Building
The Customs House is regarded as the most distinguished 18th century building in Limerick. It is an elegant Palladian-style building designed by the Italian architect, Davis Ducart, in 1765. It was the administrative centre for the Revenue Commissioners (including Customs and Excise) in Limerick and it was also the home of the Customs Collector in the eighteenth century. In the 1840s with the introduction of a new postal system a Penny Post Office was opened in the Customs House.
The Office of Public Works undertook the major restoration and refurbishment of the building completing it in 1996. The Customs House opened as The Hunt Museum on 14 February 1997. The anniversary of the opening of The Hunt Museum is celebrated annually as 'Open Day' with free admission, talks, tours, workshops and other activities.
Read more about this topic: Hunt Museum
Famous quotes containing the word building:
“The rage for road building is beneficent for America, where vast distance is so main a consideration in our domestic politics and trade, inasmuch as the great political promise of the invention is to hold the Union staunch, whose days already seem numbered by the mere inconvenience of transporting representatives, judges and officers across such tedious distances of land and water.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“A building is akin to dogma; it is insolent, like dogma. Whether or no it is permanent, it claims permanence, like a dogma. People ask why we have no typical architecture of the modern world, like impressionism in painting. Surely it is obviously because we have not enough dogmas; we cannot bear to see anything in the sky that is solid and enduring, anything in the sky that does not change like the clouds of the sky.”
—Gilbert Keith Chesterton (1874–1936)
“Whoever places his trust into a system will soon be without a home. While you are building your third story, the two lower ones have already been dismantled.”
—Franz Grillparzer (1791–1872)