Benjamin Woodward

Benjamin Woodward was born in Tullamore in 1816, the seventh child of a militia captain, before he grew into the architect who filled Dublin and Oxford with living stone. He let craftsmen improvise like medieval masons, releasing owls, lizards and billiard-playing monkeys from rigid academic rules. His feverish creativity outpaced his lungs, carrying him to France in 1861 where tuberculosis took him at forty-four.