Great British architects

Alexander ‘Greek’ Thomson 1817–75

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‘Thomson’s predilection for abstract form was the outcome of an

original mind’ Early career architecture rested. They failed to master Sir Albert Richardson, 1914 Alexander Thomson was born in , their style, and so became its slaves’. Stirlingshire, some 15 miles north of . He seems to have been the first to apply Alexander Thomson was known as He was the 17th of the 20 children of a book- Picturesque principles of composition to the ‘Greek’ Thomson because of his tena- keeper at a cotton-spinning mill and part Greek style in his villas, as at his unique Double cious commitment to an idiosyncratic of an extended family that included several Villa at (1856–57) where two iden- interpretation of Ancient Greek archi- Presbyterian missionaries. Thomson moved tical semi-detached houses face in opposite tecture at a time when it was completely to Glasgow with his widowed mother in 1825, directions. Thomson’s finest villa was Holm- out of fashion and Victorian Gothic was and, because of his aptitude for drawing, was wood at (1857–58), of which his first dominant. An eloquent thinker as well articled to the Glasgow architect Robert Foote. biographer, Thomas Gildard, wrote that: ‘If as a practitioner, he came to believe For about 10 years, he worked for John Baird, architecture be poetry in stone-and-lime— that Greek architecture was an expres- a leading architect in the rapidly expanding sion of God-given ‘eternal laws’, and city, becoming his chief draughtsman. Thom- Gothic was an irrational, unstable son set up in independent practice in 1848 (Anglo-Saxon) style. However, he was no copyist, and believed that the Greek with another John Baird (no relation), both should be the starting point for a rational architects having married two daughters of modern architecture. His work was London architect Michael Angelo Nicholson. never pure Greek, and Egyptian and The partnership was amicably terminated in other exotic influences may be detected, 1857, when Thomson’s younger brother George as well as that of the Prussian architect joined the practice, until he left to be a mission- K. F. Schinkel. Practical and inventive, ary in the Cameroons. Thomson’s final pro- Thomson was happy to use cast iron fessional partner was Robert Turnbull. and large sheets of glass with tradi- tional stone masonry in his buildings. Villas Although his imagination ranged far Baird & Thomson began by designing villas and wide, he never travelled abroad, in the new suburbs of Glasgow and along and all his surviving work is in or near the River Clyde; these were in a variety of Glasgow. He designed villas, terraces, styles, including Gothic and Romanesque. commercial buildings and Presbyterian However, by the mid 1850s, Thomson had Egyptian Halls, Union Street (1870–72), a sort churches, in which it is possible to developed the refined and abstracted Grecian of bazaar or shopping centre with an exhibi- explore a recondite symbolism inspired manner for which he is known. He was never tion gallery, was Thomson’s largest and by the apocalyptic paintings of John a conventional Revivalist and he argued that most elaborate commercial building. The Martin. Thomson secured a reputation the earlier promoters of the Greek Revival sculptural treatment of the columns articu- beyond Glasgow, too, due to the con- had failed ‘because they could not see through lating each floor is different, rising to an Alastair Hunter/RIBA Library Photographs Collectoin; RCAHMS spicuous originality of his architecture. the material into the laws upon which that ‘eaves gallery’ below the enormous cornice

70 Country Life, January 13, 2010 www.countrylife.co.uk of the dining room either side of the Thomson and specially made by the Holmwood House, Glasgow entrance. Inside, the staircase rises under Garnkirk Fireclay Company What to look for a circular cupola, and most rooms were 3 The square piers dividing the window Thomson’s finest and most elaborate embellished with a scheme of painted openings are a simple abstracted form villa was built in 1857–58 in a rural site decoration. The house is now owned by derived from Greek architecture, but in Cathcart, for James Couper, a paper the National Trust for . much used by Schinkel in Berlin manufacturer. It is a Picturesque asym- 1 The low-pitched slate roof (not wholly 4 The huge sash windows, which go up metrical composition in Thomson’s Greek practical in the west of Scotland), with and down, are placed behind and deli- style, with the projecting circular bay of generous eaves supported on cast-iron berately separate from the stone piers the parlour balancing the large windows brackets, typical of Thomson’s villas 5 The long wall directly connecting the 2 The terracotta chimneypots villa with the detached coach house is with lotus-flower tops an example of Thomson’s love of con- were designed by tinuous horizontality, which can make his villas prescient of the later prairie houses of

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a great temple an epic—this exquisite little more scientifically constructed than York Min- in London must have seemed unfashionable gem, at once Classic and Picturesque, is as ster.’ His most elegant example is Grecian in England to the point of perversity. Only complete, self-contained, and polished as Buildings in (1867–68). in Glasgow, perhaps, could his idiosyncratic a sonnet.’ Thomson designed the furniture and approach and his exotic imagination flourish. fittings, too, plus the painted decoration. Churches Thomson was not well in his latter years, Thomson’s largest buildings were churches. and, had he survived the severe winter of City architect He designed great temples for United Presby- 1874–75, he planned to make his first trip Thomson designed a number of impressive terian congregations, which Hitchcock con- abroad, to Italy, to try to recover his health. terraces in Glasgow, in which single houses sidered to be ‘three of the finest Romantic But this was not to be, and he was buried in were combined in various ways to make power- Classical churches in the world’. All had richly the Southern Necropolis in Glasgow. ful unified compositions. The grandest was decorated interiors. The first was the Cale- Great Western Terrace (1867–77), but, for the donia Road Church (1855–57, now a gutted American historian Henry-Russell Hitchcock, ruin), where a raised-up temple portico was Moray Place in (1859–61) was ‘the combined with an asymmetrically placed finest of all nineteenth-century terraces… tower. The most inventive was the Queen’s and one of the world’s most superb pieces Park Church (1868–69), which was as much of design based on Greek precedent’. In this Egyptian as Greek in inspiration; its destruc- terrace—in which Thomson himself lived tion by fire in 1943 was Scotland’s worst from 1861 until his death—the ‘mysterious architectural loss of the Second World War. power of the horizontal element’ is evident, The only intact survivor is the St Vincent Street achieved through Thomson’s ‘principle of Church (1857–59), with its unprecedented repetition’. His façade treatment for Queen’s exotic steeple, like a modern interpretation Park Terrace (1856–60, dem.) influenced the of the Temple of Solomon, in which the gal- design of Glasgow’s blocks of tenements. leries and clerestory are carried on shaped Thomson designed several commercial cast-iron columns, and plate-glass windows warehouses Glasgow, in which cast-iron struc- were applied directly to the masonry. tures lay behind stone façades that incorpor- Thomson’s contemporaries regretted that ated large plate-glass windows. Their eleva- he was never awarded a commission for tions are remarkable for the way in which he a public building commensurate with his The St Vincent Street Church of 1857–59 is dissolved the wall plane into a sculptural, talents. The decision of Glasgow University to Thomson’s only surviving intact place of dynamic composition of columns, lintels and give its new buildings to Gilbert Scott, without worship. The Ionic portico may be fairly architraves. These were developments of the competition, provoked a searing, eloquent conventional, but the steeple, rising to an trabeated language of the Greeks and reflected attack on the Gothic Revival from the archi- exotic dome, is full of Old Testament allu- his morbid suspicion of the arch, for, as he tect, but Thomson’s designs for the Albert sions and the whole dramatic composition, notoriously once said: ‘Stonehenge is really Memorial and the South Kensington Museum on a sloping site, is without precedent

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