Vancouver Art Gallery Reassesses Its Grand Ambitions For Model Spanking New Constructing
Two years earlier than completion, its notorious “pepperpot” elevation appeared on the frontispiece of Contrasts , an influential tract by the Gothicist A. W. N. Pugin, for example of the degeneracy of the classical type. Even William IV thought the building a “nasty little pokey gap”, while William Makepeace Thackeray referred to as it “slightly gin shop of a constructing”. The twentieth-century architectural historian Sir John Summerson echoed these early criticisms when he in contrast the association of a dome and two diminutive turrets on the roofline to “the clock and vases on a mantelpiece, solely much less useful”. Sir…Continue Reading