Academia: Collegiate Gothic Architecture in the United States

by William Morgan

Explore America's most breathtaking college campuses―where Gilded Age wealth found a Gothic inspiration. The Collegiate Gothic style, which flourished between the Gilded Age and the Jazz Age, was intended to lend an air of dignified history to America’s relatively youthful seats of higher learning. In fact, this mash-up of Oxbridge quaintness with piles of new money gave rise―at schools like Princeton and Vassar, Yale and Chicago―to unprecedented architectural fantasies that reshaped the image of the college campus. Today the ivy-covered monuments of Collegiate Gothic still exercise a powerful hold on the public imagination―as evidenced, for example, by their prominent place in the Dark Academia aesthetic that has swept social media. In Academia , the noted architectural historian William Morgan traces the entire arc of Collegiate Gothic, from its first emergence at campuses like Kenyon and Bowdoin to its apotheosis in James Gamble Rogers’s intricately detailed confections at Yale. Ever alert to the complicated cultural and social implications of this style, Morgan devotes special sections to its manifestations at prep schools and in the American South, and to contemporary revivals by architects like Robert A. M. Stern. Illustrated throughout with well-chosen color photographs, Academia offers the ultimate campus tour of our faux-medieval cathedrals of learning. 217 full-color illustrations

Genres: Nonfiction

200 pages, Hardcover

Published October 31, 2023

About the author

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Reviews

[Matt Ely · Rating 3 out of 5]

So, the photography is beautiful. That's what you come to a book like this for, and it doesn't disappoint.

I think you could get most of the memorable material by just looking at the photos and reading the captions. The captions often do a very effective job of summarize the main text to its most essential. The longer commentaries kind of washed over me.

Readers will have to decide for themselves whether they appreciate the author's assessment of the architectural styles here as value statements, as he makes his preferences very unambiguous. There's nothing detached; this is analysis in the mode of enthusiasm.

If I were to reread it, though, I would be much more focused on the photography itself.

[Juli Anna · Rating 4 out of 5]

A beautifully produced book on a fascinating and timely subject.

[Servabo · Rating 3 out of 5]

Gothic's medieval forms are representative of the Gilded Age, of wealth and patronage during the American Renaissance, the Great War and the Jazz Age.