ABSTRACT
Cockerell's work on Cambridge Library's north wing represented at once a great opportunity to envision an important ensemble, and the potentially frustrating experience of only being able to realize a very small fragment of a much greater whole. While this building's fragment is not necessarily comparable to the fragment of a sculpture, both elicit a consideration of part and whole, of the fragment in relation to its larger context. In many ways, this was Cockerell's art all along. As a Grand Tourist, he pieced together fragments of the Niobe group so that in turn, this newly formed fragment could be related to a larger building, ornamenting its pediment. Plate X spoke to the temporary encounter, a moment in time measured against the ruined temple and the possibility of restoration. Likewise, the incomplete projects of Elmes and Basevi represented fragments to be completed, wherein isolated parts had to be understood insofar as these too participated in a larger whole. The presentation drawings produced for the project in Liverpool as well as the Cambridge University Library again brought into play the relations of part to whole, laying out fragmented elements that spoke of larger visions. At both ends of the spectrum, the 'Bassae capital' and The Professor's Dream, respectively part and whole, hint at the bearing of phenomenological considerations of an architecture to be experienced in time together with a larger temporal and historical episteme against which architecture is inevitably cast. In all these endeavours, there is the constant desire to envision a part in relation to an existing whole, or a potential whole from the present fragment.
