The Memorial Quadrangle is a residential quadrangle at Yale University in New Haven, Connecticut. Commissioned in 1917 to supply much-needed student housing for Yale College, it was Yale's first Collegiate Gothic building and its first project by James Gamble Rogers, who later designed ten other major buildings for the university. The Quadrangle has been occupied by Saybrook College and Branford College, two of the original ten residential colleges at Yale. The collegiate system of Yale University was largely inspired by the Oxbridge model of residential and teaching colleges at the University of Oxford and the University of Cambridge in the UK. The building was donated by Anna M. Harkness to memorialize her son, Yale College graduate Charles W. Harkness, who died in 1916. Charles' brother, Edward Harkness, became the primary benefactor of Yale's residential college system fifteen years later, a scheme which required a partial reconfiguration of the Memorial Quadrangle to create its two residential colleges. Harkness Tower, a large masonry tower on the building's west side, was named in memory of Charles Harkness, a memorial to whom is found in the tower's chapel. Building Construction began in 1917, the bicentennial of Yale's first building in New Haven, and was completed in 1921. As initially built, the Quadrangle contained dorm rooms for 630 students, a dining hall, and seven courtyards. Dry moats with low walls, a frequent architectural motif at Yale, were first used by this building and were planted with ivy, flowers, and trees by landscape architect Beatrix Jones Farrand with an eye to both increased privacy and street beautification. Harkness Tower, the most visible symbol of Yale on the New Haven skyscape, is placed on an axis unifying it with Yale's Old Campus. The building is divided into seven courtyards, which Rogers framed with materials and decorative elements giving each distinct character. Three—Killingworth Court, Saybrook Court, and the largest, Branford Court—commemorate Connecticut towns significant to the school's founding, and a fourth, Wrexham Court, the resting place of Elihu Yale. The other three, on the building's southern side and now part of Branford College, are named for early debating societies in Yale College: Brothers in Unity Court, Linonia Court, and Calliope Court after the Calliopean Society. Walls around these southward courtyards are several stories shorter than those on the north, allowing light to fill all of the quadrangle's open spaces more evenly. The building's masonry exterior is richly ornamented,