Collegiate Gothic

Collegiate Gothic is a historicist subgenre of Gothic Revival architecture that emerged in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries for educational buildings in North America, drawing its inspiration from English Tudor and Gothic architecture, especially the buildings of Oxford and Cambridge. The style became popular for college and high school buildings in the United States and Canada, and to some extent in Europe, following the more dramatic High Victorian Gothic phase that had dominated after the Civil War, replacing it with what has been described as a more scholarly and less restless form of Gothic design; its architects worked as historicists rather than literal copyists, remaining sensitive to site and material. The architect Ralph Adams Cram, one of the style's leading proponents, argued that architecture had the power to shape people and communicate truth, positioning Collegiate Gothic buildings as moral and intellectual instruments rather than merely functional structures.