Several far more important and better publicized interventions in architecture on the part of Ruskin followed immediately. In considerable part because of his personal influence with Oxford friends, the Gothic design of the Irish architects Sir Thomas Deane[221] (1792-1871) and Benjamin Woodward (1815-61) was accepted for the University Museum at Oxford in 1855. Woodward had already proved himself a would-be Ruskinian in detailing their design of 1853 for the Museum of Trinity College, Dublin, in a Venetian (though largely _quattrocento_) way. As the Oxford Museum rose to completion in the next four years, Ruskin was in continuous contact with Woodward, providing himself the design for at least one window as well as encouraging the delegation to the Irish carvers of much of the responsibility for the ornamental decoration—of which only a small part was, in fact, ever executed. The work of the O’Sheas is better appreciated in Dublin, where the decoration both of the Trinity College building and of the Kildare Street Club of 1861 was carried out by them in a very free and yet boldly naturalistic vein. The most interesting feature of the University Museum—and one that it is surprising to find Ruskin, who hated iron and all it stood for in the nineteenth-century world, involved with—is the court, with its roof of iron and glass (Plate 86B). How different this is, however, from what iron-founders without architectural control were providing at the same time in the Brompton Boilers! Yet it is even more different from Hopper’s or Rickman’s iron Gothic of fifty years earlier (Plate 60B). For all the elaboration of the ornament, which is very metallic in character but also very aware of Early Gothic precedent, what is most notable is the highly articulated character of the structure, as if the architects had asked themselves: ‘How would medieval builders have used structural iron had it been readily available to them?’ Is this, perhaps, the first echo in England of the theories of Viollet-le-Duc, the French architect who was to exercise an international influence equal to Ruskin’s over the next generation? Probably not, as his own enthusiasm for iron began only rather later (see Chapter 16). Whether or not there is specific influence from Viollet-le-Duc here, his great archaeological publication, the _Dictionnaire raisonné_,[222] had begun to appear the year before. Very soon the structural expressiveness of ‘Early French’ detailing, studied by English architects at first hand as well as in the woodcuts of the _Dictionnaire_, began to supplant Italian polychromy as the hallmark of advanced fashion in the higher aesthetic circles.