As part of this year’s Festival of Architecture and the Year of Innovation, Architecture and Design, the nation is being asked to vote for their favourite building from the past 100 years.
The list includes two Glasgow banks, the Bon Accord Baths in Aberdeen and Tongland Power Station in Kirkcudbright. Also on the list are a wee concrete bothy in Sutherland (known, ironically, as the Hermit's Castle) and a fashion designer's studio near Galashiels as well as buildings on Bute, Skye, Tiree and Orkney. More prominent architectural gems include the arches at the City Chambers in Glasgow, the Scottish Parliament and Stirling University.
The shortlist of buildings (ten from each decade 1916 – 2015) is on the Festival website (www.foa2016.com/scotstyle) and voting is open now. Scotland’s favourite building will be announced at the Festival’s Finale event in November.
There is a touring exhibition by the same name and an accompanying book (Scotstyle: 100 Years of Scottish Architecture) available, which gives some fascinating insights into architectural trends over the past 100 years alongside the story behind some of Scotland’s most beloved buildings. The book also celebrates the centenary of the Royal Incorporation of Architects in Scotland (RIAS) who are curating and managing the Festival of Architecture.
The nationwide touring exhibition will premiere at the Falkirk Wheel then visit venues across the length and breadth of Scotland at venues including; St. Conan’s Kirk on Loch Awe, Inverness Museum and Art Gallery, New Lanark Heritage Centre and the Pier Arts Centre in Orkney, with a debate and book signing at the Scottish Parliament during the Festival of Politics in August.
The list was selected from more than 400 nominations put forward by members of the public, with a group of architects, critics and architectural historians whittling it down to 100 properties.
The Festival of Architecture celebrates Scotland’s fantastic built environment and up and coming events include:
The Ideal Hut Show, standard garden sheds which have been transformed by leading architects and designers (Edinburgh Royal Botanic Gardens until 30 May, Glasgow Botanic Gardens 3 – 26 June)
Out of Their Heads, Peer inside the minds of Scotland’s greatest ever architects, by admiring their portraits and encountering recreations of their most iconic designs. (National Portrait Gallery, Edinburgh 11 June 2016 – 5 February 2017)
Go to: www.foa2016.com to keep up to date with the hundreds of events taking place across Scotland
Look out for a Reader Offer for ‘Scotstyle: 100 years of Scottish Architecture’ exclusively for Herald readers, coming soon
For more on the Scotstyle Festival of Architecture please visit
Scotstyle 1926 – 1935
1927
Scottish National War Memorial
Edinburgh Castle, Edinburgh
Sir Robert Lorimer
Painful in subject – a tribute to the many Scots who fell during the First World War – and painful, too, for the architect, who cannot have imagined the controversy that would accompany its creation. Crowning the apex of the castle rock, the memorial comprises a buttressed shrine protruding north from a “U”-shaped gallery of honour. Rugged and rooted to its site (the ragged basalt emerging through the smooth granite floor), the building derives sophistication from the expertly proportioned interior and decorative work of the highest order.
1927
Union Bank of Scotland
St Vincent Street, Glasgow
James Miller
Few architects conveyed the mercantile might of banking as powerfully as Miller. Eight storeys high over a raised basement, built of pale polished ashlar on a slightly sloping corner site, this composition employs a giant order not once, but twice, reinforcing the importance of the institution. The Greek Ionic colonnade rising through the lower three floors on the entrance front (the massive bases at pedestrian head height) is flattened out on the Renfield Street façade, where the layout once incorporated shops.
1929
North British and Mercantile Building
St Vincent Street, Glasgow
Sir John James Burnet of Burnet, Son and Dick
Daringly stripped of applied decoration, this monumental ashlar cube represents Burnet’s last major design. It has a purity and control that speaks of an architect embracing modernity with confidence and effortless ease: most of the deeply recessed windows have neither cill nor hoodmould, although some have the barest hint of a keystone. For all its severity, there is nonetheless a designed sculpture scheme with maritime overtones; stylised seahorses, a Viking longboat, a galleon and St Andrew, standing in the prow of a ship.
1930
St Conan’s Kirk
Loch Awe, Argyll
Walter Douglas Campbell
Along with his sister Helen, amateur architect Campbell devoted the latter part of his life to this most exquisite of lochside buildings. His legacy is an extraordinary, eclectic church of considerable charm that took forty years to complete. The approach from the road provides few clues to the originality of the loch-facing frontage or the church’s interior richness. Facing Loch Awe, a hound chasing two hares and a row of tiny carved owls decorate the heavily buttressed frontage.
1930
India Tyre and Rubber Factory
Greenock Road, Inchinnan
Wallis, Gilbert and Partners
Arresting and exotic, the 1928 Firestone Tyre Factory on Brentford’s Great West Road provided the template for the India Tyre Company’s equally stunning Renfrewshire facility. The younger building was less ornate, but its Art Deco exterior shared the giant chamfered piers, stocky raised end pylons with stylised corbels, and glorious use of coloured glazed tile. It was a remarkable sight, even on the outskirts of a village built around airship manufacture. With the Firestone building demolished, the Inchinnan office block is an important survivor.
1931
Scottish Legal Life Assurance Society Offices
Bothwell Street, Glasgow
Wright and Wylie
Belonging to the beginning of a decade during which classicism was surrendered slowly on the streets of Glasgow’s insurance quarter, this urban behemoth was won in open competition in 1927. Wylie built nothing larger than these Bothwell Street offices. While none of the component parts of granite plinth, giant order, metal-framed windows and heavy cornice were unfamiliar in the city, they are here assembled with formidable rigour. The shop frontages (framed in bronze) are amongst the most stylish in the city.
1933
St Anne’s RC Church
Whitevale Street, Glasgow
Gillespie, Kidd and Coia
So much is innovative about this large cruciform church: the use, for instance, of a concrete frame and red facing brick. The style departed from the traditional with an Italianate frontage flattened and broadened and flanking façades with barrel-headed windows. The architectural themes tested in St. Anne’s were further developed in churches at Maryhill, Greenock and Rutherglen. Taken together, their influence would extend across the country and continue to shape new church architecture well after the Second World War.
1933
The Lane House
Dick Place, Edinburgh
Sir William Kininmonth with Sir Basil Spence
Studying together at Edinburgh College of Art, Kininmonth and Spence both joined the office of Rowand Anderson and Paul as young graduates. Their creative liaison produced a series of striking Modernist houses, including Kininmonth’s own. Here, he rejected tradition in favour of the International Style. After all, what better client to work for, and what better way to promote his fledgling practice. Streamlined and sophisticated, the house is built of brick, first painted white, but later harled.
1934
Tongland Power Station
Near Kirkcudbright
Sir Alexander Gibb and Partners (Engineers)
The 1929 Galloway hydro-electric scheme gifted to southwest Scotland industrial architecture of real refinement. Five generating stations, five reservoirs, a single barrage and a series of dams and tunnels, together delivered total peak power of around 106 megawatts. The power station at Tongland, largest of the five, its turbine hall appearing to float over the River Dee, came into operation first, in March 1935. Tongland has a timeless quality, piers of cream-painted reinforced concrete alternating with ribbon strips of metal-framed glazing.
1935
Commercial Bank of Scotland
Bothwell Street, Glasgow
James Miller
The least conventionally classical of Miller’s commercial buildings, conveying great size while relatively small: monochrome and audacious. Nearing the end of his long career by the time the building was opened, he could be forgiven for reverting to type. Instead, he embraced an almost industrial aesthetic, sufficiently awe-inspiring to reassure customers and just decorative enough not to scare them away. Unexpectedly, it is an extruded, refined version of Jenkins and Marr’s 1929 Commercial Bank in Aberdeen, given a gutsy Glaswegian twist.
For more on the Scotstyle Festival of Architecture please visit
Photo Credits:
1926-1935
11 - Scottish National War Memorial © Crown Copyright: Historic Environment Scotland. Licensor canmore.org.uk
12 - Union Bank of Scotland © Jon Jardine
13 - North British and Mercantile Building © Crown Copyright: Historic Environment Scotland. Licensor canmore.org.uk
14 - St Conan’s Kirk © Crown Copyright: Historic Environment Scotland. Licensor canmore.org.uk
15 - India of Inchinnan © Keith Hunter
16 - Scottish Legal Life Assurance Society Offices © Crown Copyright: Historic Environment Scotland. Licensor canmore.org.uk
17 - St Anne’s RC Church © Jon Jardine
18 - The Lane House © Grant Bulloch
19 - Tongland Power Station © Crown Copyright: Historic Environment Scotland. Licensor canmore.org.uk
20 - Commercial Bank of Scotland © Crown Copyright: Historic Environment Scotland. Licensor canmore.org.uk
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