The Quadrangle Dormitories (commonly referred to as Quad) are a complex of 39 conjoined residence houses at the University of Pennsylvania, in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, United States. The architectural firm of Cope and Stewardson designed the houses in an exuberant Neo-Jacobean version of the Collegiate Gothic style, and completed most of them between 1894 and 1912. The dormitories stretch from 36th to 38th Streets and from Spruce Street to Hamilton Walk (Pine Street). West of the Memorial Tower at 37th Street, the houses on the north side follow the diagonal of Woodland Avenue (now Woodland Walk) and form a long triangle with the houses on the south side. From 1895 to 1971, the dormitories housed only male students.
The Quadrangle Dormitories were listed as a contributing property in the University of Pennsylvania Campus Historic District in 1978.
The Quad is now grouped into 3 college houses: Fisher Hassenfeld College House (west), Ware College House (center), and Riepe College House (east). As "first-year communities," they currently (2017) house approximately 1,445 students.
Construction
The Quadrangle was the first major dormitory built by the university. Prior to its construction, the undergraduate components of the College (25 to 50 percent of student body) was populated by many commuters from Philadelphia-area residents; students from elsewhere lived in fraternities, Philadelphia relatives or family friends, or found lodgings in off-campus boarding houses, some of which were owned by Penn. The driving force behind building the dormitory was Charles Custis Harrison, heir to a sugar fortune and university provost, 1894–1910. He removed the unofficial campus architect, Frank Furness, replacing him with Cope & Stewardson, who were making a reputation as practitioners of the fashionable Collegiate Gothic style. Walter Cope and John Stewardson had designed exquisitely detailed historicist buildings for Bryn Mawr College beginning in the late-1880s, but the Quadrangle would be a project at a far larger scale and with a much higher level of ornament.
Provost Harrison took as his model the English college experience of Oxford and Cambridge, where students lived, studied, ate, socialized and worshiped in a single community. Often defraying construction costs with his own funds, Harrison, through Cope & Stewardson, remade the Penn campus with Collegiate Gothic buildings. Built on the former site of the university's athletic fields, fifteen of the Quadrangle's houses had been completed by 1897, and six more were added by 1906.
George Henderson, President of the Class of 1889, wrote a short book that he distributed to his classmates at their 20th reunion in June 1909. Old Penn and Other Universities charted Penn's strong growth in acreage and number of buildings between 1889 and 1909, but also the near-quadrupling in the size of the student body and the surge in out-of-state and foreign students. Henderson argued that the Quadrangle (then 22 buildings) played a vital role in attracting students, and made an impassioned plea for its expansion:
By 1912, the Spruce Street row had been extended to 36th Street and turned the corner to the newly completed Provosts' Tower, honoring the recently retired Provost Harrison. That same year, Cope & Stewardson was reorganized as Stewardson & Page. Headed by the late John Stewardson's brother Emlyn, the firm completed the houses enclosing the East and South Quads over the 1910s and 1920s. Plans to add a chapel and a dining hall to the Quadrangle eventually were abandoned. Instead, the dining hall at Houston Hall was expanded in the 1930s. Construction of the Butcher, Speakman and Class of '28 Houses – along the south side of the Upper and Lower Quads (the site formerly reserved for a dining hall) – completed the Quadrangle's perimeter in the 1950s.
1904 assessment
In his praise for The Quad, architect Ralph Adams Cram revealed some of the ethnic and cultural implications underlying the Collegiate Gothic: