Architecture of Cardiff

Its urban fabric is largely Victorian and later, reflecting Cardiff's rise to prosperity as a major coal port in the 19th century.

Two recent buildings in Cardiff Bay, the Senedd and the Wales Millennium Centre, make conspicuous use of Welsh slate together with glass and steel.

Perhaps the most noted individual building in the city is Cardiff Castle, a fortress of Roman foundation with a ruined 12th-century medieval keep and exterior walls.

Two monastic buildings existed in Cardiff, Greyfriars (demolished for Capital Tower) and Blackfriars, established in the late 13th century.

With the arrival of the railways and a rapidly expanding coal export industry, Cardiff changed beyond recognition during the mid nineteenth century.

Mordaunt Crook remarks that Burges drew on his extensive travels and the studies he had made of the campanilii of San Gimaggnano, Florence and Siena.

He included recollections of Nuremberg and Palermo, of the Chateau de Chillonon on Lake Geneva, the Castello at Milan and the Palais des Papes at Avignon.

[8] The Marquis of Bute had a momentous partnership with Burges that was to last for sixteen years, with Cardiff Castle transformed into a Neo- Gothic dream palace.

[15] Castell Coch, a ruined medieval castle, lying to north of Cardiff, was intended as an occasional summer residence for the Marquess of Bute.

The octagonal chamber with its great rib-vault, modelled on one designed by Viollet-Le-Duc at Councy, is "spangled with butterflies and birds of sunny plume in gilded trellis work."

[16] The civic centre at Cathays Park, whose earliest building dates from 1901, is a notable example in the United Kingdom of city planning on Beaux-Arts principles.

It was restored by George Pace, who added a concrete parabolic arch in the nave to support a new sculpture by Jacob Epstein, Majestas.

BBC Broadcasting House in Llandaff (now demolished), designed in 1967 by Dale Owen of Percy Thomas & Partners, who had worked in Chicago under Walter Gropius, drew inspiration from modernist architecture in the United States such as Gropius's Harvard Graduate Center and Ludwig Mies van der Rohe's apartments on Lake Shore Drive, Chicago.

It was a joint initiative between BBC Wales and Malcolm Parry of the Welsh School of Architecture and aimed to create a zero carbon house on a reasonable £120,000 budget, using the latest technologies.

[22] Cardiff Bay underwent an urban regeneration scheme in the late 20th century and its Barrage was a major civil engineering project.

The Institute of Welsh Affairs (IWA) has bemoaned the "frightful" new multi-storey car parks that have replaced key Victorian buildings.

[27] The IWA argued for more thought by planners for creative re-use of "our sadly neglected historic town centre buildings".