways is a fortified medieval form, the quadrangle. This marks the new style of Gothic consciously chosen by the newly named Princeton University. Architecture was an integral part of the program to create greatness.
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Princeton University, Pyne Library/ East Pyne Hall, façade detail President of Princeton and signer of the Declaration of Independence, John Witherspoon looks out from a niche. The employment of Tudor Gothic also marks the College of New Jersey’s transformation into Princeton University, complete with a new crest, seen here.
Princeton University, Blair Hall
The seemingly fortified Blair Tower guards the former southern entrance to the main campus (the railroad almost came to the foot of the tower’s steps). Blair was the vanguard of the thoroughly English Gothic campus, and also the iconic symbol of Princeton’s transformation from college to university. It is one of the undisputable landmarks of Collegiate Gothic.
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Princeton University, Blair Arch
Arguably the most convincing Oxbridge recreation at Princeton, Blair Arch looks as though it has stood here for half a millennium. A remarkable collection of 1930s Gothic dormitories can be glimpsed through the arch. At the apex of the broad Tudor gateway, a pair of angels bears the new Princeton University shield aloft.
City for the World’s Columbian Exposition. Five years earlier, working with Richardson’s colleague and friend, Frederick Law Olmsted, they laid an entire new campus for Leland Stanford Junior University, in a sort of Spanish Romanesque-cum-Roman-villa style with red tile roofs, seemingly appropriate to California’s history and climate. But for Chicago, the only style was Gothic. The university, underwritten by America’s most prominent Baptist, sported buildings that could be mistaken for those along the High Street in Oxford.
Princeton’s architecture, nevertheless, marks the singular achievement of the English Gothic style of this period. The once-small Presbyterian college halfway between New York and Philadelphia had a distinguished history long before it wholly embraced architectural Anglomania. Nassau Hall, its original building, had briefly served as the Capitol of the United States, and the school had been an influential supplier of leaders in the fight for nationhood (nine framers of the Constitution were alumni). But as the renamed today we would say rebranded Princeton University, it was an emerging academic powerhouse, an eventual world leader. Much of the success of that transformation was due to the official adoption of Oxbridge Gothic. Erected in 1897 at the time of Princeton’s transformation, Blair Hall, the reimagining of Trinity College, Cambridge, on this antipodean shore, is the paradigm, an enduring landmark of Collegiate Gothic. Blair Hall is a barbican and a gateway, defensible militarily burning arrows raining down on Viking invaders or drunken revelers from Penn or Yale, perhaps. It stands on a
Princeton University, Stafford Little Hall Architects Cope & Stewardson provided a less imposing extension to Blair. Though, like Blair, Stafford Little’s zigzag plan was dictated by the location of the railroad (the “Gothic snake of Little,” as Scott Fitzgerald dubbed it). Little’s meandering form, along with its Tudor chimney stacks and crenellated tower, provides a delightfully picturesque composition. It was the first dormitory on campus to have indoor bathrooms.
v
“For God, for Country and for Yale”
In after years, should troubles rise
To cloud the blue of sunny skies,
How bright will seem, through mem’ry’s haze
Those happy, golden, bygone days!
Oh, let us strive that ever we
May let these words our watch-cry be,
Where’er upon life’s sea we sail:
“For God, for Country and for Yale!”
Henry Durand, Bright College Years
If Princeton was the highwater mark of the Collegiate Gothic the golden era, the meisterstück, the High Renaissance, as if 1900 were the 1500 of the Anglo-Catholic college then Yale was the style’s high baroque, with a little mannerism thrown in. What began as a Congregational (i.e., Puritan) college at the turn of the eighteenth century, became wrapped in a cloak of joyous approbation, the paradigm of smugness, wealth, and an astonishingly brilliant architectural recreation of the Oxbridge myth. The main building years at Yale were those of the Roaring Twenties, the Jazz Age. It was also the booze-soaked time of prohibition. The decade also saw the publication of two touchstones of the era, the saga of Amory Blaine, the middle-class midwesterner at Princeton in This Side of Paradise, and not least of all, The Great Gatsby, the tale of another outsider antihero
The college of martyred patriot Nathan Hale and the hellfire and brimstone theology of Jonathan Edwards had turned away from its practical colonial brick structures and flirted with Gothic in the Dwight Library of the early 1840s. Then immediately following the Civil War, Yale erected two dormitories, Farnam and Durfee Halls, and shortly thereafter, Battell Chapel. All three were the work of Russell Sturgis Jr., a follower of the teachings of John Ruskin and the Venetian-inspired English architects, such as William Butterfield. With their pointed dormers and multicolored window voussoirs, these structures looked as though they could easily fit in the space between the Ruskin-advised Oxford Museum and Butterfield’s Keble College. As important as their Anglo-Venetian
Yale University, Memorial Quadrangle Gate Unlike many lesser-endowed colleges, Yale was able to create Collegiate Gothic compositions that rivaled, even surpassed, their British antecedents. Everything about this entrance is superlative, from the ironwork gate, lamps, Oxford-on-a-summer-day patina of the stone, to intricate carving, all in the service of the motto: “For God, for Country and for Yale.”
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University of Michigan Law Library, interior
A Tudor king would be proud. The Law Library is one of the most perfect Collegiate Gothic spaces in America. It would be superfluous to ask if gloriously painted timber ceilings and light filtered through Perpendicular window tracery make for better lawyers the future advocate studying here cannot help but wear the mantle of the past.
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University of Pittsburgh, Cathedral of Learning
At forty-two stories and over 500 feet, the Cathedral of Learning is a Gothic skyscraper. Architect Charles Klauder had already experimented with a streamlined verticality at Wellesley and hinted at it with Holder Tower at Princeton. Pushing Gothic to its limits, the Pittsburgh megastructure is a campus in one building.
for the Tribune Tower, with its sky-piercing Gothic, was a brilliant solution for a tall building.
The 1920s and ‘30s turned into a golden age of the skyscraper. It appeared that the Gothic tower truly lent itself to the aspirational cloud scratchers (as Germans called tall buildings). They were morphing rather easily into the decorative streamlined forms of art deco sweeping details that carried a line the height or length of a building and owing more to the inspiration of modern machinery, such as automobiles and airplanes, than the Middle Ages. While the smaller-scale decoration of Harkness and Holder was lost on multistory buildings, it was inevitable that some architect would apply Gothic to a tall building far beyond the medieval collegiate sources. It was left to the ever-inventive Charles Klauder to literally create a “Cathedral of Learning,” in this case, for the University of Pittsburgh.
At the turn of the century, the University of Pittsburgh commissioned a plan for “an academic Acropolis” by the Beaux-Arts-trained Henry Hornbostel on the Chicago World’s Fair model. But university chancellor John G. Bowman expressed the need to “perpetuate the most precious and sound traditions . . . faith in God, spiritual responsibility, the power and the will to create.” Plus, the university had limited land on which to build. So, in 1925 the University of Pittsburgh decided instead on a bold megastructure. The prominent landmark that Klauder fashioned for the school was a forty-two-story
University of Pittsburgh, Heinz Memorial Chapel
Completed after its neighboring skyscraper, Heinz Chapel also demonstrates the inventive genius of Klauder. This jewel box seems more Continental in its Gothic sources Sainte-Chapelle in Paris is often cited from its full-height windows to its giant spire-like flèche, but is far from a copy of anything.
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University of Pittsburgh, Heinz Memorial Chapel, interior
Inside, the chapel has more English elements, such as the broad Tudor arches of the arcade, the sense of wall, and the tall crossing. We have not seen, however, many polygonal apses and transepts in our Oxbridge-inspired chapels, not to mention the overarching sense of extreme verticality.
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University of Pittsburgh, Heinz Memorial Chapel, window detail
Heinz Chapel is infused with the signature atmospheric bluish glow of Boston glazier Charles Connick. Connick based his work on medieval methods he greatly admired the glass at Chartres. He created all twentythree windows at the chapel (some four thousand square feet of glass). Here a Jesuit blesses a soldier and a settler, no doubt in New France.
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University of Pittsburgh, Heinz Memorial Chapel, pulpit detail
The success of Collegiate Gothic depended upon the contribution of Arts and Crafts sculptors, metalsmiths, wood-carvers, painters, and glaziers. Here is an angel by Johannes Kirchmayer, the Boston wood-carver who made altars, choir stalls, and rood screens for the leading Gothicists.
Trumbauer himself trained as an apprentice, as so many designers did, rather than in the academy. His chief designer, Julian Francis Abele, had studied at the University of Pennsylvania, and thanks to Trumbauer’s largesse was sent to study at the École des Beaux-Arts, remaining chief designer at the firm even after the death of Trumbauer. Abele was Black, and while the firm did not single out specific designers for its buildings, Abele is credited with the Duke chapel, and no doubt worked on many of its Gothic structures.
The layout for this new university is the epitome of Beaux-Arts planning: symmetrical, formal, processional, and designed to impress. The dominating feature is a long formal allée in the style of Louis XIV’s garden designer André le Nôtre, with bisecting axes. The jewel in the crown is the chapel, which is at the end of the central and grandest intersecting axis. Dormitories and classrooms flanking the chapel will look familiar from their Oxford, Cambridge, and Princeton sources. Duke’s president William Preston Few
