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:
“Humility is often only the putting on of a submissiveness by which men hope to bring other people to submit to them; it is a more calculated sort of pride, which debases itself with a design of being exalted; and though this vice transform itself into a thousand several shapes, yet the disguise is never more effectual nor more capable of deceiving the world than when concealed under a form of humility.”
—François, Duc De La Rochefoucauld (1613–1680)
“So they, who climb to wealth, forget
The friends in darker fortunes tried.
I copied them—but I regret
That I should ape the ways of pride.”
—William Cullen Bryant (1794–1878)
“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)
“His work was that curious mixture of bad painting and good intentions that always entitles a man to be called a representative British artist.”
—Oscar Wilde (1854–1900)
“Soaked by the sparkling waters of America.”
—Hawaiian saying no. 2740, ‘lelo No’Eau, collected, translated, and annotated by Mary Kawena Pukui, Bishop Museum Press, Hawaii (1983)