Architecture and Landscape
Unlike many other great houses, its exterior was austere and not adorned with pediments or pilasters. For some, this gave it a noble simplicity. For others, it seemed unremarkable and undermined the case for preservation. Its exterior contrasted with a richly ornate and well-proportioned interior. The interior was magnificent, with carved marble chimneypieces, many fine ceilings and plasterwork of a high quality. There was a celebrated book room, a classical stone staircase with medallioned walls and a circular room with a groined ceiling. In the long parlour there was a painted ceiling by Riley, a student of Joshua Reynolds. Frescati boasted its own theatre with Corinthian columns. Jacob Smith, who also worked at Carton and Russborough, landscaped and devised the large formal gardens filled with rare plants and shrubs. The house stood well back from the road on acres of woods and parkland, and a stream passed through its grounds. There was also a small seawater pool in the garden. The gateway stood close to where the entrance to the Blackrock Shopping Centre stands today and its lands stretched back to where Sydney Avenue is located today.
Read more about this topic: Frescati House
Famous quotes containing the words architecture and, architecture and/or landscape:
“The two elements the traveler first captures in the big city are extrahuman architecture and furious rhythm. Geometry and anguish. At first glance, the rhythm may be confused with gaiety, but when you look more closely at the mechanism of social life and the painful slavery of both men and machines, you see that it is nothing but a kind of typical, empty anguish that makes even crime and gangs forgivable means of escape.”
—Federico García Lorca (1898–1936)
“The two elements the traveler first captures in the big city are extrahuman architecture and furious rhythm. Geometry and anguish. At first glance, the rhythm may be confused with gaiety, but when you look more closely at the mechanism of social life and the painful slavery of both men and machines, you see that it is nothing but a kind of typical, empty anguish that makes even crime and gangs forgivable means of escape.”
—Federico García Lorca (1898–1936)
“The landscape was clothed in a mild and quiet light, in which the woods and fences checkered and partitioned it with new regularity, and rough and uneven fields stretched away with lawn-like smoothness to the horizon, and the clouds, finely distinct and picturesque, seemed a fit drapery to hang over fairyland. The world seemed decked for some holiday or prouder pageantry ... like a green lane into a country maze, at the season when fruit-trees are in blossom.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)