Academia

“This is a volume that will be informative to specialists, but also a visual delight for the average reader. An indispensable addition to the field.” ― John Wilmerding, Sarofim Professor of American Art, emeritus, Princeton University

“William Morgan offers an overview of the flowering of the collegiate Gothic style in America between the Civil War and the crash of 1929. Here is a splendidly illustrated book full of insight.” ― New Criterion
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.