Collegiate Gothic in North America

Collegiate Gothic was an architectural style subgenre of Gothic Revival architecture, popular in the late-19th and early-20th centuries for college and high school buildings in the United States and Canada, and to a certain extent Europe. A form of historicist architecture, it took its inspiration from English Tudor and Gothic buildings.

Ralph Adams Cram, arguably the leading Gothic Revival architect and theoretician in the early 20th Century, stated the appeal of the Gothic for educational facilities in his book Gothic Quest as, "Through architecture and its allied arts we have the power to bend men and sway them as few have who depended on the spoken word. It is for us, as part of our duty as our highest privilege to act . . . for spreading what is true."

Gothic Revival architecture was used for American college buildings as early as 1829, when "Old Kenyon" was completed on the campus of Kenyon College in Gambier, Ohio.Alexander Jackson Davis's University Hall (1833–37, demolished 1890), on New York University's Washington Square campus, was another early example. Richard Bond's church-like library for Harvard College, Gore Hall (1837–41, demolished 1913), became the model for other library buildings.James Renwick, Jr.'s Free Academy Building (1847–49, demolished 1928), for what is today City College of New York, continued in the style. Inspired by London's Hampton Court Palace, Swedish-born Charles Ulricson designed Old Main (1856–57) at Knox College in Galesburg, Illinois.

...
Wikipedia