Academia: Collegiate Gothic Architecture in the United States

William Morgan's "Academia: The Architecture of College Campuses in America" is a comprehensive book that explores the flourishing of the collegiate Gothic style in America between the Civil War and the Jazz Age. It highlights the architectural fantasies that emerged at universities like Princeton and Vassar, Yale and Chicago, combining Oxbridge quaintness with new money. The book examines the style's cultural and social implications and includes contemporary revivals by architects like Robert A. M. Stern. Illustrated with color photographs, it offers a captivating tour of America's faux-medieval cathedrals of learning.

Format: Hardback
Length: 176 pages
Publication date: 03 October 2023
Publisher: Abbeville Press Inc.,U.S.

This is a book that will be both informative and visually appealing to experts in the field, as well as to the general reader. It is an essential addition to the field.

― John Wilmerding, Sarofim Professor of American Art, Emeritus, Princeton University

William Morgan provides an overview of the flourishing of the collegiate Gothic style in America between the Civil War and the Great Depression. 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.

Weight: 1476g
Dimension: 236 x 313 x 24 (mm)
ISBN-13: 9780789214683