On the 15th of January to celebrate the West Quad building reaching its highest point, the College held a ‘topping out’ ceremony. The new Vice Chancellor of Oxford University, Professor Richardson marked the occasion by filling cement on the building’s rooftop. Professor Richardson, remarked on the use of ‘creativity in such a constrained space and sensitivity to the surroundings’.
Niall McLaughlin has written a piece for the RIBA Journal on the symbolic use of architecture within early Renaissance Art. The essay describes observations based on a visit to the ‘Building the Picture’ exhibition, currently on show at the National Gallery in London. The exhibition gathers together architectonic works by the Italian masters of the 14th-16th centuries that explore real and imagined architectural space.
The article observes how the Renaissance artists’ enthusiasms for displaying their newly discovered skills of perspective and knowledge of the classical forms are conflated with a religious symbolism. The tropes of classical architecture are used as visual metaphors for the divine and eternal. The article explores the effect of these spaces on the viewer and the reasons why the idealised architecture tends to alienate rather than engage.