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Gatehouse, King's College Cambridge by William Wilkins. 1824-28."Wilkins had here designed with gusto," writes Nikolaus Pevsner. "The scale is right, the heights are right, the execution is substantial — not mean, like so much neo-Gothic work — and the detail is by no means dull." Pevsner clearly likes both the gatehouse with its "bulbous cupola" and the array of pinnacles, and the screen wall with its effect of transparency and its "seven-light Perp windows, a delightful effect, utterly ungothic in character" (96). As for Pevsner's "utterly ungothic," note that Tim Rawle describes the screen and gatehouse together as neo-Gothic or Tudor-Gothic (116, 117). Perhaps more people would agree with Rawle.
Left: Screen wall. Right: Screen wall with chapel alongside. [Click on images to enlarge them.]
Related Views of King's College Cambridge
Sources
Pevsner, Nikolaus. The Buildings of England: Cambridgeshire. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 2nd ed. 1970.
Rawle, Tim. Cambridge Architecture. London: André Deutsch, 1994.
Last modified 3 August 2008