Architecture
The Palmer Mansion was designed by architects Henry Ives Cobb and Charles Sumner Frost. The architects referred to its architectural style as Early Romanesque or Norman Gothic. Alternatively, the mansion was supposedly based on a German castle.
The mansion featured a three-story Italianate central hall under a glass dome. Other rooms were finished in a variety of historic styles: a Louis XVI salon, an Indian room, an Ottoman parlor, a Renaissance library, a Spanish music room, an English dining room that could seat fifty, and a Moorish room, the rugs of which were saturated with perfumes. A collection of paintings, collected by Bertha Palmer adorned the mansion's grand ballroom, 75-foot (22.9 m) long. The room's murals in the frieze above them were by Gabriel Ferrier.
The mansion's exterior included many turrets and minarets, and on the interior, a spiral staircase without a center support, rising 80 feet (24.4 m) into the central tower. Two elevators also served the building. The Palmers constructed their mansion's outside doors specifically without locks and knobs so that the only way to get in was to be admitted from the inside.
Read more about this topic: Palmer Mansion
Famous quotes containing the word architecture:
“Defaced ruins of architecture and statuary, like the wrinkles of decrepitude of a once beautiful woman, only make one regret that one did not see them when they were enchanting.”
—Horace Walpole (1717–1797)
“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)
“No architecture is so haughty as that which is simple.”
—John Ruskin (1819–1900)