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Jacob Owen
Born	(1778-07-28)28 July 1778 Llanfihangel, Montgomeryshire, North Wales
Died	29 October 1870(1870-10-29) (aged 92) Toll End, Tipton, Staffordshire, England
Nationality	British
Occupation	Architect
Buildings	Dublin Castle, Áras an Uachtaráin, Four Courts
Projects	significant public buildings in Dublin and Ireland

Jacob Owen (28 July 1778 – 29 October 1870) was a Welsh Irish architect of the 19th century. His work is most closely associated with Dublin, Ireland.

Biography

Jacob Owen was born on 28 July 1778 in Llanfihangel, Montgomeryshire, Wales, the son of Jacob Owen, an engineer, and his wife Margaret, née Ellis. After being educated at Monmouth, he was apprenticed to the English canal engineer, William Underhill, who was occupied on canal works in Staffordshire. Owen married Underhill’s daughter, Mary, by whom he had seventeen children, including the naval architect Jeremiah Owen , the architects Thomas Ellis Owen, James Higgins Owen, William Henshaw Owen and Henry Higgins Owen, and the theologian Joseph Butterworth Owen.

For most of his career, he held a private practice in Portsmouth, later expanding to bring on board his son Thomas Ellis Owen and son-in-law Charles Lanyon. In 1804 he was appointed clerk of the works to the Royal Engineer Department. Over the first third of the nineteenth century, Owen rose to prominence in the Board of Ordinance through his close relationship with John Fox Burgoyne. After Burgoyne became chairman of the Board of Public Works in 1831, he appointed Owen to the role of principal engineer and architect in the Board of Public Works of Ireland, based in Dublin. Beginning in 1832, Owen held the appointment for twenty four years. For his first fourteen years in Ireland, he was allowed by the terms of his appointment to accept private commissions, but in August 1846 this arrangement ended and in lieu of the loss of private practice work his salary was increased by 25 per cent to £1,000. The change was brought about increased pressure on the Board's architectural staff, which also led Owen to commission outside architects for some of the Board’s major building projects. Owen is known for the mark he left on the architecture of Victorian Dublin. He also contributed extensively to the shaping of public architecture throughout Ireland, both through his design of schools, lunatic asylums, prisons and other public buildings associated with British rule in Ireland, and through the commissioning of other architects such as Charles Lanyon for Queen’s University, Belfast and Augustus Pugin for St Patrick's College, Maynooth.

In his private life, Owen was a committed Methodist. He quickly became a leading figure in Dublin’s Methodist community, and connected the community to Britain’s leading Methodists such as Joseph Butterworth. Owen also served as vice-president of the Royal Institute of the Architects of Ireland (RIAI), the Royal Zoological Society of Ireland, and the Institution of Civil Engineers of Ireland (ICEI), and served as a council member of the Geological Society of Ireland. After his retirement, he founded the Irish Civil Service Building Society in 1864 with his son James Higgins Owen. For much of his life in Dublin, he lived at 2 Mountjoy Square West. His commitments in Ireland and his well established family connections kept him in Dublin for over a decade after his retirement from public service. In 1867, he moved to Southsea which had been developed as a resort town by his second eldest son, Thomas Ellis Owen. He died in 1870 at Toll End, Staffordshire, home of his daughter and physician husband. His lasting connection to Ireland was signalled by the choice of his final burial place at Mount Jerome Cemetery. Upon his death, the Royal Institute of the Architects of Ireland stated that he 'brought a practical and vigorous intellect to bear upon the amazing professional events of the earlier half of this century; and in his public career in ths country commanded respect by his administrative ability and unbending honesty of character.'

Jacob Owen’s design for the Criminal Lunatic Asylum, Dundrum, Dublin

Significant Buildings

Áras an Uachtaráin

Owen was responsible for major extensions to the building in the 1840s and 1850s when it was the Vice Regal Lodge. This work included the construction of the state dining room and the addition of the East Wing for the visit of Queen Victoria in 1849. Owen designed the subsequent extension for the West Wing, giving the Lodge, which had been previously described as ‘nothing more than a neat, plain brick building’ a comprehensive series of reception and state rooms, including a ballroom, and An Grianán, currently used as the private drawing room of the President of the Republic of Ireland.

Dublin Castle

Unlike Áras an Uachtaráin, Owen’s modernisation of Dublin Castle did not include any of the many extensions made to the original building. Owen’s mark on the building was to update and enlarge the state rooms, which included altering the Presence Chamber designed by the former surveyor general Arthur Jones-Nevill. Owen created the State Drawing Room out of of a series of smaller late 17th century State Apartments which had also been modified by Nevill in the eighteenth century. Owen amalgamated three of these rooms to form the new seven-bay State Drawing Room with a screen of Corinthian columns at the eastern end. Subsequent expansion of the state rooms were in keeping with Owen’s opening of the castle’s former warren of rooms. Owen reconfiguration and redesign included the construction of the formal staircase and the commissioning of master artisans including papier-mâché artist Charles Frederick Bielefeld who had previously work on St James’s Palace. Owen also contributed to the Castle with his design of the coach house, completed in 1834.

The Dublin Castle Coach House designed by Jacob Owen and completed in 1834

Four Courts

Owen’s work on the Four Courts began within a few years of his arrival in Ireland. His first intervention was the addition of the galleried top lit law library in 1835, designed in the Greek Revival style. Two years later, at the northern edge of the central axis, Owen designed a Greek revival façade which occupies the rear part of the solicitors’ hall and coffee room. Architectural historian Christine Casey called it ‘the most distinguished and best preserved of the nineteenth century buildings’ In 1858, Owen began work to replace The Encumbered Estates Court with a new Landed Estates Court in the Four Courts complex. The new premises for took two years to build. Owen’s design was described in newspaper reporting upon its completion in 1860 as ‘a continuation of the range extending in the westerly direction from the pile known as the Benchers Building in suite with the insolvency and bankruptcy courts at the eastern side of the coffee room and Solicitors’ Chambers,’ and ‘a most useful and creditable work in a solid, graceful and unpretentious style, presenting an appearance both chaste and imposing, and harmonising perfectly with the older portions of the rear extension.’

The Infant Model School and Tyrone House

Owen’s eye for symmetry in the redesign of Dublin’s public architecture is no more on show than in his transformation of the former Tyrone House, Dublin, town house and grounds of Marcus Beresford, 1st Earl of Tyrone’s former estate. Owen largely preserved the original 1770 mansion townhouse designed by Richard Cassels, and built a second facsimile of the Georgian building to its left. This symmetry in this mirrored design was completed with the addition in 1838 of a third Infant Model School building placed between the two townhouse buildings on Sacksville Street. Viewed together, these buildings form a golden triangle. The school building, also known as the Clocktower Building, was described by Casey as a ‘delightful low-lying and stuccoed parapeted block’ that can be seen from Sackville Street