Imagine the sadness of a gargoyle watching its building decay. Imagine the lamentations that 600 gargoyles and other grotesques could raise; surely their cries could melt stone.

Now, following years of restoration, these terra cotta figures at City College must be rejoicing. The last of the five original Gothic structures is nearing repair. Meanwhile, the first of several new buildings sure to sparkle with 21st century sophistication is rising nearby.

Historic preservation and architectural innovation on a hill in Harlem are but two shining examples of the $7.5 billion renaissance emerging at the campuses of the City University. Fueled by state, city and, increasingly, private philanthropic resources, the blueprints and renderings of a decade ago are yielding bold new interpretations of the "urban campus" ideal.

In some cases the University is caring for the architectural treasures of the past. In other instances, it is designing and erecting what may well be the architectural treasures of the future. Together, the mix of old stone and the new glass-dovetailing endeavors, tradition and innovation-are metaphors for the intellectual life and learning on the campuses they serve.

And just in time: these new facilities are arriving at a moment of great need. CUNY enrollment has jumped to levels not seen in three decades, to nearly 221,000 degree-students. Another 250,000 nontraditional students enroll in continuing education programs, a tenfold increase in the past decade.

Higher academic standards have fueled a demand for better laboratories, more research facilities, new technology and smart classrooms. A range of new buildings-libraries, daycare centers, affordable performing arts centers and modern athletic facilities-are at their disposal.

Academic functionality is at the core of these structures. But good buildings-and great campuses-are also good neighbors. Since 1993, more than 80 new or restored buildings (some completed, others in construction or design) are enhancing and reviving neighborhoods, helping to reinvent cityscapes from Jamaica to Flatbush, from Ground Zero to the Upper East Side and across all five boroughs.

"Thomas Jefferson believed strongly that the architecture of a university, by its very nature, could teach," says Richard P. Dober of Dober, Lidsky, Craig and Associates, an internationally known campus and facility planning firm in Belmont, Mass. A Brooklyn College graduate who praised the historic preservation and modernization of that campus's library as well as its future building plans, he adds, "The commitment of a public institution like City University to engage in this activity is an important part of education. Students leave with some regard for their heritage, and that may have some spillover onto the lives they lead."

A great deal of the credit for CUNY's architectural renaissance belongs to architect Emma Macari, who signed on as vice chancellor for facilities, planning and construction mangement in 1993. Back then, the state had stalled construction funds for two years. Albany wanted more planning and a guiding vision. Now, Macari says, "We're in the third year of a five-year, $2.5 billion capital program." A lot of it is targeted toward cutting-edge science facilities, but $600 million is for primarily instructional buildings at community colleges.

Because it can take 10 or 12 years between conceiving of a building and opening its doors to students, CUNY phases in budget requests to reflect only work that can be done in a given time period. State- bonded University capital projects are executed by the Dormitory Authority of the State of New York.

Macari says that the responsibility for preservation and new construction "keeps me awake at night. When projects come out beautifully, it's awesome. One of the dreams that any architect would have is to be in charge of such a vast collection of real estate that contains buildings that have been done with so much care and have made history for all of us."

A rich commission and priceless prestige were at stake in 1897 as the College of the City of New York invited eight leading architects to compete for the prize of designing the first building at its new uptown campus. Some had designed glorious buildings like Carnegie Hall and the Metropolitan Opera House, others the new NYU and Columbia campuses, leaving George Browne Post with a dilemma.

Should he go with the classic-revival/Beaux Arts style so praised in his pavilion at the 1893 Chicago Exposition? Or should he heed the rumor that competition jurors would like to evoke the great medieval universities at Cambridge and Oxford?

Post submitted two designs. One was a classic of continuous arches surmounted, in its seven middle bays, by a podium suitable for a Roman emperor to address his subjects. The other was a Gothic confection with towers, turrets, peaked roofs, gables, dormers, cornices and, of course, gargoyles where the hunchback of Notre Dame would have felt at home.

The jurors jumped for Gothic, and construction began in 1903. To save money, Post used the sparkling, dark gray stone excavated on site, known as Manhattan schist. For variety, he designed perhaps 75,000 decorations for the five buildings, from flowers to curlicues to grotesque figures depicting the educational objectives of each building. Fashioned of white terra-cotta (glazed, kiln-fired clay), they were built into the wall and used interchangeably with the stone.

Although an aesthetic triumph, the Gothic tower (now named Shepard Hall) and the other buildings were doomed to structural decay. Most of the façades were bearing walls, not stone veneers supported by steel frames, and terra-cotta was too brittle to resist the natural movement in the schist, especially in the central tower. Within 30 years, the freeze-thaw cycle had cracked the terra-cotta, allowing rainwater to further damage the structure.

Flash forward to 1986, when the tower was in danger of collapse. Enter Carl Stein of Stein White Nelligan Architects of Manhattan, who began a preservation project at Shepard Hall that is not yet finished. "The first challenge was to see if there was a way to rebuild the tower, including replacing all of the terra-cotta," at least 13,000 pieces of it, he says. After a year of research, Stein chose glass fiber reinforced concrete, which is strong, easily shaped and extremely weather resistant. Specifying four shades of white for variety, he sent off surviving decorations and photographs for reproduction, which involved considerable hand work by skilled artisans. It is the largest terra-cotta replacement project in history.

Post had used a stiff, contemporary mortar, "which didn't have any allowance for large-scale thermal movement," Stein says. Instead, he bolted decorative elements individually onto steel channels. "Since each piece is separately supported, we can have soft joints [like caulking] around each, so the building can move."

And if, say, in 100 years repairs are needed, the cladding can be removed without compromising the building's strength or weather integrity.

"Sometimes the question comes up whether it was worth putting all this money into Shepard, but it was the first building built for public higher education in New York and its symbolism is profoundly important. In talking to older alumni and to students at City-I taught at the School of Architecture there about five years-I have a clear sense that Shepard and the Great Hall are places that show commitment to public education, and that society thinks it's important enough to make a place that obviously is very special.

"I think the campus looks wonderful," Stein says. "Shepard looks like a spectacular, proud matriarch."

If Shepard Hall is the proud matriarch of City College's North Campus, three new buildings slated for the South Campus are sure to be the party girls.

Crews are constructing the $67 million School of Architecture, Urban Design and Landscape Architecture. Celebrated architect Rafael Viñoly recycled the college's ugly former library, later called the "Y" building. That ponderous mass of concrete and glass block from the 1950s last housed a hodge-podge of administrative offices. Says Vice Chancellor Macari: "I had my eyes on that building because it could be successfully gutted; it had good bones."

Viñoly crafted a glittering 130,000-square-foot space. The architecture school, now in Shepard Hall (which was never designed for it), expects to move in the fall of 2008.

Fifty paces due south, plans call for two new science buildings separated by a lush green commons. One will provide top-notch laboratories for City College.

The other will be the Advanced Science Research Center, where researchers from across CUNY will share ultra-sophisticated instruments, special facilities and controlled environments-equipment and settings far too costly to have built on more than one campus. According to Chancellor Matthew Goldstein's vision, prominent scientists will work there for the duration of their projects, then return to their home bases, opening space for other scientists.

The architects have echoed the native schist used in the Gothic quadrangle in the bases of the new buildings. "The base, the plinth, is beautiful. Above it is five stories of glass. It's a very elegant building," Macari says. Construction will start in the summer of 2007, with occupancy two years later.

Rome has only one Pantheon. Bronx Community College has two.

The Gould Memorial Library, designed by the 19th century's premier architect, Stanford White, echoes the temple to all the gods that has graced Rome for 19 centuries. Outside it displays the same artful geometry. At its portal, as at the Pan-theon's, stand great bronze doors; dedicated in 1921 by peers who chose Gould as White's memorial, they depict themes in his life. Inside, Tiffany windows and a coffered dome supported by 16 columns of rare, green marble from Connemara, Ireland, inspire hushed reverence. The city Landmarks Preservation Commission called the interior "one of the supreme examples of interior design in America."

White's second pantheon -an architectural hymn to home-grown gods -is the Hall of Fame for Great Americans, a colonnade with bronze busts that curves behind the library. It celebrates citizens from Patrick Henry to Alexander Graham Bell, from Susan B. Anthony to Harriet Beecher Stowe, from George Washington to Booker T. Washington to George Washington Carver.

Flanking Gould (no longer a library) are White's Language and Philosophy Halls. Clad in yellow Roman brick and trimmed with limestone and terra-cotta, they frame the west end of White's quadrangle. They and the Hall of Fame are city landmarks and are on the State and National Registers of Historic Places. All were commissioned by New York University Chancellor Henry MacCracken, who moved his undergraduate college from industrial Washington Square to Bronx farmland. There, he said, students could "enjoy the country environment, yet be able to study close at hand the great city."

NYU moved after merger talks with the city's other private university, Columbia College, collapsed and Columbia had hired White's partner, Charles Follen McKim, to design a new campus at 116th Street. "There was a respectful working relationship, more so than competition, between White and McKim, as both were pushing the envelope of campus design simultaneously," says Manhattan preservation architect Lisa Easton.

Still, it's hard not to read competition into a letter that White wrote to MacCracken about the Connemara columns and McKim's more grandiose Low Library: "This is the marble they endeavored to use in Columbia, but which had to be abandoned because it was impossible to get the marble in so large diameter. It is the most beautiful green marble in the world, and it would be a great thing to use it after having had to give it up in Columbia."

Sadly, Gould's lower-level auditorium was firebombed in 1969 during a student protest against the Vietnam War; NYU made repairs. By then NYU faced financial disaster, partly due to the protests. In 1973 it sold the campus to CUNY for $61 million, providing a home for Bronx Community College.

Although it had scant money for preservation, the University was able to restore Gould's auditorium, its rotunda and the Hall of Fame in the 1990s. In 2004, BCC secured a $238,000 planning grant from the Getty Foundation, one of the largest in Getty's so-far $7 million drive to protect historic architecture at some 60 colleges nationwide. Planning is essential, says foundation director Deborah Marrow, because implementation won't succeed unless it's well planned.

Architect Easton says the "oculus," or skylight that White had placed at the dome's center "is the most important feature to recapture." At some point NYU replaced it with a plaster disk supporting 16 industrial lights. "The skylight enclosure is still there. The steel is in excellent shape, although the wood will need rehabilitation." NYU also covered a second oculus on the floor, which had lit the auditorium below. "It also would be wonderful to open the floor oculus, but that's a design problem for the next phase."

With the planning study completed in January, BCC will seek funding for what college President Carolyn Williams calls "the comprehensive and authoritative preservation and restoration of the complex to its original grandeur. For our students, these buildings are everyday visual reminders of the importance and tradition of higher education in an increasingly complex world."

More than 100 years after Stanford White laid out the campus, Vice Chancellor Macari has selected an architect to complete his conception with a new library and computer center on the long north side, which now is a parking lot.

Robert A.M. Stern, dean of Yale's School of Architecture, has built projects as diverse as Disney hotels in Florida, Tokyo and Paris, the glitzy Hobby Center for Performing Arts in Houston and the Brooklyn Law School tower.

Macari says Stern sees the BCC project "as the challenge of his life, to design in the context of White and Marcel Breuer," a modernist who designed several buildings for NYU between 1956 and 1961.

A challenge, indeed-trying to harmonize with both the lyrical White and the here-brutish Breuer, whose material of choice was concrete. His forbidding science building ("He didn't do a good job there and everybody dislikes it," Macari says) dominates the quad's south side. Breuer is perhaps best known locally for his Whitney Museum of American Art and his eponymous chairs.

Referring to Stern's Darden Graduate School of Business at the University of Virginia, done in the 1990s and inspired by the adjoining campus designed by Thomas Jefferson (which, in turn, was inspired by the 16th century Italian Andrea Palladio), Macari says: "Everybody loves it; it's very much in keeping with the form of the campus." He was recently hired to design an education building there.

Stern also has worked at Stanford University, designing the five-story Bill Gates Computer Science Building, whose overhanging red-tile roof and casement windows reflect the old quadrangle's look.

"He will be contemporary, but very respectful of proportions and continuity of architecture," Macari says. "I can't wait to see what he will dream up for us."

The stately neo-Georgian townhouse at 47-49 East 65th Street, Manhattan, has known joy, tragedy and triumph, and after an upcoming makeover, it is sure to gain prominence as Hunter College's new Public Policy Institute, which will seek solutions to vexing social problems.

Sara Roosevelt built these mirror-image houses with a single façade and entrance in 1908. She lived in 47. Her son, Franklin, and daughter-in-law, Eleanor, occupied 49, moving in three years after their marriage. It became a city landmark in 1973 and joined the National Register of Historic Places in 1980.

There Eleanor bore two of their six children, one of whom died in infancy. There, in 1921, FDR recuperated from polio, which left him unable to walk. There FDR, then governor of New York, celebrated the first of his four elections as president.

There Eleanor launched her own political work. This champion of the civil rights of black Americans would fight for human rights for all downtrodden people- a goal she made international as chair of the commission that wrote the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, which the nascent United Nations adopted without dissent in 1948.

And there, historian Deborah S. Gardner, special adviser in the office of Hunter's provost, writes in an unpublished study, Sara raised funds for black colleges "during an era when few Americans would have had African-American guests in their homes.

"Sara welcomed Mary McLeod Bethune . . . whose parents were slaves, but who would become a national leader for African-American rights." From then on, Bethune recalled, " 'our friendship became one of the most treasured relationships of my life.' "

After Sara died in 1941 and FDR put the building up for sale for $60,000, Hunter suggested having an independent nonprofit organization buy it for use as the city's first inter-religious center. The president (whose Public Works Administration had built Hunter's 16-story Park Avenue building in 1939) lowered the price to $50,000 and contributed $1,000 in his mother's name toward the acquisition fund. For nearly 50 years the Sara Delano Roosevelt Interfaith House would house some 120 religious and extracurricular clubs.

In her syndicated newspaper column in 1943, Eleanor wrote, "No houses could have a better background for the use they will now serve. Always in both houses there was an effort to look on all human beings with respect, and to have a true understanding of the points of view of others."

That vision informs the building's future. Hunter President Jennifer J. Raab, formerly chair of the city Landmarks Preservation Commission, has likened the forthcoming institute to "the domestic version of the Council on Foreign Relations," a nonpartisan organization that promotes understanding of foreign policy and America's role in the world. It will be linked to an academic program in public policy.

The outside of the six-story building, clad in buff-colored brick and limestone, has been cleaned and repaired. The Roosevelt crest -- three ostrich plumes above three red roses -- appears between the third and fourth stories.

Inside, architect Charles Adams Platt designed mirror-image houses reached through a common vestibule, which will remain after renovation. Each first floor had a reception room with fireplace in front; in the rear were dining rooms that could be combined with sliding doors.

Platt cleverly placed the main stair and service areas in the middle, allowing the public and private rooms to occupy the full width of the house. And he brought light to interior halls and bathrooms through an innovative "light well" -a five-story skylight from the second to the top floors. The primary furnishings that remain from that era are bookcases, the deep oversized bathtubs and freestanding, four-legged sinks.

Renovation is in the hands of Polshek Partners, the architects who designed the sphere-in-a-glass-cube Rose Center for Earth and Space at the American Museum of Natural History in New York. President Raab says that Hunter's Public Policy Institute will bring "important discussions of social issues" back to the house. "It will be a place where faculty, students and the community can come together to craft solutions to these problems and, in doing so, honor the legacy of one of the greatest presidents and first ladies in United States history."

Take a 1937 neo-Georgian library, whose clock tower is Brooklyn College's logo. Add a 1959 annex, garishly clad in steel, orange brick and turquoise glass. Omit space for students and books. Stir in floods, mold and poor ventilation. Add the impossibility of adequate technology. What you have is a recipe for a dysfunctional library and architectural apoplexy.

But rest easy. A triumph of historic preservation and contemporary design, completed in 2002, has given Brooklyn College a thoroughly modern library and returned the original library building, LaGuardia Hall, as the college's fulcrum.

That's no mean feat for a campus born of an architect's dream -- or, perhaps, his employer's need for cash.

It was the Great Depression. Brooklyn College, founded in 1930 with the merger of the Brooklyn branches of Hunter College (for women) and City College (for men), was jammed into five rented buildings in the congested Borough Hall area. (A student poet wrote: "Oh, Brooklyn College, thou art loveliest seen/In gentle springtime, when traffic lights are green.")

One day, without appointment or commission, architect Randolph Evans knocked on President William Boylan's door and spread out plans for a new campus.

In better times, Evans had designed single-family homes. Now he worked for the Wood-Harmon Corp., which owned a small golf course and football field in central Brooklyn. He sketched the plans because he had "little else to do," the college Web site says. Could it have been that Wood-Harmon was desperate for more than the few weeks' rent it got by letting the Barnum and Bailey Circus use the tract as a staging area each year?

The next day Evans drove the delighted Boylan to walk the land. They agreed that the Georgian style that Thomas Jefferson had used at the University of Virginia would better suit the then-rural area than City College's collegiate Gothic style.

In December 1934, the city, led by Mayor LaGuardia, bought the property for $1.6 million (the 2005 equivalent of $23.2 million-a nice pay day for Evans' employer). The federal Public Works Administration allocated $5 million for construction a month later.

When President Franklin D. Roosevelt laid the cornerstone of the gymnasium (now Roosevelt Hall) a year later, he joked to an audience of 7,000, "Every time the Mayor of New York comes to Washington I tremble, because it means he wants something, and he almost always gets it." Then he turned serious. "This project is killing two birds with one stone. It is not only putting to work thousands of people who need work, but it also is improving educational facilities now and for generations to come."

But by the early 1990s, the library was out of space and inhospitable to students and the collection.

Chief librarian Barbra Buckner Higgin-botham and her library colleagues worked with the college community to secure a new building as the top construction priority in the 1995 master plan.

Architect Alexander Howe, of Boston's Shepley Bulfinch Richardson and Abbott, had to first solve the problem of the "stack core," a mass of brick and limestone built to bear the weight of a million books. Students never entered its narrow aisles, but staff did to retrieve requested volumes. "It was prohibitively expensive to remove," Howe says, "but it was dead center in terms of access" from the 1959 addition, which had become the library's ungainly entrance.

His solution lay in knitting together the two buildings and restoring LaGuardia Hall's main entry from the quadrangle. Howe gutted the annex, stripped off its façade and added 100,000 square feet of space, some of it between the two buildings. This includes two octagonal towers, one in front for a grand staircase, the other in the rear for double-height reading rooms.

The arrangement of space let him change traffic flow. Students now make a quarter-circle turn around the hidden stack core between the old building and the new on every floor. The stack core now houses special collections, which only librarians can enter; other books are in open stacks.

His second challenge "was to develop an exterior expression that is sympathetic to the old library, but is not a reproduction." That led to similar brick (hand-molded and of differing colors), high windows and "an odd roofscape, which is based on the adjacent science building -big gable ends with two chimneys."

Inside, the new library is a feast of light, seats and logic. Students can choose the upholstered reading room overlooking the original lily pond, study carrels, or soundproof group-study rooms.

"The library is inspirational for students," Higginbotham says. "We love our building and are happier than I can ever say."

Before Harold Evans' campus design could be reborn, Brooklyn College had to deal with its own version of the Berlin Wall that separated East from West -- quadrangles, that is.

In the 1970s, the college put up the undistinguished Plaza Building along Bedford Avenue, as well as a gargantuan staircase and overpass. They sundered the campus. Now they are gone and the mission in the West is to achieve Eastern balance.

In the West Quad, landscaping will mirror the East's. And to provide a visual and functional counterweight to the library, construction is soon to start on architect Rafael Viñoly's sleek one-stop-shop for student services and athletics. From "the Oasis," or glassed double-height lobby, students will go up for the bursar, enrollment, financial aid, counselors and physical education offices. And from the Oasis spectators will watch competitions in the NCAA-regulation pool and basketball court below, or descend to use racquetball courts, a weight training room and other facilities.

This campus transformation is due to Brooklyn College's award-winning 1995 master plan, devised by architects at Gruzen Samton and Kliment & Halsband, both New York City firms.

Citing its "continuity, thoughtfulness and clarity," the Society for College and University Planning and the American Institute of Architects' Committee on Architecture for Education jointly presented the award in 2005. The judges praised the architects for "re-establishing and protecting the campus heritage," adding that the master plan makes "better use of open spaces and is a thoughtful way to increase density."