"Harry Potter effect": Christopher Hawthorne on America's Neo-Neo Gothic college architecture trend

2017-12-21T14:52:00-05:00

So what does the taste for Hogwarts-style dormitories say about the Yale or the USC of 2017? It says that the primary job of residential architecture on campus is to provide a sense of consistency and familiarity for donors and incoming students alike — to soften the edges of the college experience.

Los Angeles Times architecture critic Christopher Hawthorne looks back at 2017's resurgence of Neo Gothic and Neo-Gothic-ish college architecture and compares the newly completed USC Village and Yale residential complexes with architectural references of the manifestation of nostalgic Anglophilia, the wizard school Hogwarts, as found in Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone.

"High school graduates on their way to college are hardly responsible for the architecture they find there, of course," Hawthorne writes. "Yale, USC and other wealthy and ambitious schools seem to be counting on a kind of double nostalgia, on the hope that this revival of the Gothic Revival will appeal both to incoming students and to wealthier alumni, who after all are the ones paying for and often helping dictate the architectural sensibility of new campus buildings."

Christopher Hawthorne reviews LA's newly opened USC Village development: "Equal parts Disneyland and Hogwarts"

2017-08-21T18:37:00-04:00

At a ceremony last week to mark the opening of the $700-million USC Village, C.L. Max Nikias, the university’s president, spoke at some length about the architecture of the new complex and what he called “USC’s extraordinary physical metamorphosis” in recent years. [...] Then came his ringing conclusion: “And let’s always remember, the looks of the University Village give us 1,000 years of history we don’t have. Thank you, and fight on!”

"Even delivered in a vacuum it would have been a remarkable statement," Los Angeles Times architecture critic Christopher Hawthorne remarks. "The president of the leading private university in Los Angeles taking up, as a rhetorical cudgel, one of the laziest clichés about the city, that it has no history to call its own."

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"Harry Potter effect": Christopher Hawthorne on America's Neo-Neo Gothic college architecture trend

Christopher Hawthorne reviews LA's newly opened USC Village development: "Equal parts Disneyland and Hogwarts"