Northwestern's original Evanston, Illinois campus, located just north of Chicago on the shores of Lake Michigan, can be traced to 1851, one year after the institution's founding.
The campus still hosts the majority of Northwestern's undergraduate programs, as well as several of its graduate and professional schools.
Numerous buildings on the Evanston campus constructed from the early to mid-twentieth century, including lecture halls, student residences, and the university's flagship library, were commissioned in the Collegiate Gothic style by notable American campus architect James Gamble Rogers.
In the postwar period, numerous brutalist projects were undertaken, including an expansion of the main library by Walter Netsch.
[53] The Chicago Campus, with a small assortment of gothic revival buildings, is notable for containing the first instances of academic skyscrapers in the world.