Keble College Oxford

Keble’s architecture was always intended to make a statement.
In choosing William Butterfield (1814-1900) as their architect the founders were opting for a man with a proven track record as an exponent of the Gothic style (notably through his work at All Saints St Margaret Street, 1849) as well as High Anglican principles. Butterfield’s choice of brick was not just for reasons of economy, but also owed something to ideological and aesthetic principles. Butterfield himself claimed that he ‘had a mission to give dignity to brick’; the leading Anglo-Catholic Dr Pusey saw the College as a ‘broadside of Christianity against the [University] Museum’ across the road. In the buildings at Keble Butterfield displayed his characteristic penchant for polychromatic brickwork (not to everyone’s taste: a critic in the Saturday Review in 1876 complained that he had ‘imperilled the scholarlike sobriety which belongs to our characteristic collegiate architecture'). He broke with tradition too in arranging rooms off corridors rather than up staircases: the intention was to deter students from extravagant dining in suites of rooms in favour of communal dining in Hall. According to the architectural historian Geoffrey Tyack, ‘the interior of the Hall and Library show Butterfield’s genius for reinterpreting and transforming the various elements of Oxford’s traditional collegiate plan’. The Library arranged in a series of alcoves off a central aisle owes something to the layout of a medieval hospital, while the Hall, large enough at its inception, to accommodate all members of College, was rivalled in size only by Christ Church.

http://www.keble.ox.ac.uk/