Frank Mears
Sir Frank Charles Mears PPRSA FRSE LLD (11 July 1880 – 25 January 1953) was an architect and Scotland's leading planning consultant from the 1930s to the early 1950s.
Between 1925 and 1929, Mears worked with the Jerusalem-based architect, Benjamin Chaikin, on designs for specific university buildings, including the Einstein Institute of Mathematics and the David Wolffsohn Library.
Between 1922 and 1924, in the aftermath of the Irish Civil War, he prepared plans for civic renewal and the accommodation of new national institutions on behalf of the Greater Dublin Reconstruction Movement.
[11] In 1919 he submitted a proposal for a Scottish National War Memorial as Via Sacra following the line of Johnston Terrace on the southern slope of the Edinburgh Castle Rock.
Rendel Govan and Robert J. Naismith, and Pilkington Jackson on the design for the monument to his old regiment, the Royal Scots, in Princes Street Gardens, Edinburgh.
[19] Towards the end of his career, Mears addressed the problem of rural depopulation in its most acute form in a strategy for the planning and redevelopment of the County of Sutherland.
[26] In the Tweed Valley the problem was not so much one of "town" planning as of discovering ways of arresting the decline in population by the provision of improved housing and social facilities where these were lacking, and by the introduction of balancing industries to supplement those of agriculture and weaving.
[29] Mears proposed redevelopment at lower densities, the creation of new industrial areas and the accommodation of the displaced population in a constellation of new neighbourhoods laid out in the Kip Valley on American Parkway lines to create a "federal Garden City".
He also prepared layouts and designs for council housing in Greenock and a scheme for the redevelopment of part of the town centre which had been badly damaged by wartime bombing.
His work in the burgh was the subject of a documentary film entitled Greenock Plans Ahead (1948), directed by the photographer Hamilton Tait and narrated by Frank Phillips.
His scheme involved a major expansion to the north of University Avenue into Hillhead, with new buildings arranged around a system of courts and quadrangles and linked by tree-lined footpaths.
