Collegiate Gothic architecture is a substyle of the larger Gothic Revival movement as it applied to university buildings. An example of the romanticist tendencies of the Victorian era, the style was popular from the 1880s until the 1930s. Gothic architecture was viewed as technically impressive and aesthetically pleasing by that time, and the dignified nature of England's Oxford and Cambridge inspired the style's emulation.
The term "Collegiate Gothic" was coined by Gothic Revival architect Alexander Jackson Davis to describe his Harral-Wheeler House in Bridgeport, Connecticut. In 1853, he wrote that the work was an "English Collegiate Gothic Mansion." Collegiate Gothic became the phrase for the movement by the 1890s.
Perhaps the first Collegiate Gothic building was Kenyon College's Old Kenyon building, built from 1827-1829, which still stands today. The Gothic Revival style itself began a century earlier, with Horace Walpole's Strawberry Hill estate. Over the following decades, several universities began to design new campus buildings in the style. Harvard University's Gore Hall (demolished 1913), built in 1837-1841, served as an early precedent for Gothic campus libraries. Gothic Revival architecture began to flourish after the Civil War, when eclectic Collegiate Gothic and High Victorian Gothic buildings were rapidly built on college campuses. Ohio State is no exception to this trend--the original University Hall (demolished 1971) was built in the High Victorian Gothic style in the 1870s.
Collegiate Gothic architecture came to its most well-known incarnation during the 1880s, as buildings became less ambitious and more conservative. Designs varied: some were innovative original works of architecture, while others were almost overt imitations of earlier buildings. An influential project was Cope and Stewardson's work on the campus of Bryn Mawr College, which used English Gothic architecture as precedent but remained faithful to the local vernacular. Conversely, Shepley, Rutan & Coolidge's University of Chicago campus directly copied campus buildings at Oxford and Cambridge.
Collegiate Gothic architecture generally uses English Gothic work as precedent, so as a result many buildings in the style are long and horizontal beyond their towers, as opposed to the verticality of the French Gothic cathedrals. Materiality and form vary depending on what campus a Collegiate Gothic building was constructed on--Ivy League schools such as Yale are famous for their elaborate and expansive masonry designs, while colleges that were small at the time like Ohio State usually take on a more restrained approach in brick. Regardless of scale, many incorporate the same principles of Gothic architecture: the pointed arch, stained-glass windows, fine tracery, towers and fleches, and a sense of lightness and dematerialization.
The style went out of fashion with an explosive culmination: the University of Pittsburgh's Cathedral of Learning, built from 1926-1937. A 42-story Gothic Revival steel-framed skyscraper, it is the second-tallest Gothic building in the world (after the Woolworth Building in New York City). It hybridizes the aesthetics of the Gothic with the structure of early skyscrapers. After the 1930s, Collegiate Gothic architecture declined in favor of late Beaux-Arts, Stripped Classical, and early Modernist and International-style campus buildings.
Like other historicist styles, Collegiate Gothic architecture has begun to see a resurgence in popularity, as part of the recent Classical Revival movement. Robert A.M. Stern Architects designed Yale's Pauli Murray College to reference the school's earlier Gothic work, which opened in 2017.