Architecture
This substantially extended mansion is something of an archaeological puzzle. The south range came first and is thought to be an unusually early example of the gothic revival in Britain This may have been the work of the London architect Roger Morris. Around 1735, William Talbot, Member of Parliament and later Baron Talbot of Hensol, added the east and west wings, reportedly spending some £60,000. Samuel Richardson is said to have transformed the south front in the late 18th or early 19th century, by adding more castellations and corner turrets, but there is some doubt about this. In the 1840s Rowland Fothergill employed T.H. Wyatt & David Brandon to improve the property. They extended the house to the north, added a new courtyard, and refashioned some of the gothic into perpendicular, changed the battlements and added the off-centre window bay to the south front. The interior is classical in style of various dates.
Read more about this topic: Hensol Castle
Famous quotes containing the word architecture:
“It seems a fantastic paradox, but it is nevertheless a most important truth, that no architecture can be truly noble which is not imperfect.”
—John Ruskin (1819–1900)
“For it is not metres, but a metre-making argument, that makes a poem,—a thought so passionate and alive, that, like the spirit of a plant or an animal, it has an architecture of its own, and adorns nature with a new thing.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“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)