Map of Bletchley Park

[Mark Wright AIA]

Howdy

--- JBFRAME at aol.com wrote:
> http://www.cranfield.ac.uk/ccc/bpark/bletch_map_bw.gif
> 

One helluva complex.  Notice that "D" block (D Wing "where the madmen
of the 30's persist" as cover for PISCES at the White Visitation) is
where they worked on the *Enigma* messages?

Pynchon's description of the White Visitation is inconsistent:

On p71 it is a house of "darkening blood brick and terra cotta".

On p73 it is a "Palladian house".  In the hands of Lord Burlington and
his circle, the early 18th century english palladian movement produced
highly ordered buildings typically organized in symmetrical wings in
axial compositions, ornamented in a chaste classical language. 
Exemplars might be Kent's Holkham Hall in Norfolk, and Campbell's
Houghton Hall in King's Lynn, which the group may find in Summerson's
marvelous "Architecture in Britain 1530-1830".  Summerson tells us that
this palladian taste was embraced by the second generation Whigs, who
had "(..)strong beliefs and strong dislikes, conspicuous among the
latter being the Stuart dynasty, the Roman church, and most things
foreign.  In architectural terms that meant the court taste of the
previous half-century, the works of Sir Christopher Wren in particular
and anything in the nature of Baroque."  These buildings tended to be
stiff things.

On p82 the "Palladian house" appears to have been transformed to
satisfy a peculiar 19th century taste (both eccentric and "methodist"?)
into a rambling erratic buttery Arabian harem grotto, balconied and
be-gargoyled, with terracotta facing (a cheap Victorian mercantile
building product, mass-produced and marketed by catalogue), an "orgy of
self-expression, added to by each successive owner."

This sort of architectural schizophrenia is also characteristic of the
great english houses.  They tend to be photographed in ways that
present  the separate aspects of the houses as though they are complete
and internally consistent, making this effect difficult to grasp unless
you visit them yourselves. Prominent examples mightOsterly be Hampton
Court (Cardinal Wolsey's Tudor house remodelled and added to by Wren
for William and Mary), Wilton house (a Tudor great house reworked by
Inigo Jones and Isaac de Caus), and Osterly Park (a Jacobean house
remodelled by Robert Adam). These are instances where the classical
taste is imposed upon the old-fashioned Elizabethan.  In the 19th
century, it was more likely to happen the other way 'round.  A Romantic
english aristo would deem some harmless building to be insufficiently
Gothic and give it a make-over.  Windsor Castle itself got this
treatment.

Mark




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