Princeton University’s Whitman College (Princeton U. photograph)

Today’s Wall Street Journal offers a mixed review of Princeton University’s new Collegiate Gothic residential complex, Whitman College. The piece, by the architecture critic Catesby Leigh, praises the college’s massing but slams the “rank inadequacy” of its decorative detail, complaining that the ornament “is often poorly scaled or even poorly designed, and also too shallow in relief and/or crudely carved with power tools.” The $136-million, 500-student college was designed by Demetri Porphyrios, of the London architecture firm Porphyrios Associates.

The review raises anew some interesting questions about judging Collegiate Gothic buildings.

The style as we know it on American campuses is, after all, a pale imitation of originals at the Universities of Cambridge and Oxford. At those institutions, the elements of what strike us as quirky and delightful quadrangles were added one at a time over the course of decades or centuries, not built all at once, like Whitman. And at Cambridge and Oxford a human scale was established, at least in the beginning, by limitations. Student populations were comparatively small, as were institutions’ incomes and donations. Rooms had to be illuminated by daylight or candles and heated by fireplaces. Stone was hard to quarry, difficult to shape, and expensive to transport, and while it could span long distances, doing so required considerable skill in construction.

But by the time buildings at Bryn Mawr College, Princeton, and other American institutions popularized Collegiate Gothic in this country, many of those limitations no longer existed. Some of the architects who designed Collegiate Gothic buildings here followed English models closely — avoiding symmetry, adding quirks — but it wasn’t long before institutions began asking for larger and larger Gothic buildings, such as those at the University of Chicago. By the 1920s, the University of Pittsburgh was erecting a Gothic skyscraper. The style had left its origins far behind.

It’s hardly news that, in more recent decades, some truly awful buildings have been designed in what purported to be the Collegiate Gothic style — in many cases because trustees and others were determined to restrict campuses to one architectural vocabulary. As ornamental stonework became unaffordable and campus buildings grew ever larger, what passed for Collegiate Gothic buildings were often giant, plain boxes with a few turrets and bays glued on. Even institutions committed to building first-rate Collegiate Gothic buildings, like Rhodes College, put up some buildings so plain they look more like medieval fortresses than educational facilities.

So by what criteria should a new Collegiate Gothic building be judged today? Should we compare it with the sepia-toned Oxford of Brideshead Revisited? With Princeton’s own 1897 Blair Hall (left)? With what other universities have built lately? Whitman is a series of clumsy shoe boxes compared with the 1547 chapel at Cambridge’s Kings College, but frankly it seems like a masterpiece compared with any number of 20th-century Collegiate Gothic buildings that colleges take at least some measure of pride in. Where do we go from here?