Benjamin Woodward and T. N. Deane. University Museum, Oxford. 1854-60. An example of so-called Ruskinian gothic. Follow for a contemporary photograph.
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Benjamin Woodward and T. N. Deane. University Museum, Oxford. 1854-60. An example of so-called Ruskinian gothic. Follow for a contemporary photograph.
As J. Mordaunt Crook points out, "the Oxford Museum became a legend: an attempt by an architect of genius -- who died while his genius was unripe -- [at] devising 'an iron style'. In 1855 it had been hailed as 'an experiment . . . of the greatest importance to architecture'; an attempt 'to try how Gothic art could deal with those railway materials, iron and glass'" [120].
Unfortunately, as Crook adds, contemporaries generally agreed that Woodward and T. N. Deane, had produced not a successful example of pioneering architecture but "a disappointing pastiche, this time in metal rather than stone. The Building News was correct in its prediction that Skidmore's roof would "not convert the world to a belief in the universal applicability of Crystal Palace architecture Gothicised." "We consider the principle of [Skidmore's iron roofing] to be erroneous," the Ecclesiologist concluded in 1861. After all, this is merely a stone-vaulting system in iron." [120]
Hills and Saunders, A Window of the Oxford Museum: The Sculptor O'Shea at Work. 1858. Photograph. Source: Facing Works, 16.228.
J. Mordaunt Crook. The Dilemma of Style: Architectural Ideas from the Picturesque to the Post-Modern. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987.
Ruskin, John. Works, "The Library Edition." eds. E. T. Cook and Alexander Wedderburn. 39 vols. London: George Allen, 1903-1912.
Last modified 1995