August 14, 2003

Yes. The interesting thing is that “Cherokee Gothic” wasn’t originally the name of a formal architectural movement. Frank Lloyd Wright coined the phrase after visiting OU—apparently in 1946—to describe what he saw already happening there: recognizable Collegiate Gothic forms combined with patterns and details understood as deriving from Oklahoma’s Native American traditions. The Library of Congress describes essentially that combination.

The underlying story begins earlier. After OU’s original university building burned in 1903, English professor Vernon Louis Parrington devised a campus plan. Much of it was never built, but his conception produced the North and South Ovals that still organize the settlement. The Gothic buildings subsequently placed around those spaces gave OU the collegiate vocabulary familiar from eastern universities—but in Oklahoma it evolved differently.

The distinctive visual effect comes from brickwork and light stone rather than the heavy gray masonry we associate with Princeton, Yale or Oxford. You’ll see pointed arches, buttresses, towers and Gothic massing, but also patterned brickwork and geometric ornament. One architect involved with OU’s later residential colleges described the contrasting red brick and pale limestone as making the buildings appear lighter and more animated than conventional Collegiate Gothic. He also recounts the explanation that Wright saw something reminiscent of the rhythmic patterns of Native American blankets.

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Bizzell Memorial Library is probably the mature expression to study. Built in 1929, its brick surfaces, pale stone tracery and vertical Gothic forms are recognizably collegiate, but the ornament and color make it very different from an imported English quadrangle. OU itself describes Native American influence as having been present in the university’s architecture since its territorial beginnings.

There’s another wrinkle you might enjoy for STDMi: Bruce Goff later made OU one of the most unconventional architecture schools in America. That isn’t the same thing as Cherokee Gothic. Under Goff, students were actively discouraged from simply copying European historical styles and were encouraged to draw from the Oklahoma landscape, ordinary objects, unusual materials and Native American design. In other words, the campus already embodied the question Goff’s school later pursued much more radically: what should architecture in Oklahoma look like if it isn’t simply architecture imported from somewhere else?

That may be the most useful hook for your post. Cherokee Gothic isn’t especially interesting because someone mixed two decorative styles. It’s interesting because OU was trying to make the familiar American university Gothic belong to Oklahoma.

And that is very much a settlement question.