REVIVALS VS. TRANSPLANTS

Pauli Murray College, Yale

Revivalism in architecture refers to a style that consciously echoes or evokes the style of a previous era. This blurs an important distinction. The Italian Renaissance and the British Gothic Revival were echoing the styles of earlier local eras. The Greek Revival, on the other hand, whether it occurred in Berlin, Edinburgh, or Philadelphia, was a foreign style from far away; it was a transplant. That does not mean that the former was more authentic, but it does give it a different meaning. When James Gamble Rogers was designing the Yale colleges in the early twentieth century he was not reviving a tradition; he had a collection of postcards and photographs of Oxbridge colleges that served as his inspiration. On the other hand, Franklin and Murray colleges, completed by Robert A. M. Stern in 2017, are a revival of Rogers’s Collegiate Gothic. Not the same thing.

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