Out of their Heads: Building Portraits of Scottish Architects

Scottish National Portrait Gallery, Edinburgh until February 17, 2017

www.nationalgalleries.org

IN the year-long Festival of Architecture, there could be few better places to highlight the brilliance of some of Scotland’s historic and contemporary architects than the National Portrait Gallery on Edinburgh’s Queen Street. An imposing red brick Victorian Gothic palace whose public facades are pocked with niches filled with statues of eminent Scots – from poets to statesmen – it was the world’s first purpose-built portrait gallery, designed by one of the country’s best known Victorian architects, Sir Robert Rowand Anderson.

Anderson is one of the twelve architects represented in this portrait-inspired homage, which will cluster portraits, drawings and models of each architect’s work on twelve constructions based on profiles of their key buildings drawn by artist Ian Stuart Campbell. Here, then, we have architects ranging from Sir William Bruce, responsible for Hopetoun House and substantial rebuilding work at Holyroodhouse, to Kathryn Findlay, known for radical forms including the Soft and Hairy House (1994) in Tsukuba in Japan and her work with Anish Kapor on the ArcelorMittal Orbit in London’s Olympic Park.

Along the way, the exhibition celebrates the work of architects from the very well known, such as Charles Rennie Mackintosh, represented by his Glasgow School of Art building, to the less widely known, such as Peter Womersley, whose Modernist buildings designed from his base in the Borders included Bernat Klein’s textile studio in Selkirk. Robert Adam, James Craig, Sir Robert Matthew, Margaret Brodie, Jack Coia, Sir Robert Lorimer and Sir Basil Spence are the other leading lights in an exhibition which should prove a fascinating focus on innovation in architecture over the past 300-odd years.