British architect and one of the main exponents of the Gothic Revival. Burges was a close friend of the British artist Frederic Leighton (1830–1896) and the architect George Aitchison (1825–1910). In 1856–1857, Burges travelled to Istanbul, where he was working on designs for the Crimea Memorial Church. During his stay, he visited various mosques (see his notebook at RIBA Archive, SE38/19) and made colour drawings of the stucco and glass windows of the Süleymaniye Camii (Burges, 1858, p. 89, see IG_189). One of the drawings was published in 1904 by Aitchison to illustrate the Islamic tradition of stucco and glass windows in his contribution on ‘Coloured Glass’ in the XIth volume of The Architecture Journal (Aitchison, 1904, fig. 1).
In 1865, Burges started working on the transformation of Cardiff Castle into a neo-Gothic mansion for the 3rd Marquess of Bute, a project that was to occupy him until his death in 1881. His last and one of his most ambitious projects for Cardiff Castle was the Arab-style interior executed in 1881–1882. The so-called Arab Room is reminiscent of the Islamicate architecture of Norman Sicily and includes four replicas of stucco and glass windows. Matthew Williams suggests that the Arab Hall of Burges’s friend Frederic Leighton on Holland Park Road in Kensington (London), executed between 1877–1881 by Aitchison, may have inspired his design for Cardiff Castle (Williams, 2019, p. 150).

Aitchison, G. (1904). Coloured Glass. The Architectural Journal, vol. XI(3), pp. 53–65.

Burges, W. (1858). Architectural experiences at Constantinople. The Builder, vol. XVI, n° 783–784, pp. 88–90, 104–108.

Crook, J. Mordaunt (1981). William Burges and the High Victorian Dream. John Murray.

Williams, M. (2019). Cardiff Castle and the Marquesses of Bute. London.