The Architecture of William Burn: Style and Identity in Scotland's Imperial Age

BURN-BEYOND is a study of the Scottish architect William Burn (1789-1870), the progenitor of ‘Scots Baronial’ architecture, one of the earliest and most distinctive examples of a self-consciously ‘national’ revivalist style.

Burn’s career spanned the period when the world was being transformed by British imperial and economic power and by the aftermath of the French Revolution, when architecture became an enduring vehicle for defining national, political and social identities.

His achievement was to formulate a pro-Scottish architectural identity that was simultaneously accepted as pro-establishment and British.

His work is of special contemporary relevance given the recent resurgence of nationalist politics in the face of contemporary trends towards economic and cultural globalisation.

This study will articulate debates over architectural style and national identity in Britain and beyond, and show that, through Burn’s work, the Scots foreshadowed the later 19th-century quest to establish political or cultural difference through national or pseudo-national architectural revivalism.

Using innovative approaches to stylistic, spatial and historical analysis, this project will explore the construction of national, imperial, political and gender identities in Burn’s work.

It will seek to: establish the motivations for and implications of Burn’s unrivalled stylistic diversity; demonstrate how Burn contributed to the formulation of a Scottish architectural identity; and understand how his famously ingenious domestic planning shaped gender, familial and social relationships.

It will therefore generate new insights into the interactions between stylistic choice and social, cultural and political identities in Europe in the Romantic era, and enrich studies of politics, literature, gender relations, the visual arts and nationalism. It will be of particular value to historians studying the emergence of stylistic nationalism elsewhere.