Whipple College

Whipple College is the fifth founded college of the University of Aldergate.

Whipplers tend to be the sort of people who make you feel you've wandered into a cocktail party. Elegance and refinement, sophistication and grace. Sometimes effete, occasionally insufferable, but always charming.

History
Whipple was constructed with the funds gifted to the university by its founder. Edmund Whipple was a scholar at Empress, a well-regarded philosopher and aesthetician, and also the sole surviving scion of a very old and wealthy noble family. In funding the construction of Chamber College, Whipple incurred the grave displeasure of Richard I, and there were royal rumblings about "base persons of fine blood" and a suggestion that, what with all the expensive crusades King Dicky had planned, maybe Whipple ought to give over his estate, since he seemed not to need it much.

So, Whipple did. To the University, naturally, on informal condition that it be used to build another college to preserve the Whipple name. So it came to pass, in the space between Empress and Chamber on the north side of the Pentangle.

Architecture
Whipple’s Pentward face originated as perpendicular gothic, but as more and more new imports arrived it was redesigned to incorporate Moorish elements. The portal features arabesque columns,horseshoe arches and some really magnificent honeycombed vaulting,

Supposedly VC al-Din didn't really like it much, but there you are.

Initially the space within the Whipple bailey was mostly unfilled apart from the main hall. Each new building faced stringent and exacting standards – not to match or harmonize, but to be exquisite in and of itself. The most recent addition was the Ice Cube, completed in 1810, a perfect Georgian cube of white marble that now houses the College's adminsitrative offices.

There probably won't be any more new building done inside the College for the foreseeable future. The Whipple Gardens are curated like art treasures, and their caretakers are unlikely to surrender another inch.

Oh, the picture is of the Alhambra. Lovely little cloister, gives quite a good sense of the place.