Biography
Stevenson was born at Glasgow, the son of James Stevenson, a merchant of Glasgow and his wife Jane Stewart Shannan, daughter of Alexander Shannan, merchant of Greenock. He studied with David Bryce and Sir George Gilbert Scott. He practised architecture in Glasgow and, from 1870, in London. He is particularly associated with the British Queen Anne revival style.
Author of the architecture text, Home Architecture (1880), Stevenson also wrote on town planning and the preservation of historic buildings, criticising the "dull and uninteresting" architecture of his age and the "infatuation for making streets straight".
He also designed the interiors of several ocean liners.
His siblings included Flora Stevenson, James Cochran Stevenson and Louisa Stevenson.
Read more about this topic: J. J. Stevenson
Famous quotes containing the word biography:
“There never was a good biography of a good novelist. There couldn’t be. He is too many people, if he’s any good.”
—F. Scott Fitzgerald (1896–1940)
“A great biography should, like the close of a great drama, leave behind it a feeling of serenity. We collect into a small bunch the flowers, the few flowers, which brought sweetness into a life, and present it as an offering to an accomplished destiny. It is the dying refrain of a completed song, the final verse of a finished poem.”
—André Maurois (1885–1967)
“As we approached the log house,... the projecting ends of the logs lapping over each other irregularly several feet at the corners gave it a very rich and picturesque look, far removed from the meanness of weather-boards. It was a very spacious, low building, about eighty feet long, with many large apartments ... a style of architecture not described by Vitruvius, I suspect, though possibly hinted at in the biography of Orpheus.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)