1836 to determine whether the Elgin Marbles and other Greek statuary in the British Museum had originally been coloured (see Transactions of the Royal Institute of British Architects for 1842). He was elected an Associate of the Royal Academy on 2 November 1829, and an academician on 10 February 1836, his diploma work being his design for the Palace of Westminster competition. In September 1839, he was appointed Professor of Architecture at the Academy, following the death of William Wilkins. He won the first Royal Gold Medal for architecture in 1848 and became president of the Royal Institute of British Architects in 1860. In 1833, following the resignation of Sir John Soane, he became surveyor to the Bank of England, and made additions to its London building, as well as designing branch offices in Manchester, Liverpool, Bristol, and Plymouth. His exhibits at the Royal Academy included reconstructions of ancient Rome and Athens and a capriccio entitled "Tribute to the Memory of Sir Christopher Wren, being a Collection of his Principal Works"; these became well known through published engravings As an archaeologist, Cockerell is remembered for removing the reliefs from the temple of Apollo at Bassae, near Phigalia, which are now in the British Museum. Replicas of these reliefs were included in the frieze of the library of the Travellers Club. The Royal Academy of Arts composed a brief commemorative biography of Cockerell, including the following sentiment which speaks of his great work as a student of architecture: At the heart of Cockerell's emotional experience of the power of the antique to fire the imagination lay an extraordinary visual sensitivity to the mass and volume of the components of architecture, which for him were never mere abstract, weightless forms or quotations borrowed from the past, but acted together as a constantly renewable expression of man's innate need to create beauty on earth. Architectural career Cockerell had grave doubts about the wisdom of using Greek Revival architecture in nineteenth-century England, in his diary of 1821 he had this to say: Until the attention of the world was drawn to the study of Greece by the spirit of the last century by Barthélemy's Anacharsis & thence to the study of Greek architecture by the researches of Stuart & Revett architecture had for its guide this Country the Old Italian masters & their valuable commentaries & publications of the anc[ien]t arch[itectur]e of Rome and