Background
His reputation was established with his design for the Travellers' Club, London, built in 1829-1832. This was an audacious and at that time wholly reactionary excursion into the Palladian style of monumental columns and pilasters. Like his next club, the Reform, begun in 1837, the building was loosely modeled after a Roman palace, with the apartments skillfully planned around an open court, or cortile. These clubs established Barry as a fashionable architect, and he secured aristocratic patronage, notably of the second Duke of Sutherland.
His major public buildings in London include the Royal College of Surgeons (1835), the Treasury (1846-1847), and Pentonville Prison (1840). His masterpiece, however, was the Houses of Parliament, done in collaboration with Augustus Welby Pugin. Work was begun in 1837, and completed after Barry's death. Virtually the last of the romantic Gothic palaces, it is a brilliant composition, pictorially effective and rich in Victorian decoration.
Barry was elected to the Royal Academy and made a fellow of the Royal Society, and he was knighted in 1852. He died on May 12, 1860, in London, and was buried in Westminster Abbey.