Academia Hardcover by William Morgan

Product Details

• Publisher: Abbeville Publishing Group (2023-10-31)
• Language: English
• Paperback: 176 pages
• ISBN-13: 9780789214683
• Item Weight: 1485.54 grams
• Dimensions: 12.3 x 9.3 x 0.9 cm

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 of our faux-medieval cathedrals of learning.

About the 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.