Architecture of Scotland

Scotland produced some of the most significant British architects of the eighteenth century, including: Colen Campbell, James Gibbs, William Chambers and particularly Robert Adam.

The most significant Scottish architect of the early twentieth century, Charles Rennie Mackintosh, developed a unique and internationally influential "Glasgow style".

The stone building at Knap of Howar at Papa Westray, Orkney is one of the oldest surviving houses in north-west Europe, making use of locally gathered rubble in a dry-stone construction.

[2] From the Early and Middle Bronze Age we have evidence of the occupation of crannogs, roundhouses partially or entirely built on an artificial island, usually in lakes, rivers and estuarine waters.

[11] Beyond the area of Roman occupation, wheelhouses, a round house with a characteristic outer wall within which a circle of stone piers (bearing a resemblance to the spokes of a wheel)[12] were constructed, with over sixty sites identified in the west and north.

[18] The introduction of Christianity into Scotland from Ireland, from the sixth century, led to the construction of basic masonry-built churches beginning on the west coast and islands.

[19] After the eleventh century, as masonry techniques advanced, ashlar blocks became more rectangular, resulting in structurally more stable walls that could incorporate more refined architectural moulding and detailing that can be seen in corbelling, buttressing, lintels and arching.

French master-mason John Morrow was employed at the building of Glasgow Cathedral and the rebuilding of Melrose Abbey, both considered fine examples of Gothic architecture.

[20] The carvings at Rosslyn Chapel, created in the mid-fifteenth century, elaborately depicting the progression of the seven deadly sins, are considered some of the finest in the Gothic style.

[20] The early sixteenth century saw crown steeples built on churches with royal connections, symbolising imperial monarchy, as at St. Giles Cathedral, Edinburgh.

[37] They were typically a tall, square, stone-built, crenelated building; often also surrounded by a barmkin or bawn, a walled courtyard designed to hold valuable animals securely, but not necessarily intended for serious defence.

[38][39] They were built extensively on both sides of the border with England and James IV's forfeiture of the Lordship of the Isles in 1494 led to an immediate burst of castle building across the region.

[43] The re-adoption of low-massive church building with round arches and pillars, in contrast to the Gothic perpendicular style that was particularly dominant in England in the late Medieval era, may have been influenced by close contacts with Rome and the Netherlands, and may have been a conscious reaction to English forms in favour of continental ones.

[50] New military architecture in the trace Italienne style was brought by Italian military engineers during the war of the Rough Wooing and the regency of Mary of Guise including Migliorino Ubaldini who worked at Edinburgh Castle, Camillo Marini who designed forts, and Lorenzo Pomarelli who worked for Mary of Guise during the rebuilding of forts at Inchkeith and Eyemouth.

Many of the earliest buildings were simple gabled rectangles, a style that continued to be built into the seventeenth century, as at Dunnottar Castle in the 1580s, Greenock (1591) and Durness (1619),[54] but often with windows on the south wall (and none on the north), which became a unique feature of Reformation kirks.

It kept many of the features of the high walled Medieval castles that had been largely made obsolete by gunpowder weapons and may have been influenced by the French masons brought to Scotland to work on royal palaces.

Palladio's ideas were strongly based on the symmetry, perspective and values of the formal classical temple architecture of the Ancient Greeks and Romans, and associated in England with the designs of Inigo Jones.

Smith's country houses followed the pattern established by William Bruce, with hipped roofs and pedimented fronts, in a plain but handsome Palladian style.

The threat of Jacobite insurrection or invasion meant that Scotland also saw more military building than England in this period, relying on the strength of inclined and angled engineered masonry work combined with the ability of earthen toppings that could deflect and absorb artillery fire.

From the mid-eighteenth century it was laid out according to a plan of rectangular blocks with open squares, drawn up by James Craig and built in strong Craigleith sandstone which could be precisely cut by masons.

[66] Despite this building boom, the centralisation of much of the government administration, including the king's works, in London, meant that a number of Scottish architects spent most of all of their careers in England, where they had a major impact on Georgian architecture.

Contemporaries noted that cottages in the Highlands and Islands tended to be cruder, with single rooms, slit windows and earthen floors, often shared by a large family.

[78] The other side of growing wealth and planned architecture for the aristocracy and middle classes was the growth of urban sprawl, exemplified by sub-urban tenements like those of the Gorbals in Glasgow, where overcrowding, lack of sanitation and general poverty contributed to disease, crime, and very low life expediency.

[79] The sometimes utopian concept of the new town, aimed at improving society through the foundation of architecturally designed communities, was an important part of Scottish thinking from the mid-eighteenth to the twentieth century.

[80] From 1800, Robert Owen's New Lanark, designed as a self-contained community, combining industry with ordered and improved living conditions, was an important milestone in the historical development of urban planning.

Working mainly in Glasgow, he turned away from the Gothic style toward that of the ancient Greeks and Egyptians, as can be seen in the temple and columns that were part of the Caledonia Road Church (1856).

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".

[109] The post-war desire for urban regeneration 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.

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, now named 40 George Square).