Academia

A spectacularly illustrated survey of the architectural style that defined the American college campus. 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. AUTHOR: William Morgan, an architectural historian, has taught at Princeton, the University of Louisville, and Brown. He is the author of Collegiate Gothic: The Architecture of Rhodes College, American Country Churches, and Snowbound: Dwelling in Winter, among others. SELLING POINTS: . The first-ever book about the architectural style (of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries) that defined the image of the American college campus . An engaging text by noted architectural historian William Morgan . Spectacular color photos of campuses from Princeton and Yale to Vassar and Bryn Mawr, to UMich and UChicago . Special chapters on southern colleges and prep schools . An essential volume for architecture lovers and alumni of the featured schools (not to mention devotees of the Dark Academia aesthetic on social media)