Scottish Architecture ArtWords

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Conclusion
Can we, finally, isolate any common themes that draw together the centuries, even millennia, spanned by our story? We have to begin cautiously, as most definitions of ‘national identity’ are highly subjective constructions defined as much by the perceptions of others as by any innate essence, and this subjectivity is compounded when a series of these definitions is strung together into a ‘tradition’. Common sense tells us that there can be no direct cultural or spiritual link, for example, between the builders of chambered tombs and the architects of today. This point is only underlined by the many past attempts to construct or evoke ‘national tradition’, all hopelessly beset by conflicting definitions.

Yet although there is clearly no such thing as a single ‘grand tradition’ of Scottish architecture, it would be equally misleading to see the latter as nothing more than a sequence of unrelated episodes. For a start, the geology and the equable, wet climate have remained reasonably unchanged. The most consistent thread in Scottish architecture has been the persistent use of stone construction, right through from the earliest times to the present day. But building in stone has not been continuous or exclusive, a fact often disguised by patterns of survival: turf or wooden buildings were ubiquitous for everyday purposes right up until the 19th century, while in the prehistoric era the archaeological evidence is skewed towards Orkney and other areas rich in massive stone monuments. Nor has it been consistent: methods have varied from the massive harled rubble of medieval castles and the ashlar of medieval churches to the composite stone-iron-wood construction of the 19th century city and the thin stone cladding of today.

By careful comparison with other countries, various subordinate themes also emerge within our story, especially in recent centuries. Perhaps the most obvious case is the prestige of the Scottish castle as building type and image, right through from the 14th to the 17th century and on, in consciously revived form, into the 19th century. The reasons for its popularity have been hotly disputed: while R. W. Billings in the 1840s assumed it was the unintentionally picturesque by-product of barons who ‘cared for nothing but eating, drinking and fighting’, barely fifty years later Robert Lorimer, like today’s historians, could see the castle above all as ‘a Scotch gentleman’s home’. But whatever the rhetoric and the theories, its pervasiveness and persistence on the ground cannot be denied. Equally, one could point to the special strength of classical architecture, in all its variety, from the 16th to the 20th century, especially in contrast to the special veneration for Gothic in England, and the bolder embrace of Modernist avant-gardism on the Continent. Or there was the more generally high status of secular as against religious architecture, even before the Reformation.

But paradoxically, the most important ‘tradition’ of all, especially in the more recent time from the 16th century onwards, has been the constant eager embrace of radical change and discontinuity – to a degree unmatched by any other small country. Scotland had hardly completed its revolutionary purge of the trappings of conventional religious architecture when its union with England, and its welcome as a full partner in the empire, opened up a succession of even more dramatic ruptures in the built environment. Improvement, urbanization, industrial growth: each was matched by an ever bolder architectural diversity, until the climax was reached in the fearsomely vigorous architectural culture of Thomson, Burnet, Geddes and Mackintosh.

That individualistic world was torn down by the planned social reconstructions of the 20th-century years of retrenchment. Only now, in the new era of home rule, is there a renewed desire to express ‘national pride’ in building – against the unpromising backdrop of rampant global capitalism. Traditionally, the architectural rhetoric of national identity and myth-making has tended to vilify the 19th century in favour of a pre-industrial, or even pre-Union, golden age. But if this account has shown anything, the reverse is true: if there ever was a golden age of Scottish architecture, it was the Victorian era of imperialism and British global might. The challenge now is whether that achievement can be matched again by future generations of Scots, without the supporting infrastructure of empire and world economic dominance.

About the authors
Miles Glendinning is head of the Topographical and Threatened Buildings Surveys at the Royal Commission on the Ancient and Historical Monuments of Scotland. Aonghus MacKechnie is Principal Inspector of Historic Buildings at Historic Scotland. Both contributed to A History of Scottish Architecture from the Renaissance to the Present Day (1996), and Miles Glendinning is also the author, with David Page, of Clone City: Crisis and Renewal in Contemporary Scottish Architecture (1999).

The illustration above is of Craigievar Castle, Aberdeenshire
Photo: Emily Lane