Cambridge Medical School building
Coordinates: 52°12′11.24″N 0°7′15.89″E / 52.2031222°N 0.1210806°E
The building for the Cambridge Medical School of the University of Cambridge was designed in 1899 by Edward Schroeder Prior.
The Medical School building is Prior’s largest work. Two of Prior’s former clients, Dr Allbutt and the Rev. J. B. Lock, were on the committee that appointed the architect. Prior received an honorarium of only 100 guineas for the plans and elevations. He chose to adopt a classical idiom partly as a result of pressure from the committee.
The committee also influenced the design in other ways, such as insisting on a stone façade. In style, the building is based on English Baroque, heavily influenced by recent buildings by architects such as Belcher, Pite and Blomfield. It also reflects the presence of J.J. Stevenson’s Chemical Laboratories (1886-8), immediately to the west of the site.
Although best known for the original buildings of his maturity and for his writings on Gothic art, E. S. Prior produced a number of buildings in the classical tradition. To many architects of the Arts and Crafts Movement, 19th century classicism had the advantage of continuing a long tradition of craftsmanship. Indeed Prior himself regarded classical styles as "built up on a substratum of craftsmanship which for two hundred years had practiced classic detail in the buildings of ordinary use." Classicism of the 19th century was "the passionate genuine expression of its age."
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