Alexander Thomson - Career

Career

Alexander was eventually apprenticed to Glasgow architect Robert Foote, ultimately gaining a place in the office of John Baird as a draughtsman. In 1848 Thomson set up his own practice, Baird & Thomson, with John Baird II, who became his brother-in-law, and this firm lasted nine years. In 1857, as "the rising architectural star of Glasgow," he entered into practice with his brother George where he was to enjoy the most productive years of his life. He served as president of both the Glasgow Architectural Society and the Glasgow Institute of Architects. Thomson was an elder of the United Presbyterian Church of Scotland, and his deep religious convictions informed his work. There is a strong suggestion that he closely identified Solomon’s temple with the raised basilica of the same form of his three major churches.

He produced a diverse range of structures including villas, a castle, urbane terraces, commercial warehouses, tenements, and three extraordinary churches. Of these, Caledonia Road Free Church (1856–57 - now a ruin), Queen's Park United Presbyterian Church (1869 - destroyed in WWII), and St Vincent Street Church (1859), the last is the only intact survivor. Hitchcock once stated, “ three of the finest Romantic Classical churches in the world”. Thomson developed his own highly idiosyncratic style from Greek, Egyptian and Levantine sources and freely adapted them to the needs of the modern city.

At the age of 34, Thomson designed his first and only castle, Craigrownie Castle, which stands at the tip of the Rosneath Peninsula in Cove, overlooking Loch Long. The six-storey structure is Scots Baronial in style, featuring a central tower with battlements, steep gables and oriel windows, in addition to a chapel and a mews cottage.

Thomson's villa designs were realized at Langside, Pollokshields, Helensburgh, Cove, the Clyde Estuary, and on the Isle of Bute. His "mature villas are Grecian in style while resembling no other Greek Revival houses,... are dominated by horizontal lines and rest on a strong podium." According to Gavin Stamp, "Thomson carefully designed his villas with symmetries within an overall asymmetry in a personal language in which the horizontal discipline of a continuous governing order—whether expressed or implied—was never abandoned. Regarding similarities to Frank Lloyd Wright, Stamp states, "It has often been remarked that there are clear resemblances between the early houses of the Prairie School and Thomson's horizontally massed design, with its low-pitched gables and spreading eaves -- together with a connecting garden." As Sir John Summerson noted, "There is something wildly 'American' about Thomson -- a 'New World' attitude. You can see it in the villas...a sort of primitivism, ultra-Tuscan."

Later in his career he would abandon his eclecticism and adopt the purely Ionic Greek style for which he is best known, as such he is perhaps the last in a continuous tradition of British Greek Revival architects. In attacking the Gothic, he "insisted that 'Stonehenge is really more scientifically constructed than York Minster'... Pugin's comment that in their temples 'the Greeks erected their columns like the uprights of Stonehenge'." Other important works still standing include Moray Place, Great Western Terrace, Egyptian Halls in Union Street, Grosvenor Building, Buck's Head Building in Argyle Street, Grecian Buildings in Sauchiehall Street, Walmer and Millbrae Crescents, and his villa, Holmwood House, at Cathcart.

Grave monuments designed by Thomson that are worthy of study include those to the Revd. A.O. Beattie and the Revd. G.M. Middleton, as well as that for John McIntyre in Cathcart Old Parish Cemetery.

Thomson was a visionary who introduced into our vocabulary some of the essential elements of sustainable housing. This argument hinges on an unrealized design Thomson prepared in 1868 for the Glasgow City Improvement Trust, an agency of the Town Council given the task of redeveloping a large area of slum housing centred on the medieval Old Town. The Trust invited Thomson and five other prominent architects to propose designs for the reconstruction of various parcels of land along the spine of Glasgow's High Street. Thomson suggested that closely spaced parallel tenements be built within the central courtyard, the ends of which will be open to facilitate ventilation. He also proposed that alternate streets be glazed for better warmth and safety for the residents. Although Thomson's ideas failed to catch on at the time, new research and CAD techniques have helped show how revolutionary was his proposal for improved workers' housing.