Cherokee Gothic is a term coined by

Frank Lloyd Wright Frank Lloyd Wright (June 8, 1867 – April 9, 1959) was an American architect, designer, writer, and educator. He designed more than 1,000 structures over a creative period of 70 years. Wright played a key role in the architectural movements o ...

for a

vernacular A vernacular or vernacular language is in contrast with a "standard language". It refers to the language or dialect that is spoken by people that are inhabiting a particular country or region. The vernacular is typically the native language, n ...

architectural style An architectural style is a set of characteristics and features that make a building or other structure notable or historically identifiable. It is a sub-class of style in the visual arts generally, and most styles in architecture relate closely ...

used on the campus of the

University of Oklahoma The University of Oklahoma (OU) is a Public university, public research university in Norman, Oklahoma. Founded in 1890, it had existed in Oklahoma Territory near Indian Territory for 17 years before the two Territories became the state of Oklahom ...

. The term was invented by Wright while on a tour of the school's grounds, and, when coined, applied to

Bizzell Memorial Library The Bizzell Memorial Library, known also as Bizzell Library, is a five-story brick structure located at the University of Oklahoma in Norman, Oklahoma. It is an elaborate Collegiate Gothic or Cherokee Gothic building, designed by the architecture ...

and Evans Hall. These buildings combined conventional

Gothic Gothic or Gothics may refer to: People and languages *Goths or Gothic people, the ethnonym of a group of East Germanic tribes **Gothic language, an extinct East Germanic language spoken by the Goths **Crimean Gothic, the Gothic language spoken b ...

and Native American elements. The buildings were constructed in dark and pale bricks and featured a decorative Gothic facade with light-gray stone buttresses and statues. More recently, new construction under former university president

David Boren David Lyle Boren (born April 21, 1941) is a retired American lawyer and politician from the state of Oklahoma. A member of the Democratic Party, he served as 21st governor of Oklahoma from 1975 to 1979 and three terms in the United States Senate ...

have been designed to resemble and evoke the earlier Cherokee Gothic buildings. Buildings in the style resemble

Collegiate Gothic Collegiate Gothic is an architectural style subgenre of Gothic Revival architecture, popular in the late-19th and early-20th centuries for college and high school buildings in the United States and Canada, and to a certain extent Europ ...

structures found on other campuses, although they are made from brick and light stone.

References

Gothic Revival architecture in Oklahoma University of Oklahoma campus Cherokee in popular culture {{architecture-stub