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THE ARCHITECTURE ISSUE
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Buildings & Grounds is written by Scott Carlson (left) and Lawrence Biemiller (right). Scott Carlson writes about architecture, facilties, energy, and sustainability, among other topics. Lawrence Biemiller writes about architecture and facilities and contributes to Notes from Academe. What's happening on your campus? Let us know.
Collegiate Gothic: the Worst Thing That Ever Happened to Campus Architecture?
A couple of weeks ago I made an unplanned visit to a college that it’s probably best to leave unnamed. It’s an institution whose campus I hadn’t seen in 20 years or so, and time didn’t seem to have done it many favors. I drove past one clunky, knockoff-Gothic building after another, until finally I was forced to confront what may be one of the central questions of campus planning in America today: Is Collegiate Gothic the single worst thing that ever happened to campus architecture in America?
The more I think about that question, the more serious I am about asking it. I’m a big fan of good Collegiate Gothic architecture, but let’s face the truth: Most of the Collegiate Gothic buildings put up since World War II have been lousy. They don’t have load-bearing masonry walls, so they don’t need—and usually don’t get—all the costly buttresses, arches, and other structural flourishes that make the style lively and engaging. And they’re built all at once, instead of one accretion at a time, so they end up uniform and often symmetrical, rather than quirky and amusing.
Worse yet, if a college has a core of Collegiate Gothic buildings, alumni and trustees may refuse to let the institution build in any other style, even if an essentially medieval, church-inspired architecture is entirely inappropriate for whatever the institution is doing in the 21st century—and even if the college has no hope of raising the money necessary to build a new Collegiate Gothic building good enough to match those in its core. Plus—and this is increasingly an issue—Collegiate Gothic doesn’t scale. An architectural style that created perfect, human-sized cathedral cloisters cannot simply be supersized for an institution’s next interdisciplinary science center.
In the 50s we got stripped-down Collegiate Gothic — which is to say, Gothic without any of what we love about the style. After that we endured a spell of reinterpreting Collegiate Gothic in various contemporary guises—and that turned out to be, in most cases, even worse that what the 50s had given us. Now we’ve settled for putting up what are mostly background-grade Collegiate Gothic buildings. But what’s the point? I’d much rather see a good contemporary building than a mediocre Collegiate Gothic knockoff, no matter what the buildings next door look like.
You can certainly ask the same question about Georgian buildings on college campuses, but to me mediocre Georgian buildings don’t seem as disappointing as their mediocre Collegiate Gothic counterparts. Besides, Georgian scales better than Collegiate Gothic, and its ornament is cheaper to add on.
So the question remains: Is Collegiate Gothic the worst thing that ever happened to campus architecture in America? What do you think? —Lawrence Biemiller
Lawrence Biemiller | Tuesday September 2, 2008 | Permalink | Contact usComments
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I’d vote for mid 20th century boxes as the worst thing to every happen.
— I work in an ugly building Sep 2, 02:12 PM #
I think the knock-off Brutalism of the ’60s and ’70s is responsible for more truly monstrous and unlivable campus buildings, especially dorms, than Gothic. So I’d place Gothic as the second-worst thing ever to happen to campus architecture.
But your point is well taken, and even made more moderately than it might have been. Even Princeton’s new Whitman College, which has been praised for its non-uniformity of design, seems worthy of condemnation: it’s only a more highly evolved and expensive form of kitsch — it’s supposed to look like a pile that evolved over time, with “quirky” touches, but the scale of the thing is still completely off, like an airplane hangar clad in expensive stonework. It’s not just the second-rate quirklessness of the standard imitation Gothic that should be decried, but just as much the out-scale big-box application of a style that should be reserved for small buildings with elaborately worked, niche-rich edges.
— Roger Sep 2, 02:16 PM #
The University of Oklahoma is Exhibit A for your argument. Four or five lovely Gothic buildings from the 1920s, and several monstrously scaled Gothic wannabes from the 1980s forward. (But like the folks above, I’d say that campus was more brutalized by modernism.)
— Mark Sep 2, 02:37 PM #
Let’s see, such possibilities…..
Notre Dame? consciously retreating into the past
Virginia Tech? tragic victim of too much local stone
— jon Sep 2, 03:23 PM #
First: “collegiate” before any architectural style preemptively bans the good (not to mention the better and the best) of that style.
Second: when measuring/comparing collegiate Modern, High-Tech Postmodern, Spanish Islamic, Gothic and Gothic Revival, Classical and Classical Revival, Bauhaus, etc., how do we quantify which style is the worst?
— richard Sep 2, 06:56 PM #
I work amongst REAL collegiate Gothic architecture [Oxbridge, dating from 1200s onwards] and even we try to eschew “fake” collegiate Gothic in new buildings. That said, students themselves tend to prefer the traditional colleges (in terms of architecture) to the new.
— Molly Sep 3, 02:09 AM #
Well, better to have an attempt at gothic architecture than to have the sort of buildings that an art prof. from my undergraduate alma mater referred to as “late twentieth century crackerjack box.”
— Phil Schwartz Sep 3, 12:53 PM #
An in-house engineer at our campus (which will remain anonymous here) recently retired after nearly 40 years of service.
“In my tenure here,” he boasted, “I’ve value-engineered more than 100 million dollars out of proposed campus building projects.”
The sad thing? It shows. But with tight budgets at state universities nationwide, these are the types of characters who are employed and rewarded by our institutions, and who will continue to “value engineer” much of the integrity and beauty out of whatever building projects our architects try to design for us.
— Ashley Sep 3, 05:38 PM #
Worst thing? let’s hear what goth people say on gothiclover.com
— Adam Sep 3, 08:15 PM #
Forget aesthetics, let’s talk typology. Who ever thought that a double loaded corridor was a good collegiate housing typology never went to a proper college.
— wm Sep 4, 10:24 AM #
Cheap and badly designed buildings of any style are bad whether they be cheap imitations of Medieval or Victorian Collegiate Gothic. Cheap Modernesque is also banal and anti-individual which is even worse.
— Ethan Anthony Sep 4, 02:34 PM #
As far as this discussion is concerned, collegiate architecture, especially in the private sector, should truly reflect an ideal of patronage to the art of architecture. Institutions that value learning, growth in culture, and forward thinking should not relegate their students to ideals of the past. A poor attempt at a current style or lexicon is still better than any attempt at a style that stood for a past principle that we’ve already learned from. After all, perhaps that new, poorly built, model will help to advance a current dialogue, language, or design firm. Architecture is a field in which we constantly learn and grow, much like an collegiate instituion…
— Jesse James Sep 4, 03:19 PM #
… Revivalist styles, like Collegiate Gothic, are rather difficult to carry-off well, especially as times and contexts change.
But crap knows neither style nor time. On balance, older crap is somewhat better because it looks, well, older … and easier to justify replacement.
— tye simpson Sep 8, 01:19 PM #