Architecture in modern Scotland

The most significant architect of the early twentieth century was Charles Rennie Mackintosh, who mixed elements of traditional Scottish architecture with contemporary movements.

The Neo-Gothic style continued in to the twentieth century but the most common forms in this period were plain and massive Neo-Romanesque buildings.

The 1980s saw the growth of speculative house building by developers and the introduction of English brick and half-timbered vernacular styles to Scotland.

The most significant Scottish architect of the early twentieth century, having a considerable influence on European architecture, was Charles Rennie Mackintosh (1868–1928).

[5] In the twentieth century the distinctive Scottish use of stone architecture declined as it was replaced by cheaper alternatives such as Portland cement, concrete, and mass-production brick.

[11] From the mid-twentieth century, public architecture became more utilitarian, as part of the impulse to produce a comprehensive welfare state.

Isolated examples included the houses that combined modern and traditional elements, designed by Basil Spence and built at Broughton Place (1936) and Gribloch (1937–9).

A royal commission of 1917 reported on the "unspeakably filthy privy-middens in many of the mining areas, badly constructed incurably damp labourers' cottages on farms, whole townships unfit for human occupation in the crofting counties and islands ... groups of lightless and unventilated houses in the older burghs, clotted masses of slums in the great cities".

Many early council houses were built on greenfield sites away from the pollution of the city, often constructed of semi-detached homes or terraced cottages.

Coia's first church, St Anne's, Dennistoun (1931), utilised the engineering techniques of Beaux-Arts architecture, resulting in a broad, centralised space, with narrow arcades rather than aisles, with a monumental facade of red-brick.

Coia's partner T. Warnett Kennedy's temporary, open-roofed Catholic chapel at the Empire Exhibition (1938) was fronted by a Mackintosh-like grid of metalwork, and with his St Peter in Chains Church, Ardrossan (1938), with austere walls and towers, showed the influence of the "abstract compositions" of contemporary Swedish architecture and pointed to the future influence of modernism.

[14] In the post-war period Scotland continued to produce important architects, including James Stirling (1926–92), who, with James Gowan (1923–) designed the Flats at Ham Common, London (1955–58), considered a landmark in the development of modernist, brutalist residential planning, a style which would have a profound impact in Scotland.

[16] The main thrust of post-war planning would be one of clearance and rebuilding, beginning in Paisley, where from 1955 the populations of districts were decanted, the buildings demolished and rebuilding began, resulting, in the first district, George Street/ Canal Street, in low flats in render and reused rubble around landscaped courtyards, with a 15-storey tower at one end.

[17] As the post-war desire for urban regeneration gained momentum it would focus on the tower block, championed in Glasgow by David Gibson, convener of the city housing committee.

Projects like the brutalist Red Road Flats originally offered hope of a new beginning and an escape from the overcrowded nineteenth-century tenements of the city, but lacked a sufficient infrastructure and soon deteriorated.

[18] Robert Matthew (1906–75) and Basil Spence (1907–76) were responsible for redeveloping the Gorbals in Glasgow, for demolitions at the University of Edinburgh and the stark rebuilding typified by the David Hume Tower (1960–63).

[25] The Catholic Church, whose traditional membership was most affected by the changes in housing, was the first to react to this situation, creating 76 new parishes between 1845 and 1960 in the west of the country alone.

Instead there was a move towards a form of post-modernism that looked to a clash of styles with a renewed emphasis on visual aesthetics that invoked classicism.

[27] This movement against modernism also included renewed influence by the Scots baronial and Mackintosh-inspired designs; these can be seen respectively in the Scandic Crown Hotel (1988–89) in the Old Town in Edinburgh and the National Library Causewayside Building (1985–87, extended 1993–94).

[33] There have been increasing attempts to preserve much of what survives from Scotland's architectural heritage, including the great buildings and monuments, but also the classically influenced houses of towns like Edinburgh and Glasgow[34] and the surviving tenements, many of which have been renovated, restored from the black fronts created by pollution to their original pink and honeyed sandstone,[35] and brought up to modern standards of accommodation.

Sales of council houses were popular in Scotland and until the mid-1990s as, unlike in England, local authorities could use the whole of their capital receipts for development.