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Originally Posted by brickell
And it looks very similar to old parts of Univ of Florida. Does anyone have any insight as to why this gothic brick was so popular for schools?
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Actually, I also spent 2 years at the U. of FL and was going to post that but I couldn't find a good aerial shot.
In Duke's case, it's not brick but stone and that's because the school took huge advantage of the Depression (since it was one of the few institutions in the mid-south to have plenty of money then). It bought a stone quarry, built a rail line from said quarry directly down the main quad, imported a crew of Italian stone masons and started building. I'm not sure who they used as an architect.
They also, by the way, bought vast swaths of land around the buildings, now known as Duke Forest and the Sarah P. Duke Gardens. The garden is extraordinarily beautiful (think huge masses of azaleas in bloom) in springtime and the forest has all sorts of uses
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