a White Visitation

[Mark Wright AIA]

Howdy all

Take a peek at Bletchley Park, where Enigma fell to the Oxbridge
mathemancers. It's a worthy model for "The White Visitation".

The house is an "orgy of self-expression" if ever there was one, and
there's narry a Palladian element in sight --- the whole of the house
appears to be late-Victorian parvenue Gothic. Unlike TWV, however,
Bletchley Park is nowhere near the Kent coast where P places it, and
the Historical Bletchley was built in 1882 rather than over the course
of the two centuries prior to 1944, during the reign of either George I
or George II. P signals TWV's period though not, I submit its style,
with the label "Palladian".

Interestingly, governments under Georges I & II were led by Walpole,
who rose to power in the aftermath of the South Sea Bubble crisis that
(according to Dad's old Columbia Encyclopedia) "ended the prevalent
belief that  prosperity could be achieved through unlimited expansion
of credit." (AMERICA, TAKE NOTE!)  Walpole was sort of a British
colonial era slave-economy FDR, if you can imagine such a creature. His
great house at Kings Lynn, on the Norfolk coast near the mouth of the
river Ouse, was a prime examplar of the Palladian fashion, planned by
Colin Campbell with two wings flanking a central block ornamented with
rusticated Serliana and topped with four curious domes by Gibbs.
Despite Gibbs' juicy modifications to Campbell's astringent conception
Walpole's house was not an orgy of self-expression. No Palladian house
was.

The codesandciphers site has a detailed plan of the Bletchley Park and
its neighboring buildings. I wonder which of these crowded bumps humps
and howdahs is D wing?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bletchley_Park
http://www.codesandciphers.org.uk/virtualbp/bp1940/bp1940.htm
http://www.codesandciphers.org.uk/bletchleypark/tour1.htm

Mark

__________________________________________________
Do You Yahoo!?
Tired of spam?  Yahoo! Mail has the best spam protection around 
http://mail.yahoo.com