A carved stone pangolin clings to the top of the tower, its scaly tail curled into the crevice of a cornice, as if holding on for dear life. It crowns an arresting arrival to Oxford, the city of dreaming spires, the anteater taking its place on this skyline of slender steeples and gurning gargoyles, up there at the summit of the newest – and strangest – spire of them all.
“I was thinking, ‘How do you mark Covid in a building?’” says David Kohn, architect of this curious addition to the campus of New College. “We were developing the designs in the middle of the pandemic, when pangolins had been in the limelight for all the wrong reasons.”
