Gray's School of Art - Garthdee Campus

Garthdee Campus

In the early 1950s, Thomas Scott Sutherland (1899–1963), an Aberdeen architect who had attended the School of Architecture at Robert Gordon's Technical College, gifted his Victorian mansion Garthdee House and its surrounding estate on the southern outskirts of Aberdeen, to the School of Architecture, along with a substantial endowment. The relocated school opened at Garthdee in 1956 as the Scott Sutherland School of Architecture.

Following on from this development, in 1966 Gray's School of Art was relocated to a function-built Modernist building on the Garthdee Estate, which marked the beginning of the redevelopment of Garthdee by Robert Gordon's Institute of Technology. The Gray's School of Art building has three floors and is designed in a U-plan with a large front facade and two wings.

The ground floor on the main facade houses the printmaking studios and workshops as well as administrative offices, a computer lab, photocopiers and textile-printing workshops. The East Wing houses a photographic studio, the school art shop, refectory and the large First Year Studio Hall. The West Wing houses ceramics, jewellery and 3D design workshops as well as life model changing rooms and two large open-plan sculpture studios. Both wings have only one floor, although underneath the sculpture and first year studios, which are built into the hill on which the school stands, there are two general woodwork and metalwork workshops.

The first floor houses second and third year painting studios, visual communication studios, textiles studios, life drawing rooms, the head of school's office in the east wing and the printmaking staff room in the west. The second floor until recently exclusively housed the fourth year painting studios. However, in the last two years two rooms have been reallocated to the new photography and electronic media (PEM) course.

Gray's School of Art also has studios in the adjacent 'Scott Sutherland School of Architecture and Built Environment' where the studios of Communication Design are housed, while all other departments are hosted in the main building. Many facilities such as workshops and computing facilities are shared between the two schools.

In the early 1990s, "temporary" cabins were put in place to house the growing number of students. These are still in use, housing 3D design studios, design for industry studios, critical and contextual studies, and the MFA programme studios.