AMERICAN GOTHIC
Gothic architecture emerged in the Ile-de-France around 1140 and ended in the United States in the 1930s.
Fittingly, the last architects to build in the Gothic style were primarily drawn to its late, florid period. Saint Patrick’s Cathedral, a studied summa of the rayonnant and flamboyant styles, is the most convincing recreation of a medieval building this country. Early skyscrapers like the Woolworth Building in lower Manhattan and the Tribune Tower in Chicago acknowledge their debt to the first generation of vertically-oriented buildings in their creative reinterpretation of flamboyant decoration.
The broad, low-pitched arches and intricate vault tracery of the English Decorated and Perpendicular styles, derived mainly from late medieval halls and chapels at Oxford and Cambridge, served as the architectural model formany elite East Coast academic institutions. The Neo-Gothic,ivy-clad core campuses of Yale, Duke, the Universities of Chicago, Pennsylvania, Pittsburgh and the crown jewel of “collegiate Gothic,” Princeton University, are synonymous with higher education in the American imaginary.
Modernism and capitalism brought an abrupt end to American Gothic architecture. The modernist rejection of 19th-century eclecticism and historical revival styles coincided with the Great Depression, during which the astronomical cost of constructing, and then maintaining, stone vaults, lead armatures and stained glass, carved moldings and gargoyles, hammerbeam ceilings, and bell towers became unsustainable for all but the wealthiest patrons.
The world’s largest church built in the Gothic style is in the Morningside Heights neighborhood of Harlem. Construction began on the vast Cathedral of Saint John the Divine in 1892, but structural and fiscal difficulties have brought the project to a halt several times and there is no completion date projected.
1. Cope and Stewardson, Princeton University, Holder Hall and Tower, Rockefeller College, 1910.
2. Cass Gilbert, New York City, Woolworth Building, 1910/12.
3. James Renwick Jr., New York City, Saint Patrick’s Cathedral, 1858/78.
4. John Mead Howells and Raymond Hood, Chicago, Tribune Tower, 1922/25.
4. Richard Upjohn, New York City, Trinity Church, 1839/46.
6. Julian Abele, Duke University Chapel, 1930/35.
7. Ralph Adams Cram, NThomas Webb Richards, College Hall, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, 1871.ew York City, Cathedral of St John the Divine
8. Shepley, Rutan & Coolidge, University of Chicago, Harper Memorial Library, 1891-1912.
9. Charles Klauder, Pittsburgh, University of Piitsburgh, Cathedral of Learning, 1926/37.
10. Thomas Webb Richards, College Hall, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, 1871.
