Minard Lafever (1798–1854) was an American architect of churches and houses in the United States in the early nineteenth century.
At this period in the United States there were no professional schools of architecture and few who claimed the title architect.
The Greek Revival Government Street Presbyterian Church in Mobile, Alabama is a National Historic Landmark that was designed using many of the latter book's detailed guidelines.
It has two towers of different size, and the “off-center arrangement of two large peaked gables, give the school the exterior appearance of picturesque irregularity common to the Gothic revival.” [2] However, the interior is compact and symmetrical, with long crossed hallways dividing the building into quadrants.
Architectural historian Andrew Dolkart calls Lafever’s design of Packer "one of the earliest and most sophisticated evocations of English-inspired Collegiate Gothic, creating the educational atmosphere of Oxford and Cambridge.