5. The Rise of Collegiate Gothic
© 2018 Jan M. Ziolkowski, CC BY 4.0 https://doi.org/10.11647/OBP.0146.05
American Gothic Colleges: Ogive Talking
Not only are universities a “cathedral” for worship of knowledge, they are also “sheltered workshops” for the socially challenged.
—Tony Attwood, expert on
Asperger syndrome
Collegiate Gothic marked the last and, at least on the North American continent, the greatest of numerous architectural revivals. In most cases, what has happened in this manner of construction from its very origins until now has occurred in direct proportion and correlation to developments in literature. An association between Gothic literary styles and architectonics of the Middle Ages has been drawn repeatedly. For instance, Gaston Paris, the first prominent public promoter of Our Lady’s Tumbler, compared the literature of the early thirteenth century with what preceded it by fixing the texts he scrutinized in the context of the architecture that was contemporaneous with them. Of course, the conjunction of Gothic literature and architecture was by no means limited to the medieval period, which adds a measure of complexity to the application of the adjective Gothic. When modern authors, whether of fiction or of nonfiction, deploy the word, we must seek to discover exactly which period they mean to evoke. In architecture, the concept has encompassed at one extreme actual premodern construction techniques and masonry, and at the other the merest veneer of the medieval or the faintest gesture toward the Middle Ages, laid over modern engineering and materials.
Accordingly, no one should be astounded that at times in the twentieth century the jongleur was taken to heart nowhere more flashily—more flamboyantly, in all senses of the term—than in American universities. He elicited this open-armed welcome to no small degree because those settings had been made medievalesque in their buildings and built environments. For this reason, those who hugged him to their bosoms wrapped their arms around one of their own. In effect, the early thirteenth-century entertainer was made an honorary undergraduate. A quick-change artist, he swapped his monastic costume for the graduate gown of a college senior at commencement. Likewise, many a student thought of himself as the tumbler. Both the medieval dancer and the modern collegian were abstracted from the thick of the world, freed to be the eye of the storm in their own unflustered frenzy of activity. Collegiate Gothic furnished places designed for losing track of time.
To fathom fully the reception of Our Lady’s Tumbler and its clan in the United States, we must come to terms with the country’s turn to collegiate Gothic during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The Gothicization of architecture on campuses was felt to have cultural ramifications that transcended architecture and quarried stone alone. Both the armed forces and most private colleges in the United States were then single-sex institutions, several decades away from the comingling of women and men that is now the norm. Whether in soldiers’ barracks or college dormitories, the young male elite of the country were quartered together. A platoon of persuasions guided the architectural trend toward Gothic in many American educational institutions. Among them was a belief that the types of national service—in the military, public affairs, and even private enterprise—for which the crème de la crème was being trained possessed a spiritual underpinning.
In a sense, on-campus buildings required validation by being associated with the epoch in which the institutions they solidified were created. This sort of logic would have led inevitably to tapping the Middle Ages for enhancements to the architecture and landscape of universities. From the perspective of Europeans, this reflex toward Gothic could have seemed the response of nouveaux riches and parvenus who craved immediate gratification in the guise of an immediate faux past. (In the consumer goods of our own century, we now take similarly for granted prewashed jeans, distressed furniture, deliberately cracked ornamental glass, or any number of other pseudoantiques.) In this interpretation, the United States was raising colleges and universities for which alumni, administrators, professors, and students sought an artificial history. From their subjective point of view, medievalesque architecture could provide a counterweight to the unstable totteriness of newness. By being imitative, collegiate Gothic—one of the most distinctive reflexes of the style in America—was by its very nature uninspired and unoriginal. Yet the question of its authenticity merits scrutiny. To be even more derivative, it could be said that originality is itself a relative construction.
Even Americans questioned the intellection that led ultrawealthy graduates to impose this pseudomedieval style of architecture upon colleges in the building campaigns of the early twentieth century. Take, for example, Henry Seidel Canby, who graduated from Yale University in 1899, taught there afterward, and eventually underwent the academic apotheosis of becoming an English professor with tenure (see Fig. 5.1). Under the revealing title Alma Mater: The Gothic Age of the American College, he reeled off a raft of retrospection, at once anecdotal and sociological, on the experiences of his generation, and on the architectural and social ecosystems within which they took place. Canby described the metamorphosis of “the ugly college of the nineties” and “the bare and nondescript college of [his] youth” into “a new Oxford.” To fulfill “a romantic alumnus’s dream of a proper setting for college life,” the transformation was achieved “at frightful expense.” This alum loyalist chose “the florid Tudor Gothic” that, despite its cost, became the hallmark of the fin de siècle. For that reason, the astringent author of Alma Mater opted to call this whole dreamily idealistic phase of American education “Gothic.”
To Canby, the style was at once traditional, unorthodox, imitative, and sham. Despite the uncertain relevance of such features to America, this Gothic “spotted [the continent] with ramparts, cathedral towers (sometimes very beautiful), gargoyles, machicolations, and light-resistant windows.” Within this “imitation monastery” and these “imitation Middle Ages,” this consummate Yale man admitted that the social engineering driven by the architectonics worked: since attending college at the time was mostly a male (and white) prerogative, his classmates and he bonded like the brethren of medieval monastic orders or fraternal organizations. The choice of period to imitate resulted from mindful efforts by university administrations and architects. Once again, the disjunction was anachronism aforethought. Cram, the campus planner of Princeton and public face of collegiate Gothic, described the institution of higher learning as “a walled city against materialism and all its works.” The medievalism was to remedy the negativism of modernity. Gothic was inherently character-building.
Canby’s undergraduate years, the final ones of the nineteenth century, witnessed a conscious turning by advanced education in the United States to an Americanized usurpation and adaptation of the medieval period. This move had a simple logic: universities originated in the Middle Ages. Wring residue of those earlier centuries out of these societies, and you may even sap their legitimacy as the establishments they are. A case in point is the often farcically medievalesque academic garb that we take for granted at graduation ceremonies, with its extraordinarily long-lived sartorial standards.
A professor of architecture, writing in 1925, saw the choice of architectural styles on campuses as resulting willy-nilly from the expansion that had occurred within universities of the time. In his view, the colleges of America had undergone a growth in their calling. The evolution of academic mission had interacted, in a relationship that was equally causal, with the determination of trustees for the institutions to build or rebuild buildings and grounds according to a single architecture. Although this writer was open to a variety of styles, he focused primarily upon ones in collegiate Gothic. This point of convergence led him logically to identify in turn Monte Cassino as the flagship cloister of the Benedictines, Clairvaux as that of the Cistercians.
The alignment of resurgent Gothic with the universities made sense. The lesson encoded in the historicism of the Federal period was, whether we agree or disagree nowadays, that organizations deserved the architecture of the culture that engenders them. In the initial stage, courthouses, capitol buildings for congresses, and other offices were built to recall the democracy associated with Greece, the republic (and empire?) evoked by Rome. If the executive, legislature, and judiciary merited the augustness of antiquity, then by the same token higher learning, an undeniably medieval legacy, was suited to the lofty erudition and spirituality of the Middle Ages.
Was the Gothic revival (or, once again, arrival) in the United States less genuine than its counterparts in Britain and Europe? In one sense, the answer would be an obvious affirmative. In another, such criticism would not have rung entirely true at the time. After all, even the Continent was submersed in altogether new constructions in German-influenced round-arch or neo-Romanesque and in new Gothic revival style. Furthermore, even veritable Gothic edifices had in some cases been so heavily restored that important features thought to be bona fide medieval were on the contrary far later accretions. To round out our picture of the neomedieval presence within Europe, we should reflect upon what happened after the Great War. Owing to wartime damage, many buildings that had been through-and-through medieval, such as the principal church of Reims, required and underwent salvage and reconstruction. Sometimes the work was on a minor scale, but in other cases it qualifies as very extensive.
On American college campuses, already existing pseudomedieval edifices of neither Romanesque nor Victorian lineage were all suddenly scratched out in one mass die-off of entire architectures. Gothic from Queen Victoria’s era survived at a lower rate, but plenty of specimens remain. Furthermore, adapted and enhanced flavors of Romanesque revival continued to be built even into the heyday of collegiate Gothic. Still, whether we choose to call it Lombard or Norman Romanesque revival, and however prepossessing the sparse additional constructions in the style may have been, it marked the exception to the rule. In the early twentieth century, collegiate Gothic held sway.
Among the various colleges and universities where he was active (or hyperactive, to be more accurate), Ralph Adams Cram put his stamp most enduringly on Princeton. While house architect there from 1907 to 1929, he designed in a mainly Perpendicular Gothic style much more than merely the vertebrae of the campus. The recasting of the institution in collegiate Gothic had begun more than a decade before Cram’s commission, with the construction in 1896 of Blair Hall. Thus, Blair could not be chalked up to the later architect’s towering ambition. The status of this dormitory as the university’s “first building of collegiate Gothic architecture” was proclaimed in postcards. This hall gave a special twist to the idea that a man’s home is his castle. It incastellated, like aspiring knights, the male undergraduates who resided there (see Figs. 5.2 and 5.3). Its pointed arches and battlements of gray stone and its bay windows with leaded panes became iconic features.
The dormitory occupied a cardinal position, almost like a checkpoint, near the rail depot at the end of the spur that connects Princeton to its junction with the main line (see Fig. 5.4). Since then, the terminus of the railroad has been repositioned again and again. On each occasion, it has been shifted ever farther from the hub of the campus. As a result, it now requires command of distant history to realize how things looked back in the days of F. Scott Fitzgerald. The novelist says nothing explicit of the railway in his debut novel This Side of Paradise from 1920, but the itinerary of the protagonist upon arriving at the university assumes its existence. In that once “upon a time,” the collegiate Gothic residence halls served to screen the iron technology of the real world from intruding upon the quintessentially American timelessness and placelessness of the sylvan Middle Ages in this New Jersey university. In this sense, the so-called Dinky station and the dormitories ringing it employed this architecture to familiarize and domesticate technology that would have otherwise been invasive. By the same token, the locomotive and its cars spat out visitors not just before a modern university but also before a medieval fantasyland.
The commitment of the trustees to the new but not-so-new style must be set in a larger context of institutional change. In 1896, what had been formerly the College of New Jersey completed its official name change to Princeton University. In the same year, the institution celebrated its 150th anniversary. The transition from a college of undergraduates only to a university with graduate students as well was offset by the imposition of a uniform and unifying collegiate Gothic. Previously, the campus had been distinguished (or undistinguished) by its architectural eclecticism. By committing to one style, the newly conceived university could maintain the halcyon illusion of collective oneness, the presumption of community, that its first element of uni- implied: “We are one, we are in this together.”
Intellectually, the American university of the early twentieth century could accept to an extent the Germanization of education. Specialized graduate training, the seminar system, and a scholarly orientation had become consolidated within the more ambitious establishments of higher learning, now conceived of as research institutions. Those who shaped the expanded institutions asserted for the undergraduates a different architectural and pedagogical vision. For the college portion of their enterprise, they devised indigenous versions of the courtyards and tutorials prevalent at Oxford and Cambridge—cited in one breath by the portmanteau name of Oxbridge. In this pair of municipalities, the principles of architecture and landscape are driven by education, and the learning was meant to stretch mind, body, and soul alike. As a consequence, the American embodiment of the combination has been analyzed as pairing “the monastic quadrangle and collegiate ideals.”
At the same time, the institution could tacitly project on a social niveau its demographic oneness—or at least the oneness of its major benefactors. The big givers hailed from Anglo-Saxon ethnic background. (Henry Adams, to ring a characteristically contrarian change on this norm, would have had it instead that his ancestors were Norman.) In keeping with the Protestantism enshrined in the last letter of the acronym WASP, they had little to no stake in the specifics of medieval religion and especially Catholicism. Nonetheless, they were swayed by positive preconceptions about the Middle Ages. In their view, that era had been simpler, purer, and more moral than their own days. Furthermore, the superiorities of the earlier times manifested themselves in ways congenial to Protestant values concerning hard work and willpower. God loves a trier.
Collegiate Gothic architecture generally arrived hand in hand with the adoption by university presidents—such as Chicago’s William Rainey Harper and Princeton’s Woodrow Wilson—of the residential college and the quadrangle as an organizing principle for undergraduate education. In this spirit, Princeton University was put into the Gothic idiom through the construction of residential buildings. As at various other institutions of higher learning in the United States, collegiate Gothic achieved a viselike grip upon New Jersey’s member of the Ivy League only after flirtations with assorted other styles. Cram, one-style-fits-all Gothic totalitarian that he was, found only faulty premises when he saw the campus. If he had had his way, all of these aberrant structures would have been dynamited to make way for the latest and greatest form of the fashion. The integration or imposition of the Crammian mode can be seen in such landmarks as Cleveland Tower (see Fig. 5.5) and the chapel (see Fig. 5.6). The latter was the last gasp at Princeton of both pure collegiate Gothic and its costliness in materials and labor. Afterward, dwindling fortunes and soaring prices led to other solutions, even when the semblance of construction in the manner was chosen for the skins of later buildings. In this grand finale, the stained-glass windows of the chapel, with a series dedicated to Malory’s Le Morte d’Arthur, Dante’s Divine Comedy, John Bunyan’s The Pilgrim’s Progress, and John Milton’s Paradise Lost, memorialize the close connection prevailing between architecture and literature in the style.
Viewed from outside, these edifices contributed unquantifiably to the image of Princeton as a university to be taken in all seriousness, one on a firm footing with its older European and particularly English forebears. The contribution of the collegiate Gothic buildings to the prestige of the institution can be inferred from their salience among the images represented on postcards sold by the university store—and, to rely for a moment on anecdotal evidence, from the frequency with which they are invoked by alumni as having been a motivation for their applying to the college and accepting admission to it. Should it be unexpected that collegiate Gothic is also the stuff of nostalgia? Not for nothing does the refrain to one of the two beloved reunion songs emphasize “Going back, going back, to the best old place of all.” Old, but not same old same old.
As the name of Cleveland Tower might impel one to suspect, the larger political context once again calls out to be remarked. The head of the university from 1902 to 1910 (see Fig. 5.7) was none other than the future President of the United States from 1913 to 1921, Woodrow Wilson. Princeton took its motto at that time, “In the Nation’s Service,” from the title of an oration Wilson delivered in 1896. He incorporated a nearly identical phrasing into his inaugural address as chief executive of the university in 1902. His predilection for Gothic extended even to the domestic architecture of his own home in town, in Tudor revival (see Fig. 5.8).
The dual commitments of Princeton University to the architecture of collegiate Gothic and to the ideal of national duty were not unrelated. A short book published in 1967 is entitled Men and Gothic Towers. Its author cannot be expected to be anything but a diehard Goth, since he reveals that the medievalesque architecture drew him to the college, where he longed to act out the Mark Twainian fantasy of being “a knight living in a feudal castle at King Arthur’s court.” The epigram facing the title page of the book in question divulges that the source of the title phrase was a poem pithily entitled Princeton by an alumnus: “Here we were taught by men and Gothic towers / Democracy and faith and righteousness / And love of unseen things that do not die.” In 1954, these lapidary lines were inscribed under the archway of McCosh Hall at Princeton (see Fig. 5.9).
To move to a different and lower stratum of power and society, consider for a moment the masons who toiled for years with mallets and chisels to shape the slabs of stone that transmuted Cram’s vertical visions into reality. No cinder blocks here! The first industrial revolution of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries had given rise to the second one that carried forward to World War I. With its emphasis on the craftsmanship of hand-hewn stone, collegiate Gothic, like its chief cheerleader, bucked against the course of history—a counterrevolution against modernism. It was unaffordably expensive and elitist. At the same time, it stood as a protest in favor of handmade beauty by people who felt discontented and precarious, not just in the cultural aspirations of their social classes but also in their very humanity, because of the so-called machine age. The position of many today is not altogether dissimilar, except that our anxieties about work are prompted not by the factory floor so much as by computers, robots and robotics, and engineering. Perhaps a dose of Gothic now and then would make us feel better—or at least make the modernism of postmodernism go down more easily. Once upon a time, the prescription brought solid results.
Thus, largely owing to Cram, we can speak of a collegiate Gothic style in the United States, and also thanks to him we can conceive of an Americanization of it. Without necessarily being attuned to the fact, students who spend their undergraduate years at institutions designed, influenced, or inspired by Cram will draw an unspoken equation between his kind of architecture and the way of life (or station of life) they experience in college. Gothic is the genius loci. It signifies an existence outside the supposedly real world of either family or career. At many institutions, it entails only lightly constrained freedom to fraternize (or sororize) with short-term siblings within a system that furnishes room and board and sets requirements for what must be accomplished at regularized intervals.
The building blocks of the original design are green and grassy spaces. Called quads at Oxford and courts at Cambridge, these geometrically arranged alternations of verdant sod and solid walkways form the core of amenities that would not seem at all alien to a medieval monk from his own favorite haunts. Students walk the gangplank through lawns to face their destiny in lecture halls. A porter’s lodge allows tight micromanagement, so that only the authorized may enter and exit at allowable times. The typical constituents of a British college in the pattern that became standard were lodge, dining hall, and library, but most important were the dormitories, in sets arranged around the quadrangle.
In their transatlantic translations, the fundamentally collegiate underpinnings of Oxbridge remained intact. In American pronouncements that invoke those same transatlantic colleges, a contrast is often intended with the universities of Germany. Both the German and English systems promoted specialization more than American undergraduate education in the liberal arts did. All the same, German-type universities placed relatively greater stress on graduate education, whereas residential colleges in England typically put emphasis on undergraduates. Beyond the commitment in the United States to lower- over upper-level education, the move toward an Oxbridge style of Gothic represented simultaneously also a commitment to the humanities as well as to the humaneness that such study was hoped to inculcate. The system had defects and limitations, but it helped immeasurably to hold together the world for more than a century. The humanities were aligned with the liberal arts, nonvocational education, and the acquisition of social connections and skills by men, especially gentlemen. Most of the universities were only in the early stages of a long process to separate themselves formally from specific denominations with which they were associated; thus, very few of the institutions failed to have chapels placed conspicuously within their building campaigns.
A third feature of Oxbridge merits underscoring. The desirability of residing near the cultural life and cerebral talent of Oxford and Cambridge spurred growth in population and business activity in both. The isolation of the two English colleges, more of Cambridge than of Oxford, distinguished them from almost all their continental peers (although, at present, the pair of communities retain only with great effort the mirage of persisting in being, as they once were, residential universities buffered from big cities). The separateness from urban density was a feature imitated when colleges were established in what would become in due course the United States.
Harvard, for example, was founded in 1636 at an eight-mile distance from Boston, even though this reality may not be readily perceptible today. Similarly, the alumni who in 1701 established Yale out of disaffection with the slide of the older college in Massachusetts from Congregational orthodoxy came to New Haven only as their third location. The first two sites in Connecticut where the new institution was billeted were mere flyspecks of towns at the time. In 1746, what shortly became the College of New Jersey, and later Princeton, was started with classes in Elizabeth and Newark by Yale converts to Presbyterianism. In due course, the trustees selected the present-day home of the institution in the center of the state as its permanent site, in no small part because of its long remove from the dense inhabitations of New York and Philadelphia. Quaintly from today’s urbanized perspective, not being in the thick of things was seen to bring dividends.
In the continuing comparison with monasteries set up by reforming monastic orders of the Middle Ages, all three of these Ivy League members began with a potent religious cast: look at the official seals that they use to this day (see Figs. 5.10, 5.11 and 5.12). They were located in “new” settlements. Similarly, they had their origins in assiduous avoidance of the material world and, like their predecessors, their success attracted wealth and growth that were on bad terms with their original spiritual missions.
However unstylish it already was in the late nineteenth century to cling to the doctrine that a building should announce its function in its architecture, such annunciation is the whole point of collegiate Gothic. It advances that claim from its circumference inward. The cloisters of collegiate Gothic America are reminiscent obliquely of the medieval cathedrals and monasteries with their attendant all-male ecclesiastical communities, whose denizens, in the Middle Ages and long afterward, were meant to live celibate or at least unmarried lives. In effect, they were to refrain from the full commerce with the world that family men had.
The state of being closed off has often been conventionally opposed metaphorically as a negative to conditions that are esteemed in American and British Commonwealth cultures. Quadrangled enclaves—never-never lands segregated from the secular hubbub beyond—are pitted against values associated with open societies. Cloistered snobs and their ivory towers are set implicitly in opposition to the populism and the real world excluded by its walls. The overprivileged live within a bubble of stone and grass that awaits pricking by the reality outside. Henry Seidel Canby contends that his generation retreated from “the unlovely but immensely vital America outside” and took refuge in “the Gothic of our imitation monastery.” The mimicry was not solely a matter of architecture. Rather, existence within the men’s colleges incorporated “traditions (not all of them decorous) of monasticism.” Inside the enchanted gardens of the courtyards, professors and students could engage socially and intellectually with each other within an environment that, despite being built, was in unison idyllic, pseudosylvan, and faux Arcadian. In sum, college was boxed off in cloisters architecturally to make it so metaphorically as well. Little wonder that American universities sprouted clubs or inns called Cloister: Yale, Princeton, and Chicago each had one by this name. The organizations were (grassy) gated communities; their role models, monasteries.
Sounding much like F. Scott Fitzgerald, the English professor in New Haven describes the charm of romantic promenades lit by moonbeams. The scales fell from his eyes, so that he saw the value of the unworldliness. Canby then draws a parallel between the study of literature in colleges during his younger days and the activities of choir monks as seen by lay brothers in the Middle Ages. In fact, he goes so far as to claim that much like the jongleur of Notre Dame, scholars in the Gothic Age were undecided and indecisive over their roles in society and whipsawed between lay and ecclesiastical status. Elsewhere, he characterizes collegiate existence as having a “traditional romance… which has come down to us unbroken from the medieval university, its vagabond students, the Goliards, its arrogant unrespectability.”
The shaded cloisters looked not just backward but forward too. Gothic was a living style, not merely an antiquarian exercise. It was time-tested in the fullest sense of the word. At its optimum, it could be, if not a panacea, at least a palliative for the ills of American society as Cram and others saw them. Through the architecture, life in the educational institution was intended to convey to the young elite a sense of community through participation in spirituality and what could be called the vita contemplativa. As in monasticism, a paradox was that the togetherness took shape in seclusion. Another contradiction was that the college was meant to inculcate through community-mindedness a commitment to civic service, but to do so in temporary isolation from the vita activa.
F. Scott Fitzgerald and the Gothic Jazz Age
So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.
—F. Scott Fitzgerald, closing words of
The Great Gatsby
The Gothic of American colleges designed and inspired by Cram and his peers has inscribed generation after generation of students. This effect is exactly what it was intended to accomplish by the architects who drafted it, the tycoons who funded it, and the academics who taught in it. The process began making itself evident before the larger public at the latest in the fictions of writers who came into their own in the Jazz Age. Theirs was the so-called Lost Generation of the 1920s. The epithet captures the disenchantment after World War I that shattered their faith in God and progress, destabilized their values, and motivated them to embrace pleasure and materialism.
Most telling in this cohort of seeming sybarites is F. Scott Fitzgerald (see Fig. 5.13). In an autobiographical essay, he chronicled the reactions that he experienced upon entering the campus of Princeton University. He perceived first two spires and then “the loveliest riot of Gothic architecture in America, battlement linked on to battlement, hall to hall.” Just as important as the edifices is the setting, since the pseudomedieval architecture is arrayed “over two square miles of green grass.”
As seen, these surroundings constitute a consciously built landscape. In it, a social class has taken nature as a canvas upon which to depict itself. Its self-construction subsumed not only an understanding of the past but also a vision for the future. To Fitzgerald, collegiate Gothic architecture and landscape architecture constituted a warranty against monotony. In his susceptibility to the glamour of wealth, the fiction writer also construed the seeming age of the style as a bulwark against the impression that the campus had been “all built yesterday at the whim of last week’s millionaire.” Gothic offered a means of diachronic money–laundering. By acquiring cultural capital in buildings of this sort on campuses, the members of the mushroom aristocracy could make their new wealth instantaneously centuries old and culturally valued. The tycoons may have been contriving playgrounds for the affluent, but they gave them a window dressing of gravitas that can be bought more easily when quarried. They transmitted their names and legacies to the future, but grounded them in a seemingly remote and hallowed past: their new money became instantly old.
On the face of it, Fitzgerald’s This Side of Paradise, set in the United States of the time, would seem to hold scant promise as a bully pulpit for medievalizing (see Fig. 5.14). It probes the frictions with crass materialism and social ambition that love undergoes. The events take place unambiguously in the twentieth century. Yet portions of the story, especially those staged within the main precincts of Princeton University, would have been inconceivable without the Gothic revival of American colleges. In the cover art for Fitzgerald’s bestseller, the Gothicizing watchtower is accorded as pivotal a place as any the human characters receive (see Fig. 5.15). Nothing more is needed to conjure up the archetypal campus of the early twentieth century, at least in the Princetonian mold, than this style of architecture. The 1982 Scribner Classic edition (see Fig. 5.16) adds to such a thrusting projection three bulbous trees in the middle and college students (then still only young men) in the foreground to complete the picture.
In his novel’s second chapter, “Spires and Gargoyles,” Fitzgerald describes the “Gothic halls and cloisters” of his fictionalized Princeton as “infinitely… mysterious.” Next he characterizes the impact of the college on the protagonist. In due course he styles this Amory Blaine a “mediaevalist.” Already, the young man has experienced a retarded passage of time, an awareness of melancholy beauty, and a devotion to the medievalesque architecture of his college. He has developed a sense of the constructions as repositories of the bygone and even as a quasi-monastic collocation of nocturnal study and chastity. Through this protagonist, the novelist evinces his grasp of the intimate interplay between buildings and landscape on the ideal Gothic campus. The architects—of turret and terrain—worked in harness out of a shared concern for what students and instructors would spy either from the windows of their dormitories, classrooms, and libraries, or when outside in transit or in strolling. Just as intended, the views formed part of the education.
Within the text, Fitzgerald interpolates explicitly one twentieth-century architect. He identifies the man under discussion as “Ralph Adams Cram, with his adulation of thirteenth-century cathedrals.” Perhaps more interesting than the homage that this real name pays to the creator of Princeton University’s collegiate Gothic is who stands cloaked behind the pseudonym of another actor in the novelist’s drama. In the first chapter, the cast of characters includes “the Honorable Thornton Hancock, of Boston, ex-minister to The Hague, author of an erudite history of the Middle Ages and the last of a distinguished, patriotic, and brilliant family.” The naming of this city in the Netherlands hints strongly at Henry Adams’s great-grandfather. John Adams spent time from 1781 to 1783 as ambassador (or minister) from the United States to the Dutch Republic. Such fancy guesswork is not needed, however, since Fitzgerald himself spelled out the reference in a letter he addressed to his editor, Maxwell Perkins of the publishing house Charles Scribner’s Sons. Additionally, from Fitzgerald’s biography we learn that long before composing the novel, he met the real-life Adams in Washington. From Adams, it takes a mere hop, skip, and jump to realize that the “erudite history of the Middle Ages” would, of course, be his Mont Saint Michel and Chartres. And Amory reflects upon Hancock, evidently viewed through the prism of The Education of Henry Adams. In Fitzgerald’s fiction, the savant is “respected by half the intellectual world as an authority on life, a man who had verified and believed the code he lived by, an educator of educators, an adviser to Presidents.”
Fitzgerald’s second novel, published in 1922, was The Beautiful and Damned. Its protagonist is the grandson of Adam Patch (the given name is no accident). This Anthony Patch travels to Europe after graduating from Harvard. Among other things, he composes there “some ghastly Italian sonnets, supposedly the ruminations of a thirteenth-century monk on the joys of the contemplative life.” Later, his grandfather tries to dissuade him from writing a medieval history: “Why you should write about the Middle Ages, I don’t know. Dark Ages, we used to call ’em. Nobody knows what happened, and nobody cares.” The novelist refuted just such opinions by interlacing medievalism within the fabric of his bestsellers. (Both the Middle Ages and medieval studies outlasted the 1920s, thank you very much.)
Late Collegiate Gothic at Duke and Rhodes
The best is usually saved for last.
A conviction about collegiate Gothic holds true through the last glorious expression of the movement. In a 1931 address on “The Unity of Architecture at Duke University and the Ideas That Underlie It,” Duke President W. P. Few (see Fig. 5.17) set forth a syllogism for the graduating seniors of his university. In the first proposition, the Gothic buildings were intended to provide a beautified setting that would make a “home of the soul of the University.” The second premise was that “these appropriate and beautiful surroundings will have a transforming influence upon students, generation after generation, and even upon the character of the institution itself.” The conclusion, although left implicit, can remain in no doubt: young scholars and the university will be ameliorated by the beauty and by the medievalness.
A twofold yearning informed Few’s drive to shape the buildings and the terrain around them at Duke into a particular kind of cultural landscape—a campus. One was to elevate the expanding institution as the first and foremost research university of the South. The other was concurrently to strengthen the collegiate, and spiritual, disposition of the Methodist-affiliated Trinity College out of which the university had sprung in 1925. The unity and clarity of Few’s historicizing vision contributed its share to the notable success of his presidency.
Among the final hotspots of the style, in North Carolina amid the forests of loblolly and longleaf pines, Duke University underwent its breathless, but also breathtakingly high-cost surge of construction, eventuating in the resolutely collegiate Gothic style that prevailed on the West Campus. This work, mostly carried out between 1925 and 1930, culminated in the completion of Duke Chapel in 1935 (see Fig. 5.18). Contrary to its modest designation, this building is impressively idiosyncratic, with an uncommonly wide main tower that is modeled upon the Bell Harry Tower of Canterbury Cathedral (see Figs. 5.19 and 5.20).
In 1937, two years after the completion of the chapel, the English author Aldous Huxley—today known best for his nightmarishly dystopian portrayal of the future in Brave New World, published in 1932—launched into a rhapsody over Duke’s architecture. He described the sudden epiphany that a viewer experiences upon discerning the ensemble of structures for the first time. Huxley continues to draw comparisons, to the advantage of the university, between its “composite and synthetic Gothicness” and the aridity of not just “Ruskinian monsters” of the revival in England, but even the genuinely medieval buildings of Oxbridge. In support of his view that neo-Gothic surpasses the original, he invokes none other than Kenneth Clark.
Not all Europeans reacted with the same favor and fervor. Writing on New Year’s Day of 1930, Giuseppe Prezzolini, an Italian-born writer, reacted in nearly the opposite way to his first sight of Duke University: “Yesterday morning I returned from Durham (where I went on the 28th) after having seen rising from a forest a new university, made on the model of Oxford, with little Gothic portholes sealed with glass like the bottom of a bottle. What a mania these Americans have for the sham antique!” To this Continental, Duke Chapel would have seemed nothing more than an arrant nave.
Nearly 650 miles west stands Rhodes College in Memphis, Tennessee. In 1925, its president Charles E. Diehl, a Princeton graduate, committed to the style, and in nearly a century of existence, it has clung consistently and beautifully to the collegiate Gothic ideal (see Figs. 5.21 and 5.22). Diehl drafted a mission statement for his own institution and its physical plant that rejected misbegotten forms of Gothic in favor of what he regarded as the authentic one. The distinguishing features of this collegiate style were to be genuineness and beauty, to him the essential concomitants of liberal education. The architect to whom the commission was entrusted had worked as a young associate on the campus of Princeton. As this case goes to show, the Crammian tradition survived in more places than New Jersey even after the Jazz Age was long over. Cram’s force of character ensured that the style came in like a lion. Afterward, it may have become meek like a lamb, but it never went out altogether. Across more than one land around the world, collegiate Gothic has abided as a must-see expression of higher education.
Cathedrals of Learning
Collegiate Gothic concretized the value placed upon “learning for learning’s sake,” as well as upon scholarship as a collective and cumulative process of accretion. At the zenith of the fashion, knowledge was acquired and arranged in large buildings that were often constructed and sometimes regarded metaphorically—in the best of medieval traditions—as great churches. The navel of the campus at the University of Pittsburgh is known, plain and simple, as “The Cathedral of Learning.” (See Fig. 5.23.) The name of the edifice pairs or mispairs modern secularism with medieval spirituality, just as its reality rightly or wrongly couples modernism with medievalism. The uncompromising Gothic of twentieth-century American universities mutinied against postmedieval materials and making: it rejected an age of iron alloy by reinstating a golden era of uncontaminated stonework. In contrast, the Cathedral is a skyscraper in a radically modified reflex of the style: forty-three stories high, a stone casing on the outside screens a weight-bearing steel frame within. In other words, it is an ivory tower upheld by a metallic skeleton in a skin of Indiana limestone: Gothic is not supposed to rust. The bastardized framework would have made it anathema to the purism of many hard-nosed American devotees of the Gothic arrival, but somehow it fits as an expression of academic aspirations within a metropolis nicknamed Steel City, with a professional football team called the Steelers. The verticality is essential when truly higher learning is pressed for space in an urban setting. At one stroke, a steel tower with stone cladding gives the city what both the Eiffel Tower and Notre-Dame did to Paris in France, the work of chisels encasing that of blowtorches.
In 1886–1887, Cram made a trip to Europe that has been called “a cathedral pilgrimage,” much like the one Adams enjoyed in 1895. During the expedition, the architect underwent a conversion experience that culminated in his adopting High Church Anglicanism. This movement within the Church of England is associated liturgically more closely with Roman Catholicism than with Protestantism. As his numerous disquisitions against modern culture might lead us to suspect—archconservative that he was—Cram and others chose the institutionalization of collegiate Gothic consciously, meaning to secure sanctuaries not just for students and scholars but also for congregants from the larger world. The architecture that Cram and his cronies embossed upon private universities and colleges for both men and women distinguishes more institutions of higher learning than does the famous perennial vine. It might make more sense to speak of a Gothic League than an ivy one—but the style became widespread also on the campuses of public universities.
A particularly memorable instance of collegiate Gothic in a state university would be the much-beloved Michigan Law Quadrangle, completed in 1933 (see Fig. 5.24). This complex is the exception that proves the rule, however. It has elaborate, and often structurally otiose, carved stone corbels and bosses, gables, cupolas, and turrets, all in a Perpendicular style familiar from Tudor England. The whole venture was funded by an alumnus who never set eyes upon any of the buildings he paid to have constructed in Ann Arbor. Without donors with such affluence and generosity, the extraordinary price tag of materials and workmanship for such construction would have put the architecture beyond the budgets of public institutions.
A strikingly wide span of Gothic styles can be picked out on both the Evanston and Chicago campuses of Northwestern University, a private research facility set up in 1851. The aspiration of the founders to forge an on-the-spot history for their institution can be inferred from its very name, which harks back to Northwest Territory. This designation was official from 1787 until 1803. If what it is called helped to ground the university in American history of the late eighteenth century, Gothic quickly gave it the patina of Oxbridge and the Old World. Consumers are often said to be covetous of instant gratification. In architecture, Gothic provided universities with something less spur-of-the-moment, in the form of immediate ratification.
University Hall (see Fig. 5.25) on the Evanston campus, erected in 1869, is the earliest surviving example at Northwestern University of Gothic, in this case an eclectic High Victorian Gothic. The Garrett Biblical Institute (see Fig. 5.26), a Methodist seminary established in 1853 that is located within the precincts of Northwestern and has affiliations with it, has administration, classrooms, and dormitories in the collegiate Gothic style, most of them constructed around 1925. When key components in the Institute were announced, the Englishness of the design was emphasized, along with its simplicity. As the buildings aged, and the landscaping matured, the hope was that the ensemble would “become an inspiration and a background to the deepest and sincerest studies.” Gothic cause, intellectual effect.
In the 1920s, Northwestern took the ambitious step of clustering all its professional schools, in medicine and dentistry, law, and business, on a Chicago campus (see Figs. 5.27 and 5.28). Prospective donors were assured that it would be “an investment for all time.” James Gamble Rogers assumed responsibility for most of the university’s buildings in the Windy City. This was a homecoming of sorts for him. After all, his first major institutional and Gothic design had been the School of Education at the University of Chicago. The edifices he designed for Northwestern are Gothic simplified, streamlined, and supersized—not quite skyscrapers, but stacked higher than is conventional in collegiate Gothic.
On the east coast, Dean Andrew Fleming West of Princeton (see Fig. 5.29), a medievalist and Latinist, won a famous victory over the opposition of the university president. The stiff-necked Woodrow Wilson wanted the graduate college to be situated centrally, so that it could be integrated within the campus—and so that in the process its students could be allied with undergraduates. In contrast, the dean prevailed in his scheme to sequester the brand-new complex and its occupants on a knoll beside golf links a half mile from the facilities for those pursuing their baccalaureates. The two men may have been archrivals about the location, but they stood shoulder to shoulder in arguing that the new assemblage of buildings should have a collegiate Gothic blueprint.
In making the case for the style, West saw stony courtyards and ivy-clad walls as especially conducive to affectionate reminiscing about studies in the liberal arts. The issue of memory was hardly beside the point. With conspicuous frequency, major edifices on collegiate Gothic campuses have the word memorial in their names. Often the stone carvings and other artwork memorialize trustees, donors, professors, and architects, as well as undergraduates who lost their lives prematurely in wars, accidents, or other misfortunes. The phrase “college of memory” has been formulated to describe one commemorative courtyard, and it could serve nearly as well for many others. West’s advocacy of a quadrangle-and-ivy residential model calqued on Oxbridge is remarkable for the interaction it demands between man-made architecture and managed landscape. Even more memorable is Woodrow Wilson’s proposition that colleges be “gardens of the mind.” The university president’s imperative does not mean automatically that the pleasances should or would be completely disconnected from the money and power of the worlds surrounding them.
Gothic Landscaping: Picturesque Perfect
In the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the picturesque was deemed to be closely related to visual attractiveness—to a scenic value that was tied up with artistic vision. The concept swelled in importance at the very moment when the past was felt to be slipping away in the face of industrialization and modernity. Since the very end of the eighteenth century, picturesqueness had been invoked in connection with Gothic. The medieval style fits naturally within the contexts of natural growth and the quaint with which this form of sightliness has been intimately associated. In 1852, Andrew Jackson Downing, an outspoken advocate of the American Gothic revival, submitted: “As picturesqueness denotes power, it necessarily follows that all architecture in which beauty of expression strongly predominates over pure material beauty, must be more or less picturesque.” The architect was not to live long, but through his charisma in person and publications, he promoted a vision of rural Gothic that sent ripples still measurable in most subsequent revivals of the style in the United States. His rural form eschewed all the gloom (or Walpolian gloomth) of its romantic antecedent—the Gothick that had been spelled with a terminal k. Not for him were the dour castles that some other designers relished.
Hard on the heels of Downing’s pronouncement, Gothic revival took hold along the wealthy banks of the Hudson River Valley. The phrase “castles on the Hudson” is apt. The waterway had been likened to the riverscape of the Rhine very influentially by James Fenimore Cooper in a novel from 1832. In time, the topographic likenesses between the two watercourses were accentuated by architectural ones. The slopes along the stream of water in New York became studded with sham castles and ruins in the picturesque image of the medieval and medievalesque Rhine as Americans imagined it. Many such residences have since been demolished, but enough stay standing for the vogue not to be altogether forgotten.
As revived in England, Gothic architecture deserves special credit for having entailed a thoughtful engagement with landscape, including gardens. The imbrication of buildings with their built environments already typified the grandiosity that two monuments to early Gothic revivalism display. One of these zany projects was Horace Walpole’s Strawberry Hill, begun in 1750 as an outgrowth from a cottage at Twickenham, on the Thames near London. The other was William Beckford’s Fonthill Abbey in Wiltshire, completed in 1807. The characteristic of implanting such revival buildings in landscapes carefully engineered to seem natural was maintained through the best of the collegiate style in the United States.
If Gothic landscape and architecture were joined like mortise and tenon, so too were Gothic architecture and literature. The style of both residences was promoted by the eccentric Gothic writers who constructed them. Thus, Walpole was the novelist of the camp Gothic The Castle of Otranto, while Beckford wrote Vathek. Both men were dilettantes, but chest-thumping and even megalomaniacal ones who patronized architects. Walpole went so far as to call Strawberry Hill “a very proper habitation of, as it was the scene that inspired, the author of the Castle of Otranto.” First, he built his house and grounds out of an antiquarianism that encompassed study of sites and texts alike. He then drew upon his home and its surroundings as a fountainhead of inspiration and a backdrop for the fiction he confected. In both cases, as a “true Goth” he prided himself upon imaginative as opposed to imitative powers. The inaugural edition of The Castle of Otranto had a frontispiece that displayed a couple in a derelict crypt, with a pointed arch in a state of suggestive collapse (see Fig. 5.30). In 1765, Walpole subtitled the second edition A Gothic Story (compare Fig. 5.31, first edition).
Both the early Gothick and much later collegiate Gothic may be described as fake or at least energetically reimagined history. This fanciful past is planted in an environment that is equally faux, even while pretending to be consummately natural. The fascination for the imaginary days of old fostered the fetish for creating fanciful contexts in which to relive them. The two attractions were encouraged together by the emphasis on idealized communities that imbued the Arts and Crafts movement on both shores of the Atlantic Ocean.
Collegiate Gothic communities were set in designed landscapes that belonged through cultural atavism to the world of Gothic novels. Those fictions play out in settings such as ruined abbeys, churches, castles, or cemeteries, all of them far from cities. The style abided by this tendency to favor the rural or rustic over the urban. The argument has been made that campuses were not the only places in the American countryside where a twistily picturesque design took hold. Under the direct influence of Gothic, suburbs too adopted an alternation between pointy linearity and gentle curviness that persists to this very day.
The look of suburbia is marked by “architectural informality, winding serpentine roads, and continuous swaths of lawn.” The suburbs have been depicted both relentlessly and remorselessly in Gothic and horror literature, television, and film. Consequently, the phrase “suburban Gothic” has become entrenched in cultural studies relating to US pop culture. This subgenre occupies its own place of unwholesome honor, sandwiched between the shuddering horror in downtown urban Gothic and its nonidentical twin in backwoods rural Gothic. The happier opposite of “sublime suburbanism” remains underused. These other halfway homes between town and country are paradisiacal rather than hellish, tend to be serene rather than sinister, and comprise beautiful outdoors rather than ugly basements. Sometimes the multiplicity makes keeping the sundry Gothics straight impossible. The term can mean too many things for comfort, but no one ever said that language would or should be comfortable.
From the beginning, the districts under consideration were modeled on the Middle Ages. They were meant to allow their denizens to develop manual skills alongside intellectual ones. As we have seen, this idealistic objective can be traced back to William Morris’s daydream of people living “in little communities among gardens and green fields.” In his protosocialism the Englishman did not envisage for a moment an arrangement like an American campus: perish the thought! At the same time, his zeal for communes lent itself to appropriation by those who sought to make colleges places in which youth could cultivate sound minds in sound bodies.
The many intersections between collegiate Gothic and landscape architecture were no mere coincidence. Rather, the style imprinted upon campus design many of the same positive effects that the City Beautiful Movement had exercised upon urban planning in the 1890s and early 1900s. In oddball ways, it caused Victorian pleasure gardens to coalesce with the equivalent pieces of ground in medieval monasteries. All the beauty was owed to the willingness of major donors to support the costs of shaping topography worthy of collegiate Gothic—and vice versa. We could speak of chlorophyll-anthropy. This form of largesse complemented the construction of libraries that could be called bibliophilanthropy. Among practitioners, the well-known landscape gardener and architect Beatrix Farrand put the matter well when she asserted that education depends on more than knowledge and theory gained from reading and study. In her phrasing, the book of nature complements mere facts with “the subtle inspiration of beauty.”
Gothic campuses lend themselves well to beauteous built landscapes because of the age-old connection between colleges and cloisters. Both have banked on scenery to inform what goes on within and around it. The orderly asymmetry that underlies the style’s architecture holds true for plantings and topography within it as well, as each is intended to achieve or impose an alternation between busy bustle and restful repose. Just as music relies at least as heavily upon the silence of pauses as upon the sounding of notes, so the institutional design of monasteries and universities requires the full stops of these oblong geometric shapes to punctuate the sentences of space. The greens have meanings much more transcendental than any of the transit or recreation that takes place upon and through them. They conjure up the illusion of countryside within a city that is designated formally by the Latin phrase rus in urbe, or “country in city.” As landscape, they exist in a sublime equipoise with the architecture. For that reason, quadrangles—above all, Gothic ones—deserve recognition as basic units in landscape architecture.
The campus of the ideal American college comprised a designed and deliberate interstice between or around buildings. A central green space, it was meant to be handsome and made a distinctive national contribution to landscape design. Once again, it bears remembering that the term campus originated in 1774 and anticipated only slightly the Revolutionary War. Such spaces exerted an allure that in part consisted in seclusion from the smoke and mirrors of the urbanism outside. Landscaping afforded one ready means to achieve separation from the world that would foster contemplation and introspection.
Trees were so essential to the makeup of campuses and especially collegiate Gothic ones that some college heads saw themselves as the academic equivalents of Johnny Appleseed. The first president of the University of Oklahoma designed the institutional seal to depict a man strewing seed. One of this leader’s own aims in directing his institution was to make “a thousand trees grow where none had grown before.” The chief executives of these institutions may not have spiced their motivational speechifying to staff and students with expressions along the lines of “arboreal Gothic” or “Gothic forest theory,” but the effect was similar. They wanted their pseudocloisters and sham castles to contain chapels of both stone and trees.
Trees as Nature’s Cathedrals
The Gothic church plainly originated in a rude adaptation of the forest trees with all their boughs to a festal or solemn arcade…—
The largest houses of worship in the Middle Ages were much more denaturalized than were most other buildings of the time, seeing that most medieval homes and barns were constructed of far more natural organic materials. Yet from another perspective the cathedrals nonetheless came closest to nature, so long as naturalism was understood to express upon earth a marvelously divine order of all creation. Gothic buildings and the Gothicized built environment were perceived to be intimately connected. In fact, today they are still felt to be closely related. Reasons are not difficult to pinpoint. Such architecture, especially in the great churches, was envisioned as at once a living organism and an artificial fabrication. The style was truly radical, to speak etymologically, in that it was rooted and grounded. As such, it occupied an interface between nature and art.
Lately, resemblances have been pointed out between places of prayer made by men and giant nests constructed by termite colonies (see Figs. 5.32 and 5.33). By the same token, tall rocks containing cavities lined with purple or violet crystals are commonly called amethyst cathedrals. Similarly, in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, suitably shaped formations in echoey caverns were compared with features of Gothic architecture. Deep time, conceptualized in the eighteenth century by James Hutton, applied in the nineteenth century by Charles Darwin, and coined in the twentieth century by John McPhee, rattled the chronology by which the age of the earth was reckoned. The universe was en route to becoming the multiverse. On that account, drawing analogies between the man-made and natural worlds may have rendered unnerving concepts more manageable by making them more familiar. Calling termite mounds, crystal geodes, or caves after cathedrals made such formations more proximate to the products of human art and toil.
The likeness between Gothic and nature that has been drawn longest and most often likens it to the grandest and oldest of trees (and vice versa). As opposed to many other styles of architecture and landscape design, this one tends toward a kind of cultivated wilderness—a forest Gothic or a Gothic wildness. In 1724, William Stukely likened the interior of Gloucester cathedral to “a walk of trees, whose touching heads are curiously imitated by the roof.” Already in the early sixteenth century, an author designated as “Pseudo-Raphael” had advanced the so-called forest or tree theory. This speculation held that Gothic style derived from uncut trees, the sprays of which were bent and plaited to form pointed arches. A visualization of this same metaphor is placed as a guidepost in a volume on Gothic architecture published in London in 1813. The frontispiece displays the design for a “wicker cathedral”—a fanciful Gothic church fashioned of wickerwork (see Fig. 5.34). The conceit rests on an implicit assumption that the construction of cathedrals replicates in stone the vegetation of trees and shrubbery. The similitude is sufficiently obvious that when later authors or artists take it up, we should not assume automatically that they were versed in the minutiae of this or that architectural theory. François-René de Chateaubriand imagined cathedrals to have arisen from the inspiration of trees in Celtic forests. Victor Hugo himself drew an analogy between the pillars in a great house of worship and trunks in a forest.
The comparisons of Gothic ecclesiastical interiors with copses, and of stone pillars and vaults with arboreal trunks and branches, pervaded romantic writing. Early architectural historians assumed falsely that churches of this kind were meant consciously to replicate stands of trees in forests where Druids had once enacted their pagan rituals. Nevertheless, such lax speculation provoked notable opponents: who would want to go out on that theoretical limb? For instance, Friedrich Schlegel dismissed the untested and untestable hypothesis of vegetal origins. Later, Ruskin rebuffed not the analogy—he himself lauded “the arborescent look of lofty Gothic aisles” in The Seven Lamps of Architecture—so much as the use of it to theorize about the origins of Gothic as a whole. Despite such rebuttals, the theory persisted that this brand of architecture had treelike origins.
The trend toward identifying the tallest of plants with cathedrals received an extra nudge in the New World. Americans were frantically clearing their whole continent of primeval forests that had been inhabited by aboriginal peoples who were sometimes conceived as noble savages and who thus picked up the mantle (or other clothing) from virtuous pagans of antiquity and noble heathens of the Middle Ages. Instead of the original woods, the nineteenth-century nation-builders raised up constructions of artificial trees loftier than the natural ones, sometimes even veritable groves of living stonework. The added push came from the rationale that was applied to justify the establishment of national parks. The natural resources of forests, minerals, land, and water constituted a heritage that legitimated the young nation culturally, just as the great medieval churches that soared upward did for France, Italy, and Germany. Arboreal and geological cathedrals created by nature were no more to be logged or quarried than the ones made by human beings in Europe were to be leveled. As the citizens of the United States made a religion or cult of nature, the new preserves became sacred spaces. Tourists were pilgrims who journeyed to do homage to the relics protected in these national shrines. Yellowstone, the first park in what would become an immense system, was signed into existence by President Ulysses S. Grant on March 1, 1872.
By no accident, in that same year the first formal arboretum in the United States was established in Boston. If nature was art, trees were paint brushes plied across the canvas of landscapes. The likeness is not meant idly. That arboreal garden rose within the same decade in which the first art museums were founded in Boston, Washington, and New York. In other words, museums of art and museums of trees were established simultaneously. The common ground was aesthetic and artistic, with a specifically Gothic accent.
Advocate extraordinaire for the preservation of the wilderness and open space was the Scottish-American John Muir. He connected the dots between the natural and the national better than anyone had ever done before. Toward that end, this proto-environmentalist privileged in many writings mountains and forests of North America over great churches of Europe. At the same time, he likened the two phenomena, natural and man-made. Back to nature became identical with back to Gothic. As the frontiers closed, Muir sought staunchly to have tracts of unspoilt land maintained as nature’s cathedral. By being made legally into national parks and forests, the natural features, flora, and fauna were collectively consecrated as places of devotion and houses of religion. The divine was immanent in natural as much as in manufactured marvels, and God performed a miracle by becoming incarnate in the features of nature as he did in his son—by implication, Mother Nature or Mother Earth presupposed Mother of God and vice versa. In due course, the idea of the wilderness cathedral became enshrined in local toponyms. A granite mountaintop in Yosemite National Park (see Fig. 5.35) would be called Cathedral Rocks and Spires; likewise, a formation in Bryce Canyon National Park in Utah, with a shape not unlike a westwork tower with a long nave behind, is named The Cathedral (see Fig. 5.36).
To return by way of the living cathedral to plants, the comparison of the arboreal with the ecclesiastical is particularly obvious in comments upon two species of sky-high plants, redwoods and sequoias. The shared vertical thrust of Gothic churches and natural trees clearly drove the analogy. Muir wrote already that forests of these tall California conifers constituted “majestic living temples, the grandest of Gothic cathedrals.” Nor do the evergreens need to be as spectacularly large as redwoods or sequoias to resemble immense places of prayer. Consider Cathedral Drive, a dirt back-road in Lakewood, New Jersey, as it existed in the 1910s (see Fig. 5.37). In 1901, a columnist rhapsodized that a photograph of the drive and the treetops swaying above it would recall “an archway of rugged grandeur resembling the nave of a cathedral, from which its name is derived.” By the twentieth century, this analogy verged on vapidity, especially in America. Thanks to Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, likening evergreens to great churches became a topos in the United States. His lovely “My Cathedral,” a Petrarchan sonnet, maps out the similarities and dissimilarities between conifers and cathedrals by comparing their architectural appearance, materials, builders, embellishment, sounds, and manner of worship.
Another expression of the commensurability between tall plants and medieval architecture in the American context was that architects who raised collegiate Gothic buildings interspersed them sometimes with screens of trees and shrubs. This arboricultural rotation was a means of demarcating and enclosing the perimeter of the campus. Also related is the incorporation of arboreal motifs into the tracery of the Bok Singing Tower, a Gothic bell tower built in a sun-dappled preserve in Florida.
The analogy did not disappear even in the late twentieth century. At one extreme, a hybrid cultivar developed to replace the trees killed in America by the so-called Dutch elm disease is called “cathedral.” It was thus named because when planted in close rows the upper boughs form arches like those ubiquitous in Gothic great churches. Owing to this quality in growth, American elms were the archetypal cathedral trees in the nineteenth century. Their resemblance to places of worship led observers to comment on the superiority of nature to architecture. Beyond that, the stateliness of these botanical beauties induced comparisons between them and English houses of prayer. Numerous observers recognized that while the New World continent might lack original stone cathedrals, it had in these plants their arboreal equivalents.
To move from the tree-killing fungus to the actual Netherlands, “The Green Cathedral” is a landscape display by the artist Marinus Boezem. The project was developed in 1978 and planted in 1987 in Flevoland, a polder or tract of ground reclaimed from the sea (see Fig. 5.38). This two-part specimen of what could be called silviculture involved creating, by analogy to photography, both a positive and a negative image of a great church. The plus side required the placement of dozens upon dozens of Italian silver poplars in the shape not of the columns but rather of the outline of the cathedral of Reims. Together, the 178 trees constitute a built forest that is simultaneously an architectural complex. The negative involved the cutting of a clearing in the shape of the same edifice from a uniform growth of trees. The Dutch installation gets at a correspondence particular to the original Gothic, and one that is commonly encoded into the collegiate form of it, between seemingly natural forests and man-made buildings.
The manipulated landscape also actualizes a pipe dream that the eighteenth-century English poet Alexander Pope had articulated, of growing a medieval Gothic cathedral out of poplars. Do grand ideas about the biggest house of prayer grow on trees? In the following century, the American architect Montgomery C. Meigs transferred Pope’s notion to the elm and refined it with a view toward cultivating a great church of such trees in Philadephia to replicate the plan of Notre-Dame at Paris, or perhaps punning on the Latin botanical name of the genus, the cathedral of Ulm. In the present millennium, the landscape architect who has designed garden installations that play similarly upon the relationship of architectonics and trees is Giuliano Mauri. He implanted a series of “vegetal cathedrals” that allude to the religious and aesthetic structure of great churches by training tens of trees to be columns with tops that curve in upon themselves in vaults (see Fig. 5.39).
If the trunks of trees have been regarded as resembling the piers of cathedrals, skyscrapers have been viewed at times as fusing the organic best of both. This metaphorical fusion of the arboreal and the architectural was evident in Louis Sullivan, a patriarch of its American manifestation. Both before and after these buildings, the designers who raised all sorts of edifices in Gothic revival styles on college campuses took tacit advantage of the resemblances between trees and turrets.
Collegiate Gothic Havens
Gracious God, we thank you for the vision of Ralph Adams Cram, John La Farge and Richard Upjohn, whose harmonious revival of the Gothic enriched our churches with a sacramental understanding of reality in the face of secular materialism; and we pray that we may honor your gifts of the beauty of holiness given through them, for the glory of Jesus Christ; who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God,
in glory everlasting. Amen.
By the early twentieth century, life was already very much accelerated from what it had been before industrialization. Collegiate Gothic buildings were intended to procure their occupants a respite from the overbearing harshness of nonstop existence, industry, and materialism. Like revival churches, they delivered stout protection from the exhausting social Darwinism that the American novelist Sinclair Lewis described in 1906 in The Jungle. This ambition could be berated with finger-wagging as escapism and exclusivity. Was such a capital-intensive solution required as an alternative to the winner-take-all dogfights of the everyday routines outside their walls? The architecture of the colleges could also be seen as a true hedge that was not furnished by most other institutions within society at that (or any other) time. Among other things, the style helped to shelter and ratify the pursuit of basic research in natural sciences, the social sciences, and the humanities.
The Gothic-minded architects built spaces to envelop their denizens within the medievalesque ideals of contemplative life, rusticity, and spirituality. Beginning in the twelfth century, the enclosure of the monastery was allegorized as the cloister of the soul. One side was inward-directed self-contempt; another, outward-turned contempt of the world. A third aspect was love of God; the fourth, love of one’s neighbor. The quadrangles of collegiate Gothic enclosed the students in like fashion. The buildings cost a king’s ransom and entailed future disbursements for maintenance and operation, but they were a long-term investment in higher education, culture, intellect, and artistry. Just as the most perspicacious of early twentieth-century observers prophesied, campuses in the style stand as monuments to confute any facile fault-finding of the Gilded Age for being “wholly given up to a selfish materialism.” The administrators and architects who participated in the solicitations for funding from former students and others reasoned that the expense of Gothic would repay itself through lower overhead later. They did the math right. The stonework has lasted now for decades, better than wood, brick, or concrete: the cost has been amortized over a century or more. Nor do the financial returns end with lower maintenance. A prestigious appearance could elicit larger donations. The scorecard of campaigns for giving argues that they were right: the Gothicized cloisters and towers draw graduates back for remunerative homecomings, and the loyalty of alumni is cultivated by nurturing nostalgia for the arches.
The architecture should not be judged solely or even primarily with jaundiced eyes. The adage “unity in variety” surfaces again and again in writings of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries in conjunction with Gothic. This quality made the style a good match for a nation in the throes of expeditious industrialization and demographic diversification. Individually, the buildings were constructed with the consistency that arose from reliance upon familiar architectural features. At the same time, the menu of mélanges that could be fashioned from the relatively limited tally of ingredients was infinite. The edifices have a unified look, but they are never identical. Variety and whimsy, in gargoyles, chimeras, ceiling bosses, plaques, and other unique features, abound. While the overall order may validate the status quo, the rough-hewn grotesqueries tucked here and there permit mild satire of those same authorities. The distinctive features were often not dictated by the overall design of the architects, but instead expressed the personalities and perspectives of the masons who hewed the slabs of stone. These one-of-a-kind elements in collegiate Gothic and its close ecclesiastical relatives account for the gargoyle-friendly tours and booklets found in bookstores and on the websites of many American colleges and churches. Such phenomena are New World equivalents to the postcards and handouts that show local pride in parishes with old buildings and artworks throughout Europe.
While standing outside a prevailing materialism, the collegiate Gothic buildings were not completely detached from society. Rather, they were meant to foster service of it. In turn, the surrounding community took pride in them. A multiplicity of postcards, the centrality in them of flagpoles with the red, white, and blue flapping in the breeze, and the appropriation of Brookings Hall (then still “University Hall”) of Washington University in Saint Louis as the nerve center for the World’s Fair of 1904 bring home that the architecture had a face that looked outward as well as one that turned inward. The expense and solidity of the edifices were meant to achieve prestige by showing that the United States, now more than four hundred years after the discovery of the New World by Christopher Columbus, had reached maturity and come into its own. What better way to demonstrate age than through its hallowed plural, the Middle Ages?
The desire for venerable olden days as a counterpoise to modernity explains a pronouncement by Woodrow Wilson about the benefits of what he calls “Tudor Gothic style.” First, the architecture adds a millennium in an eyeblink to the history of the university. Second, it brings home “derivation and lineage” by pointing the imagination of all viewers to “the historical traditions of learning in the English-speaking race.” On a similarly grand scale, collegiate Gothic promises to condition future students to the world destiny of the United States that has arisen from the nation’s mediation of earlier English culture and civilization across both time and space. The style offered instantaneous roots in a past that commanded high prestige at the time. The future president of the United States did not need to know that by the time he formulated this thought, the value of the architecture for teleporting the viewer back hundreds of years had been recognized at least since the early nineteenth century.
Ralph Adams Cram, an equally great Anglophile, also made assumptions based on a racial Anglo-Saxonism. Yet the zero-tolerance architect did so without descending into either the frequency or the vehemence of the racism that vitiates many parts of Wilson’s legacy. Much like Henry Adams before him, Cram posited that his compatriots felt an almost atavistic and instinctive attraction to Gothic, as an alternative to modernism. In his eyes, his fellow Americans had a commitment to constitutive values of morality and artistry that extended even to the construction techniques employed in realizing the style in actual building.
Gothic furnished overarching unity for the variety of the university. This capacity could be taken far beyond a strictly academic setting. In the case of the Brooklyn Bridge, the perceived potential of the fashion to allow for diversity while simultaneously fostering a shared oneness grew to have much broader symbolic implications. By way of the bridge—by the mere fact of itself being one—the style could cater to a nation that aspired to welcome the peoples, or at least some of them, of the world.
The Gothic quadrangle contained considerable potential for beauty and romance. At the same time, it was allied with a vision that meant college to be a place and time for the development of not just an elite but in fact one sharing similar opinions and tastes. An emphasis on such like-mindedness can readily lead to the exclusion of the unlike. In this context, with its pretend castle keeps and battlements, the style made the interiors into no-go zones for unwanted outsiders. Just as cathedral closes had done in the Middle Ages, collegiate Gothic shut in and protected the gowns of campuses within from the towns of the municipalities without. The revival had originated alongside gusto for heraldry and genealogy, and the architecture grew along with the loyalty to their undergraduate institutions shown by affluent families. At their best, the college precincts were not gilded cages or even limestone lazarettos, less protective bubbles than safety devices such as airbags or parachutes.
Races, ethnic groups, religions, and sexualities have grown far more numerous in the demographic ferment of many European countries as well as the United States, and the purview of world history even more multilayered. With the benefit of enlightened hindsight, aspects of the unblinking pronouncements made by early twentieth-century exponents of collegiate Gothic can cause cringes or winces nowadays. Yet the gut instinct of mooring a rapidly changing present in the cove of a more stable and sheltered past, even if one with only imagined stability, has nothing inherently askew about it. The dangers of not heeding what has happened in earlier times exceed the pitfalls of subscribing at least initially to romantically distorted preconceptions of the long-ago.
Ivy League and Ivory Tower
Cope and Stewardson, the brace of Quaker architects from Philadelphia who pieced together the backbone of Bryn Mawr College, made buildings in the Tudor Gothic style its vertebrae. These edifices went a long way in institutionalizing the presence of ivory towers, the light-colored collegiate Gothic ones—not wrought from actual animal tusks or teeth—on the campuses of many private universities in the United States. Usually disparaging, this turret syndrome now connotes timelessness, woolly-headed ideas, book learning, pure knowledge, perquisites, and seclusion. In contradistinction, the real world signifies the ever tick-tocking clock, unsentimental realities, empiricism, instrumental knowledge, sharing the common lot, and immersion in the everyday.
Mind reading rates as risky under the best of circumstances, but let us double down and make a truly high-stakes gamble on a long shot: if actual towers lurk in the thoughts of people who speak of ivory ones today in the United States, most of them have pointed arches and crenellations. Just examine the images that come to light in a search for the phrase “ivory tower.” In the architectural setting of American universities, such a projection is even more easily demonstrated to be effectively a Gothic tower.
The medievalist Andrew Fleming West of Princeton University had published on the Anglo-Saxon monk Alcuin, who, around 800 CE, served for Charlemagne a function that today would be styled director of education. As dean of the Graduate College, West sought to adapt to the modern world an updated Carolingian form of monasticism. Whereas little of the promotional material for elite colleges from the early twentieth century puts on display the ivy-green leaves of the genus Hedera, the Gothic buildings are ubiquitous as a stony proclamation of their educational goals—and of the financial resources they possess for realizing those objectives. One Englishman wrote in 1899 to an influential architectural journal “some of the dearest associations of college life cluster round ivy-mantled crenellated towers.” At the same time, the ivory and ivy towers were not at all distant and disengaged from the aims and aspirations of the United States as a nation.
When the three-day gala to celebrate the completed construction of the Graduate College took place in October 1913, Woodrow Wilson had already bolted from Princeton for the White House. He purposely refrained from participating in the pomp and circumstance at the university he had fled for first a governorship and then a national presidency. In contrast, President William Howard Taft trundled to Princeton to deliver a tribute to a predecessor of his in office. The other onetime commander in chief honored was the late Grover Cleveland, after whom the college’s Memorial Tower was named. As the Philadelphia Orchestra played “The Star-Spangled Banner,” the elder of the dead president’s two sons yanked on a halyard to unfurl Old Glory atop the tower. Cleveland Memorial Tower acquired iconic status with alacrity.
Meanwhile, Harvard University eschewed new construction in collegiate Gothic. Going further, it even committed to a policy of good riddance by abolishing the presence of earlier forms. The style was expunged from Harvard, just as Yale, Princeton, and other institutions took oaths of fealty to the fashion. This bifurcation of architecture happened during the first quarter of the twentieth century, when wealthy donors consigned the means for concerted building campaigns unrivaled before or after. Many Gothicizing colleges and universities would not waver in their pledges for decades to come.
The exception at Harvard University that proves the rule is to be found in the Divinity School. The granite of Andover Hall (see Fig. 5.40), built in Gothic revival, sits well removed geographically from the bosom of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences. So far so good. But consider a fact of vital importance that is betokened by the very name of the edifice: when the structure was commissioned, it was the project of a non-Harvardian institution, the Andover Theological Seminary, which formed an alliance with Harvard Divinity School in 1908.
Under Harvard, the premises of Andover gradually acquired the cladding of vegetation that bespoke the Ivy League (see Figs. 5.41 and 5.42). The tower is not particularly towering, but it suffices to evoke one made of ivory. That Gothic ambivalence about the surrounding world is part of what drove Harvard to clean house architecturally. It first rid itself of most constructions in the medievalizing manner and soon administered modernism as a disinfectant.
The great old educational institution on the Charles River is not (despite occasional misimpressions on the part of both it and other entities) the whole of Massachusetts. Outside its best-known university, the state has its fair share of campuses that bear a deep Gothic brand (see Fig. 5.43). For example, at Boston College in Chestnut Hill (see Fig. 5.44) Gasson Hall and its tower not only inspired most of the other nearby buildings on campus, but also influenced more broadly the development of the collegiate style throughout the United States once their design was published in 1909 (see Figs. 5.45 and 5.46). Praised by no less than Cram, it provided an outsized yardstick against which to take the measure of other tall structures.
The collegiate Gothic tower calls to mind the cathedrals when they were white—and the allusion here to Le Corbusier is deliberate. Along with the entrance arch, the spire is often a sentinel that announces a campus to be a campus. It constitutes an intellectual and even spiritual alternative to the hectic materialism that has always lurked outside the stone quadrangles. Both the tower and the university can be a haven, locus of escape or fantasy, venue of resistance, protected area for meditation, pyramid of learning, incubator of epoch-making ideas, and much else. They may be caricatured as isolationist, but by the same token they may be extolled for offering a truce, time-out, or time to cogitate. After all, institutions of higher learning fulfill conflicting roles. On the one hand, they grease the wheels that must turn if future workers and money-makers are to be trained. At the same time, even if they have become less churchlike entities than was once the case, they remain establishments that stand at least somewhat apart from society. More to the point, if America has any ivory towers at all, many of them are in fact collegiate Gothic. So as not to become irrelevant, they call out for renovation and innovation. To meet the demands and demographics of a constantly changing world, they must be remodeled. Yet such refashioning requires judicious safeguarding: institutions of higher learning exist for and thanks to historic preservation. The towers were bequeathed to us, an instant Middle Ages for a country that had none. They were medievalesque because at the end of the day universities were medieval creations. More importantly, they were presented to their faculties, students, and alumni, and to the nation to be hotbeds of thought: they were think tanks before the concept was framed by that word. They were given to endure, for us to use as we see fit. Their positive impact has been measureless. Let us make the most of them, both towers and Middle Ages.
Within college contexts, the ivory tower was a Gothic tower. If the collegiate Gothicists had tunnel vision, the tube was not horizontal but vertical. The United States was booming, with much of its most impressive urban growth taking place upward. For very different reasons, two of the most distinctive creations of America, the college campus and the urban skyscraper, both emerged from deep dialogue with Gothic.
The medievalizing architecture shared by many American college towns and cities helped to make the United States hospitable for the jongleur from the Middle Ages. The Gothicization of construction happened just as the medieval minstrel took by quiet storm the nation at the forefront of most of the convulsive changes that were changing the whole world. The juggler blends in well within the university, since both the character and the institution dance on the razor’s edge between rigor and recreation. The architectural style and the fictitious figure (if he was indeed made-up or imagined rather than real) were not rearguard actions to stave off modernity and modernism. Rather, the first pair were indispensable counterweights to the second. Respecting and even loving olden times does not necessarily signal fatuous self-indulgence. Quite the opposite case could be made. To be disenfranchised of a past that may stimulate optimism runs a close second to being denied a future of hope.