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.

[4] 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.

[7] 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.

[8] 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.

[4] Often defraying construction costs with his own funds, Harrison, through Cope & Stewardson, remade the Penn campus with Collegiate Gothic buildings.

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.

[4] 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.

[12] In his praise for The Quad, architect Ralph Adams Cram revealed some of the ethnic and cultural implications underlying the Collegiate Gothic: It was, of course, in the great group of dormitories for the University of Pennsylvania that Cope and Stewardson first came before the entire country as the great exponents of architectural poetry and of the importance of historical continuity and the connotation of scholasticism.

The [War Memorial] tower has been severely criticized as an archaeological abstraction reared to commemorate contemporary American heroism.

It is named for Jerome and Anne Fisher and Alan G. Hassenfeld, all alumni and trustees of the university, who funded its creation.

The H-shaped complex straddles the Upper and Lower Quads, and includes the Memorial Tower and buildings east of 37th Street.

[9] Its carved limestone ornament, by sculptor Edward Maene, features plaques honoring each of the first 12 provosts, and twin "headboards" with the Coat of Arms of Pennsylvania at the parapet.

It is enclosed by Foerderer (with its 3-arch cloister), Baldwin, Class of '87 and McKean Houses, along with the iron fence that separates it from Hamilton Walk.

It is sometimes called "The Nipple"[26][27] The dormitories are adorned with a total of 163 limestone gargoyles, bosses (cartoonish grotesques), and other carved elements.