Charles Robert Cockerell

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The main entrance to the Fitzwilliam Museum.

Charles Robert Cockerell (1788–1863) was an English architect, archaeologist, and writer. Early in his life, he trained in the architectural practice of his father, Samuel Pepys Cockerell. One of his earliest jobs found Cockerell assisting Robert Smirke in rebuilding the Covent Garden Theatre (a forerunner of today's Royal Opera House). He set up his own practice in 1817 and became relatively successful, winning the first Royal Gold Medal for architecture in 1848 and becoming president of the Royal Institute of British Architects in 1860.

As an archaeologist, Cockerell is remembered for removing the reliefs from the temple of Apollo at Bassae, near Phigalia, which are now in the British Museum. Replicas of these reliefs were included in the frieze of the library of the Travellers Club, of which Charles Robert Cockerell was a founding committee member in 1819.

With Jacques Ignace Hittorff and Thomas Leverton Donaldson, Cockerell was also a member of the committee formed in 1836 to determine whether the Elgin Marbles and other Greek statuary in the British Museum had originally been coloured (see Transactions of the Royal Institute of British Architects for 1842).

The Royal Academy of Arts composed a brief commemorative biography of Cockerell, including the following sentiment which speaks to his great work as a student of architecture:

"At the heart of Cockerell's emotional experience of the power of the antique to fire the imagination lay an extraordinary visual sensitivity to the mass and volume of the components of architecture, which for him were never mere abstract, weightless forms or quotations borrowed from the past, but acted together as a constantly renewable expression of man's innate need to create beauty on earth."

[edit] Notable Buildings

The St David's Building at the University of Wales, Lampeter

1822-1827 - The Saint David's Building, University of Wales, Lampeter.
1824-1829 - The National Monument, Edinburgh.
1829 - Church of Holy Trinity, Hotwells, Bristol ^[1].
1835 - The Bank of England, Courtney Street, Plymouth.
1838 - London & Westminster Bank, Lothbury, London (with William Tite).
1839-1845 - The Ashmolean Museum and Taylor Institution, Oxford University.
1844-1847 - The Bank of England, Bristol ^[2].
1845 - The Bank of England, King Street, Manchester.
1845-1848 - Bank of England, Liverpool.
1848 - Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge University.
1851-1854 - The Bank of England, Castle Street, Liverpool.
1854 - St. George’s Hall, Liverpool.

[edit] References

^ Walter Ison (1978). The Georgian buildings of Bristol. Kingsmead Press, 88-89. ISBN 0901571881.
^ Walter Ison (1978). The Georgian buildings of Bristol. Kingsmead Press, 33. ISBN 0901571881.