The Irish Times

St Fin Barre's Catheral

'Few buildings that pre-date the 20th century possess such a complete record of their own creation as does St Fin Barre's," writes curator Richard Wood, in his introduction to the illustrated catalogue for the exhibition on the architect William Burges at the Public Museum from October 6th. Conserving the Dream - Treasures of St Fin Barre's Cathedral will be formally opened by Jimmy Page, founder and lead guitarist with Led Zeppelin, a Burges enthusiast who lives in the home the eccentric Victorian designed for himself in London. The exhibition is based on the archive of working designs in paper and plaster which - as the building, begun in 1865, was unlikely to be completed for several years - Burges left as a kind of insurance that work would be carried out according to his own original plans. An almost full set of coloured cartoons for the stained glass windows and the mosaics remains, along with plaster maquettes for the statuary, both inside and outside the cathedral. In a way, the exhibition itself is an unfinished work, in that it is a reduced version of a proposal for Cork 2005 which would have brought precious examples of Burges designs for furniture, house and castle interiors, altar plate and jewellery from the UK and Europe to Cork. When this proposal was refused, City Manager Joe Gavin ensured the restoration of the archive with the support of the property developer Tom Coughlan.