Pearce's Design Copied in The US Capitol and British Museum
Pearce's revolutionary designs came to be studied and copied both at home and abroad. The Viceregal Apartments in Dublin Castle imitated his top-lit corridors, although with minor alterations that undermined the effect somewhat. The British Museum in Bloomsbury in London copied his colonnaded main entrance for its own facade. The impact of his designs stretched as far as Washington, DC, where Pearce's building, and in particular his octagonal House of Commons chamber, was studied as plans were made for the new United States Capitol building. While the shape of the chamber was not replicated, some of its decorative motifs were, with the ceiling structure in the Old Senate Chamber and old House of Representatives chamber (now the Statuary Hall) holding a striking resemblance to the original Pearce-designed ceiling in the original Irish House of Commons. Coincidentally, while the Capitol was copying aspects of the design of Dublin's Parliament House, the White House was being modelled on the ground and first floors of Leinster House, then the residence of the Duke of Leinster, one of the leading peers in the Irish House of Lords, and now the seat of the modern independent Irish parliament, Oireachtas Éireann.
The uniqueness of the building, the quality of its workmanship and its central location in College Green, across from Trinity College, Dublin, made it one of Dublin's most highly regarded buildings.
Read more about this topic: Irish Houses Of Parliament
Famous quotes containing the words design, copied, capitol, british and/or museum:
“If I commit suicide, it will not be to destroy myself but to put myself back together again. Suicide will be for me only one means of violently reconquering myself, of brutally invading my being, of anticipating the unpredictable approaches of God. By suicide, I reintroduce my design in nature, I shall for the first time give things the shape of my will.”
—Antonin Artaud (1896–1948)
“The power of a text is different when it is read from when it is copied out.... Only the copied text thus commands the soul of him who is occupied with it, whereas the mere reader never discovers the new aspects of his inner self that are opened by the text, that road cut through the interior jungle forever closing behind it: because the reader follows the movement of his mind in the free flight of day-dreaming, whereas the copier submits it to command.”
—Walter Benjamin (1892–1940)
“A woman with her two children was captured on the steps of the capitol building, whither she had fled for protection, and this, too, while the stars and stripes floated over it.”
—Jane Grey Swisshelm (1815–1884)
“Semantically, taste is rich and confusing, its etymology as odd and interesting as that of “style.” But while style—deriving from the stylus or pointed rod which Roman scribes used to make marks on wax tablets—suggests activity, taste is more passive.... Etymologically, the word we use derives from the Old French, meaning touch or feel, a sense that is preserved in the current Italian word for a keyboard, tastiera.”
—Stephen Bayley, British historian, art critic. “Taste: The Story of an Idea,” Taste: The Secret Meaning of Things, Random House (1991)
“The Museum is not meant either for the wanderer to see by accident or for the pilgrim to see with awe. It is meant for the mere slave of a routine of self-education to stuff himself with every sort of incongruous intellectual food in one indigestible meal.”
—Gilbert Keith Chesterton (1874–1936)