The Nott Memorial is the centerpiece of Union College and North America's only 16-sided building, set within America's first planned college campus. In 1806, Union president Eliphalet Nott began acquiring land to move the college uphill from its original Stockade location, and seven years later he commissioned the French architect and landscape planner Joseph Ramée to design the campus. Ramée conceived a broad courtyard surrounded by facing buildings, open green space, and gardens, a groundbreaking plan meant to foster connectedness at a time when colleges were usually arranged in a row of buildings, and his design became a model for future campus architecture in the U.S. At the center, Ramée and Nott envisioned a large, round, domed building, but neither lived to see it completed because lack of funds, due in part to the Civil War, delayed construction for 60 years. Edward Tuckerman Potter, grandson of the building's namesake and Union's longest serving president, designed the 16-sided structure in the bold Victorian Gothic style rather than the campus's neoclassic design. After a major restoration, the Nott Memorial reopened in 1995 for the bicentennial of the college's founding, and today the campus remains true to Ramée's original plan with the Nott at its center.
