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WILKINS, William the Younger - b. 1778 Norwich, d. 1839 Cambridge - WGA

WILKINS, William the Younger

(b. 1778 Norwich, d. 1839 Cambridge)

English architect, writer, and collector, son of the architect William Wilkins the Elder (1751-1815). Educated at Cambridge, he became acquainted with Greek and Italian architecture during his travels (1801-04). He set up his office in London in 1809 and quickly established himself as a leading figure of the Greek Revival. He designed the first pure Greek Doric portico for any English country-house at Osberton House, Nottinghamshire (c. 1805, demolished). This was followed by the East India (now Haileybury) College, Hertfordshire (1806-09), and then Downing College, Cambridge (1807-20), both early and important buildings of the Greek Revival. In the latter case, where Wilkins’s scheme was selected instead of James Wyatt’s Neoclassical design, Thomas Hope (1769-1831) was the chief protagonist in promoting the Grecian style. Downing was the first of all university campuses, or separate buildings disposed around a grassed area.

Wilkins followed these important schemes with University College, London (1827-28), the Philosophical Society’s Museum, York (1827-30), St George’s Hospital, Hyde Park Corner, London (1828-29), and the National Gallery, Trafalgar Square, London (1834-38), all in the Grecian style, although the last had a disastrous effect on his reputation for its lack of distinction. Two of his most handsome creations in the Greek Revival style, were the Nelson ‘pillar’ (i.e. column), Sackville (later O’Connell) Street, Dublin (1808-09, destroyed 1966), and the Nelson Column, Great Yarmouth, Norfolk (1817-20, now marooned in impossibly bleak and hideous surroundings).

At Grange Park, Hampshire. (from 1809), he used Greek Revival for an English country-house, and created one of England’s noblest buildings in that style. Elsewhere he succumbed to fashion and designed in Tudor Gothic, including Dalmeny House, West Lothian (1814-17), Dunmore Park, Stirlingshire (1820-22), and New Court, Trinity College, Cambridge (1823-25). At King’s College, Cambridge, however, he responded brilliantly to the great medieval chapel by designing the entrance-screen, gateway, and new buildings (1824-28), in a Tudor Gothic of great charm, inventiveness, and delicacy. However, as a Classical (and especially Greek Revival) architect, Wilkins could be somewhat prissy and feeble, for, with the exception of Grange Park, his buildings tend to lack any sense of power in massing, although his detailing was always scholarly, if constricted by his inhibitions as a designer.

However, Wilkins was among the first to note the optical corrections used by the Greeks in their buildings, and his The Antiquities of Magna Graecia (1807) contained accurate illustrations of the Greek temples at Agrigentum, Paestum, Segesta, and Syracuse. He also published Atheniensia, or Remarks on the Topography and Buildings of Athens (1816), as well as The Civil Architecture of Vitruvius (1812, an incomplete translation), and Prolusiones Architectonicae (1837, essays on Greek and Roman architecture probably based on his lectures as Professor of Architecture at the Royal Academy), among other works.

Exterior view
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Exterior view

Between 1807 and 1821 Wilkins was engaged on realizing his 1804 design for Downing College, Cambridge. It is an completely unadorned elongated structure stretching alongside extensive lawns, accentuated only by Ionic porticoes at the corners, which follow the model of the Erechtheion on the Acropolis in Athens.

This building belongs to the early period of the Greek Revival movement. The photo shows a view of the north wing, seen from the south.

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General view
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General view

After the beginning of the 19th century, it became increasingly fashionable to make accurate copies of Greek architecture, leading to a notably purist Greek Revival in Britain that affected all areas of building. Along with a general enthusiasm for Greek art and culture, Greek architecture was now considered unquestionable superior to Roman architecture. Particularly in the Doric order, it was seen to embody an archaic ideal, the pure form from which everything sprang.

One of the first buildings to put this strict ideal into practice was a country house, The Grange in Hampshire, which William Wilkins rebuilt in 1809-16 as a Greek temple. Wilkins transformed a modest 17th century brick building into something more like an Ancient Greek temple. Literally wrapping the house in cement, Wilkins added classical fa�ades, including the striking temple front supported on eight gigantic columns.

The Grange is the foremost example in England of Greek Revival architecture.

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