14 Buildings That Lay Bare Scotland’s Soul

If there is one castle that typifies the jaggedly romantic outline of the traditional Scottish tower house, it is Craigievar Castle in Aberdeenshire. With its jumble of oversailing gables and turrets emphasizing an uncompromising verticality, it wears the ceremonial dress of warlike display rather than the armor of battle. Bristling with features such as corbelling and fictive cannons, it was built to look fortified at a time when the need for serious defensive protection had largely passed but when the prestige associated with military endeavor was still deeply embedded in the psyche of the Scottish landowning class. Built for William Forbes in the early 17th century by local masons from almost unworkable local granite hidden beneath a layer of pinkish ocher harling (a lime-based screed), it is far more resolved than first appears. An irregular L-shape on plan, its cleverly worked congregation of spaces provides a fully integrated range of functions from kitchen to great hall—a last triumph of vertical living at a time when grand houses in England and Europe were expanding along a rather more horizontal axis. Internally, Craigievar has a match for its busy outline in its elaborate plasterwork decoration, a fashionable element inspired by royal precedent. The vaulted ceiling of the great hall is enlivened with busts of Roman emperors, and there are caryatids above the main fireplace. Since the 1960s, the property has been in the care of the National Trust for Scotland. (Neil Manson Cameron)

Not only did King James V of Scotland like dressing up as a peasant and wandering around incognito, he was an obsessive Francophile. When he decided to rebuild his hunting-lodge at Falkland, he went scouting around the Loire Valley with a French master-mason, Moses Martin, to get ideas to ensure his latest edifice would pass muster with the French court. He had his reasons: he was married in 1537 to Madeleine de Valois, daughter of King Francis I of France. When she died a few months later, he then married Marie de Guise, daughter of Claude, duke of Guise. Significantly, the treaties setting up both marriages detailed that Falkland Palace was to be given to his brides in the event of his predeceasing them. Built largely by French masons and resplendent with Renaissance detailing up to date with the latest architectural styles of the French court, Falkland was laid out on a square plan around a central courtyard. The south courtyard front has some of the most engaging stone carvings of its period in Britain, an array of character types from young women to venerable soldiers, set within luxuriant wreaths. Yet the main street frontage adopts a veneer of subterfuge. It is in Late Gothic style, misleading historians into thinking it was earlier than the Renaissance courtyard on the other side; both were built at the same time, the palace having been completed in 1541. The frontage simply represents a serious, churchlike foil to the more frivolous splendors within. (Neil Manson Cameron)

As a truly international style, Romanesque architecture spread across Europe with a fascinating multitude of local variations. Dalmeny Church in Edinburgh is the best-preserved Romanesque parish church in Scotland. It has the round-apse plan typical of many parish churches dating from the early to mid-12th century, yet its detailed sculpture shows it to be part of a distinct local group including the abbey at nearby Dunfermline. It was built for the local landowner, Earl Gospatric, from blocks of sandstone, which have helped ensure its longevity. (It was completed in 1140.) Although its western tower was restored under the architect P. MacGregor Chalmers from 1922 to 1927 and rebuilt to the designs of Alfred Greig in 1937, the rest of the building is very much as Gospatric would have known it—its hefty construction and vaulted chancel and apse giving its interior a highly memorable sense of enclosure. The great glory of Dalmeny is its elaborate south doorway. A beguiling range of motifs fills the stones around the arch, many derived from the medieval bestiary. There are centaurs, lusty couples, and the tree of life, all figures charged with symbolism. Building churches was a means of trying to ensure God’s approval, and, with a keen eye to the afterlife, Gospatric commissioned a decorated sarcophagus, which was moved from the church to the graveyard during the Reformation and now stands as a timely reminder of mortality. (Neil Manson Cameron)

With the building of the Royal High School on a rocky outcrop overlooking its center, Edinburgh cemented its reputation as the “Athens of the North.” The school’s complex massing of Greek Revival elements was entirely appropriate for the main public school in a city famous for the “democratic intellect” heralded by the cultural ferment of the Scottish Enlightenment.

The Royal High School was the building that really made the reputation of Thomas Hamilton as a master of the Classical language of architecture. The son of a local mason, Hamilton never visited Greece, yet the way in which he integrated the central “temple” core of the building with Doric colonnades and pavilions is masterly. The setting on Calton Hill, just below the Parthenon-inspired National Monument, is so sensitively integrated with its site, it almost appears to be hewn out of the living rock.

Symmetrical in plan, the principal focus of the building (which was completed in 1829) is the galleried central hall with gilded columns, its details an array of Grecian motifs such as anthemions, palmettes, and rosettes. Cleverly lit from above by windows at gallery level, the heavily coffered ceiling seems to float rather than weigh heavily, and the overall result pays elegant homage to Classical sources without being slavish or pedantic. The Royal High School is a key element in making Edinburgh the greatest Neoclassical city in the world. (Neil Manson Cameron)

With the passing of the Scotland Act 1998, the Scottish Parliament came into existence. Donald Dewar, the Scottish Secretary, led the mission to create a new building that would house Scotland’s first independent parliament in almost 300 years. In 1997 Dewar held an architectural competition, which was won jointly by Catalan architect Enric Miralles and Scottish architecture practice RMJM. It was not, however, a match made in heaven. The complex is sited at the end of the Royal Mile in Edinburgh’s Old Town opposite the Royal Palace at Holyrood. The location was controversial, there was a huge overspend on the initial budget of £40 million ($80 m), the building opened three years late (in 2004), and the whole project was dogged by criticism and adverse publicity. The building, however, is a delight, and it has won many plaudits for its design. With its central motifs of “upturned boats,” interlocking, leaf-shaped buildings topped with elegant skylights, and grass-roofed branchlike buildings merging into adjacent parkland, it achieves a poetic union between the Scottish landscape, its people, its culture, and the city of Edinburgh. Miralles (who, like Dewar, died in 2000) designed the building’s Debating Chamber to emphasize the impression of parliament “sitting in the land” with garden paths and ponds linking the site to the landscape. Other elements include four tower buildings with committee rooms, briefing rooms, and staff offices, a media building, and a large, sky-lit foyer. The oft-photographed windows are of stainless steel, framed in oak with lattice oak sunscreens. Inside, the offices feature concrete, barrel-vaulted ceilings, oak furnishings, and window seats. The building is a tribute to its late architect and encapsulates a “Scottishness,” individuality, and confidence in a new, independent future. (David Taylor)

Although Glasgow is rightly famous for the work of Charles Rennie Mackintosh, at an earlier period it produced another world-class architect in Alexander “Greek” Thomson. Although his designs have traditionally been perceived as a difficult and demanding, opinion has warmed to his unique brand of architectural eclecticism.

Thomson never left Britain, and, although he was nicknamed “Greek,” he utilized published sources showing Egyptian and Indian architecture as well as those illustrating classical buildings. Unlike most of his British contemporaries, he was prepared to experiment boldly with traditional forms, introducing adventurous features and compositions that find their closest kinship in the work of Karl Friedrich Schinkel in Berlin.

Although built on a difficult, sloping site, St. Vincent Street Church (completed in 1859) represents Thomson at the height of his powers. A masterpiece of architectural massing, it raises the traditional classical porticoed form onto a colossal two-story plinth. Positioned in bold asymmetry is an extraordinary tower that mixes Assyrian with Egyptian details and culminates in a fluted egg-shaped dome of Indian derivation. While the building seems almost unnervingly massive on the exterior, the use of top-lit spaces gives the interior a beguiling lightness. With a range of highly resolved details such as attenuated cast-iron columns terminating in capitals, which subvert the traditional acanthus form, this is a building where every last detail has been considered from a unique perspective. Sadly, many of Thomson’s other works have been damaged or demolished, adding an extra level of importance to this most idiosyncratic of Victorian churches. (Neil Manson Cameron)

While most buildings considered interesting are unique, some are fascinating because they are typical. Glasgow’s Tenement House (145 Buccleuch Street) falls into this latter category. It is a time capsule that represents an extraordinary vignette of life at the turn of the 19th century and the beginning of the 20th century. Its very ordinariness is what makes it so important.

Built in 1892 and lived in from 1911 until 1965 by Agnes Toward, a shorthand typist, it preserves the traditional features of the tenement—an apartment in a small block of similar properties. The four-story block housing is built of the red sandstone that is distinctive of much of Glasgow’s architecture of this period. Plain but solidly built, with a centrally placed “close” (common entry) providing access to all apartments via a stone stair, the house is typical of tenement blocks built across the city in the boom years before the start of World War I.

Owned by the National Trust for Scotland since 1982, it preserves features such as gas lighting, the coal-fired cooking range, and a bed-recess off the kitchen. It is also decorated with many of Toward’s possessions, including a rosewood upright piano and a grandfather clock. It allows the visitor an understanding of how life was lived by ordinary people in one of Europe’s great industrial cities. (Neil Manson Cameron)

The brief for the Glasgow School of Art was a specific one, and a competition was held for an architect to design a “plain building.” The winning architect also had to take into account that the site available was a difficult one to accommodate. It was long, narrow, and on a steep incline of 30 feet (9 m). Charles Rennie Mackintosh beat 11 other architects with his groundbreaking, practical, and fittingly simple design. One of the building’s most striking features is the clever use of windows. Tall and slender, they echo the size of the rooms within the building, individual rooms having differently sized windows. Inside the school, maximum use is made of natural and artificial light. As an artist himself, Mackintosh understood the importance of being able to work by natural light. The school’s east wing was built between 1897 and 1899; the west wing between 1907 and 1909. The new building included attic studios, a design so popular that similar studios were added to the east wing. The western doorway is more elaborate than the rest of the building, with its gradation of stone carvings suggestive of an entrance to an Egyptian pyramid. It is a fascinating anticipation of Art Deco design. Externally the building owes a debt to the grandeur of the Scottish Baronial tradition, with its forbidding outer walls, yet the internal spaces are refreshingly modern. It is a building of sharp contrasts: the exterior appears austere, the interior welcoming. (Lucinda Hawksley)

Far outside the city of Glasgow, at the top of a hill in Helensburgh, stands Charles Rennie Mackintosh’s finest domestic project: Hill House. Completed in 1902, it is a lesson in the manipulation of light, construction, and the art of interior design. It is the epitome of Mackintosh’s holistic approach to architecture both within and without. While he was widely venerated in turn-of-the-century Vienna, where enthusiasm for Art Nouveau was at its peak, Mackintosh’s stark white walls with delicate flower stenciled designs were not fully appreciated in Victorian Britain. However, he had the perfect patron in wealthy publisher Walter Blackie. On receiving the commission for Blackie’s family home, Mackintosh spent many months with the Blackies, gaining an insight into the needs of their way of life. He then worked on the interior layout before starting on the exterior elevations.

The articulation is in the form—every space imagined fully and complete in his mind. With its distinctive cylindrical stair tower, large asymmetric gable-end, steeply sloping roofs, and many small, stone-framed windows set into thick, gray rendered walls, the underlying theme is of a Scottish baronial keep or castle. It even has a tower in one corner, some narrow arrow-slit windows, a parapet, and a gardener’s hut that looks like a dovecote. Internally, the home is an orchestrated balance of light and shadow. Furniture and light fittings, designed with his wife Margaret, line the walls. Hill House is one of the highlights of Mackintosh’s small Scottish portfolio. (Beatrice Galilee)

Set amid the rolling upland of the Scottish Borders is one of the most sculptural buildings of late 20th-century Britain. Designed by Yorkshire-born Peter Womersley, a talented but elusive Modernist architect, the Design Studio was built for Bernat Klein, the celebrated Yugoslavian-born textile designer. Klein’s geometric house, High Sunderland, also designed by Womersley, stands nearby.

The Design Studio uses reinforced concrete and glass over a brick base-course, the floors marked by massive and daringly oversailing beams, reflecting Womersley’s fascination with varied textures and structural adventurism. The balance between horizontal and vertical, and between solid and void, seems perfect. Surrounded by a gnarled battalion of wind-bent trees and founded on a step of flat ground amid hilly fields, the building, which was completed in 1972, has sharp lines in startling but sympathetic contrast to its surroundings. The first-floor walkway ends on an earthen mound—a fortuitous practical addition insisted upon by the planning authorities to provide an alternative fire escape—that provides a powerful symbol of the close relationship between the building and the landscape. With a cleverly arranged suite of workspaces, the Bernat Klein Design Studio demonstrates the involvement with natural forms, changing light, and color that was key to Womersley’s work. (Neil Manson Cameron)

A large-scale sculpture as much as a building, An Turas stands on the foreshore of Tiree, a remote and beautiful Scottish island. It is a startling contemporary intervention in the landscape. Built in 2003 as a shelter for passengers waiting for the local ferry, An Turas, which means “the journey” in Gaelic, represents a close collaboration between Sutherland Hussey and four established Scottish artists—Jake Harvey, Glen Onwin, Donald Urquhart, and Sandra Kennedy. The project was commissioned by a local arts enterprise organization. Having visited the location together, the artists and architects considered the various qualities that made the island distinctive, then devised the structure and its textures to draw out related themes. An Turas is formed of three main parts laid out as a long rectangle on plan—a tunnel, a bridge, and a glass box. Each part provides a different involvement with the surroundings, with the glass box being the main point of focus and allowing protected but delightfully engaging views across the bay. The white-walled tunnel protects the viewer from the harsh and frequent winds but is open to the sky, whereas the slatted sides of the bridge permit the patterns in the rocks and sand to be read. It is a pure and beautifully streamlined design, and, although it ostensibly performs its intended function as a passenger shelter, it is effectively a platform from which to comfortably engage with the surrounding topography. What makes it truly engaging, though, is the contrast its rectilinearity provides with the natural forms that surround it while simultaneously providing interaction with them. Here, Functionalism is secondary to inspiration, and at essence its closest architectural siblings are the viewing pavilions, belvederes, and follies that punctuate the more elaborately designed landscapes of Georgian Britain. (Neil Manson Cameron)

Two Nissen huts placed end to end are all that remain of Camp 60, a prisoner-of-war camp on the small island of Lambholm, in the Orkneys. From 1943 until the end of World War II, Italian prisoners converted the huts into a chapel. Italian prisoners had been sent to Lambholm in 1940 to assist with the construction of the Churchill Barrier, a concrete barricade blocking the eastern approach to Scarpa Flow. In January 1942, more than 500 Italians were relocated to Camp 60, which comprised 13 Nissen huts. Almost as soon as they arrived, the Italians began to improve their surroundings. They used concrete left over from the construction of the camp to build paths, a theater, and a recreation hut, complete with a concrete snooker table. But their greatest undertaking was the chapel, on which work began toward the end of 1943. The project was managed by artist Domenico Chiocchetti. Once the huts had been repositioned, work began on the chancel, followed by the altar, stoop, and the elaborate facade. All were constructed from concrete and scrap materials. Behind the altar, Chiocchetti created his masterpiece, a painting portraying the Madonna and Child. The interior walls were paneled with plasterboard and painted with scenes of Italian churches. In total the work took 18 months. The prisoners were repatriated early in 1945. The chapel was rededicated in 1960, with Chiocchetti in attendance. (Adam Mornement)

Born in Scotland, Robert Adam is widely regarded as the greatest British architect of the 18th century. The celebrated “Adam style”—which integrated Neoclassical architectural form and elaborate interior decoration—was derived from the architect’s research into the Classical art and architecture of ancient Rome.

At Culzean, on the dramatic west coast of Scotland, Adam created his most romantic house in the castellated style that became the hallmark of his later commissions. Viewed from the sea, the heftlike shape of the castle appears to have grown from the rugged rocks on which it stands. Yet seen from the landward side, it presents a more refined and balanced composition, using the idiom of fortification as no more than a playful veneer. Set within grounds that include woodland, formal gardens, and romantic follies, Culzean represents an exceptional example of aristocratic 18th-century taste.

Built for David Kennedy, the 10th earl of Cassillis, incorporating elements from earlier ancestral buildings on the site, the house almost bankrupted him. Nevertheless, it remained within the Kennedy family from its completion, in 1792, until the National Trust for Scotland assumed stewardship in 1945. Although it has the full panoply of grand apartments and a circular drawing room, the highlight of the interior is the colonnaded oval staircase. Lit dramatically from above, this element was a late addition to the Adam plan, but it acts as the compositional core of the building. (Neil Manson Cameron)

It is always a special thrill to find sheer opulence in the middle of wild countryside. Kinloch Castle is an extraordinary example of Edwardian excess situated on Rum, a beautiful but remote island of the Inner Hebrides off the west coast of Scotland. Fitted out with the finest furniture and fittings of the period, it survives as one of the richest and most evocative interiors of the Edwardian age. Built for the wealthy industrialist Sir George Bullough, who inherited a massive fortune based on textile production in Lancashire, England, it was a sporting retreat used principally as a base for stalking red deer. Although there had been a previous house nearby, Sir George had it replaced with the present building, a castle in mock Tudor style with Scottish Baronial inflections, laid out around a central courtyard and filled to overflowing with eye-catching furnishings and the latest modern conveniences. Designed by the London firm Leeming & Leeming, building began in 1897, and the red sandstone used for its construction was brought by ship from the south of Scotland. With no expense spared, the house had its own hydroelectric plant, air conditioning, and telephone system, almost unheard-of luxuries at the time. (It was completed in 1906.) With the finest paneling and furniture, much of it supplied by James Shoolbred & Co. of London, Kinloch Castle was also filled with mementos of Sir George’s travels to exotic places. Altogether, it represents supreme Edwardian frivolity in the years before World War I. (Neil Manson Cameron)