1999 marks the centennial of Old Main's completion and the beginning of classes a the Eastern Illinois Normal School in September of 1899.  Normal schools prepared students intellectually and socially for teaching in township schools and city school districts.  They embraced a core set of values regarding useful and practical learning, and promoted a democratic culture and a populist vision of teacher training.

The one hundredth anniversary is an opportunity to reflect on the origins and growth of Eastern Illinois University, and the architectural and historical significance of Old Main.  Like other art forms, architecture reflects conditions and attitudes of its time.  Old Main developed from late nineteenth-century architectural, social, political, and educational values.  The campus architecture is a road map of the history of the institution. 

The first fifty years of campus architecture drew heavily on the Gothic Revival style.  Gothic architecture had been associated with higher education ever since the founding of the Sorbonne University in Paris in the thirteenth century.  Eastern's architects drew on the popularity of "Collegiate Gothic" in the normal school's early years.

Art Deco hit campus in the 1930s, by which time Eastern Illinois State Normal School had become Eastern Illinois State Teachers College.  Ahistorical Modernism dominates the last fifty years of campus building, corresponding roughly to the school's existence as a university.