380. King’s College Chapel, Cambridge,

1446-1515 (United Kingdom)

This soaring chapel is one of the great monuments of late medieval architecture. The university colleges of Oxford and Cambridge are traditionally focused around a chapel, though royal patronage made this example unusually large and lavish: originally funded by Henry VI, it was completed in the reign of Henry VIII. The chapel has a very simple plan, consisting only of an extended rectangle. The unified nature of the resulting space, acoustically suited to the hearing of sermons, is still evident despite the insertion of a large wooden choir screen and organ loft across the middle of the nave; this served to divide the congregations of students and townspeople, who were often mutually antagonistic. Stylistically, the chapel exemplifies the so-called Perpendicular period of English Gothic, evident in the insistent verticality of the wall articulation. The beautiful fan vaults, only partly structural in nature, were designed by the master mason John Wastell. King’s College Chapel is comparable to the Sainte-Chapelle in Paris in that the walls have been reduced to an absolute minimum, serving only to frame large areas of stained glass.