Design
Barton Academy is three floors in height and is primarily constructed of brick which has been stuccoed and scored to look like ashlar. A heavy ground floor supports the main floor and the slightly smaller third floor. The building can be visually divided into a central block with a two-story, pedimented, hexastyle Ionic portico, five bays wide, with wrought-iron balustrades. A low-pitched hipped roof over this block is topped by a domed cupola that is ringed by 28 Ionic columns. The dome is surmounted by a lantern, patterned after the Choragic Monument of Lysicrates. To either side of the central block is a plain section, three bays wide. Adjoining these plain sections are east and west blocks, also three bays wide, with each bay defined by projecting pilasters.
Barton has had many unsympathetic additions over the years since construction, resulting in an interior that currently bears little resemblance to the original plan. That plan consisted of a central stair hall with flanking classrooms on all three levels. The original wooden windows have been replaced by metal ones. Only the interior of the rotunda under the dome remains in its original condition and configuration.
Read more about this topic: Barton Academy
Famous quotes containing the word design:
“What but design of darkness to appall?—
If design govern in a thing so small.”
—Robert Frost (1874–1963)
“Nowadays the host does not admit you to his hearth, but has got the mason to build one for yourself somewhere in his alley, and hospitality is the art of keeping you at the greatest distance. There is as much secrecy about the cooking as if he had a design to poison you.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“With wonderful art he grinds into paint for his picture all his moods and experiences, so that all his forces may be brought to the encounter. Apparently writing without a particular design or responsibility, setting down his soliloquies from time to time, taking advantage of all his humors, when at length the hour comes to declare himself, he puts down in plain English, without quotation marks, what he, Thomas Carlyle, is ready to defend in the face of the world.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)