Alexander Thomson

Alexander “Greek” Thomson (9 April 1817 – 22 March 1875) was an eminent Scottish architect and architectural theorist, widely regarded as the pre‑eminent architect of his era in Glasgow and a pioneer in sustainable building. Born in the village of Balfron in Stirlingshire, he was the son of John Thomson, a bookkeeper, and Elizabeth Cooper Thomson, and was the ninth of twelve children. His father, who already had eight grown children from a previous marriage, died when Alexander was seven. Following this loss, the family moved to the outskirts of Glasgow, where further tragedy struck: the eldest daughter, Jane, and three of her brothers died between 1828 and 1830, the year in which Alexander’s mother also died. The surviving children then moved to Hangingshaw, just south of Glasgow, to live with one of the older brothers, William, a teacher, and his wife and child. The Thomson boys all worked from a young age, but the children were also home schooled. An older brother, Ebenezer, was employed as a bookkeeper in a lawyer’s office, possibly Wilson, James, and Kays, and later became a partner in the business.

Thomson’s early exposure to work and study in Glasgow shaped his professional path. In 1834 he began work as a clerk in a lawyer’s office in the city. One of the firm’s clients was the architect Robert Foote, who, impressed by Thomson’s drawings, took him on as an articled apprentice. In Foote’s office he gained access to an extensive library and a collection of classical casts, which helped form his life‑long engagement with classical architecture. When Foote retired due to illness in 1836, Thomson transferred his articles to the architect John Baird, initially as an assistant and later as chief draughtsman. His younger brother George was also apprenticed to Baird in the early 1840s, further strengthening the family’s connection to the architectural profession. On 21 September 1847, Thomson married Jane Nicholson, granddaughter of the architect Peter Nicholson, in a double wedding ceremony at which her sister Jessie married another architect, John Baird II (unrelated to Thomson’s employer). They had twelve children in total, five of whom they later lost in an epidemic.

Thomson’s independent career developed through a series of partnerships that placed him at the center of Glasgow’s mid‑nineteenth‑century building boom. In 1848 he joined John Baird II in the practice of Baird & Thomson, formed after Baird’s break with his previous partner. By the mid‑1850s Thomson had established himself as “the rising architectural star of Glasgow.” In 1857 he entered into practice with his brother George, a partnership in which he enjoyed the most productive years of his life. Over the following decades he produced a diverse range of structures, including villas, a castle, urbane terraces, commercial warehouses, tenements, and three extraordinary churches. At the age of thirty‑four he designed his first and only castle, Craigrownie Castle, at Cove on the Rosneath Peninsula overlooking Loch Long. This six‑storey Scots Baronial structure features a central tower with battlements, steep gables, oriel windows, a chapel, and a mews cottage. His villas were realized at Langside, Pollokshields, Helensburgh, Cove, along the Clyde Estuary, and on the Isle of Bute. These mature villas, Grecian in style yet unlike other Greek Revival houses, are dominated by horizontal lines and rest on a strong podium. As Gavin Stamp observed, Thomson carefully composed symmetries within an overall asymmetry, using a personal language in which the horizontal discipline of a continuous governing order—whether expressed or implied—was never abandoned.

Thomson’s ecclesiastical and urban work secured his reputation as one of the leading Romantic Classical architects of the nineteenth century. His three major churches—Caledonia Road Church (1856–57), now a ruin; St Vincent Street Church (1859), the only intact survivor; and Queen’s Park United Presbyterian Church (1869), destroyed in the Second World War—were described by Henry‑Russell Hitchcock as “three of the finest Romantic Classical churches in the world.” An elder of the United Presbyterian Church of Scotland, Thomson held deep religious convictions that informed his architectural thinking, and there is strong suggestion that he closely identified Solomon’s Temple with the raised basilica form of these churches. In his commercial and residential work he developed an idiosyncratic style drawing on Greek, Egyptian, and Levantine sources, freely adapted to the needs of the modern industrial city. Among his most important surviving works are Moray Place and Great Western Terrace in Glasgow; Egyptian Halls in Union Street; the Grosvenor Building; the Buck’s Head Building in Argyle Street; the Grecian Buildings in Sauchiehall Street; Walmer and Millbrae Crescents; and his own villa, Holmwood House, at Cathcart. He also designed notable grave monuments, including those to the Revd. A. O. Beattie and the Revd. G. M. Middleton, as well as the monument to John McIntyre in Cathcart Old Parish Cemetery.

Over the course of his career Thomson gradually abandoned his earlier eclecticism and adopted the purely Ionic Greek style for which he is best known, making him arguably the last major figure in the continuous tradition of British Greek Revival architecture. A vigorous critic of Gothic Revival, he famously insisted that “Stonehenge is really more scientifically constructed than York Minster,” turning around A. W. N. Pugin’s comment that the Greeks erected their columns like the uprights of Stonehenge. His work, with its strong horizontality, low‑pitched gables, spreading eaves, and integration of house and garden, has often been compared to the early houses of the American Prairie School. Gavin Stamp and others have noted clear resemblances between Thomson’s horizontally massed designs and the work of Frank Lloyd Wright, while Sir John Summerson remarked that there was something “wildly ‘American’” and “New World” about Thomson’s villas, a kind of primitivism that anticipated later transatlantic developments. Although his buildings were well known in the architectural press of his own day, his reputation remained largely confined to Glasgow during his lifetime, and it was only from the 1950s and 1960s onward that his critical standing revived, not least in connection with his probable influence on Wright. In 1966 Henry‑Russell Hitchcock wrote that Glasgow in the previous 150 years had produced two of the greatest architects of the Western world—Charles Rennie Mackintosh and, “an even greater and happily more productive architect,” Alexander Thomson—whose influence could be traced in America, in Milwaukee and New York City, though not in Europe.

Thomson was also a visionary in matters of urban reform and what would now be called sustainable housing. In 1868 he prepared an unrealized design for the Glasgow City Improvement Trust, an agency of the Town Council charged with redeveloping a large area of slum housing in the medieval Old Town. Invited along with five other prominent architects to propose schemes for parcels of land along the High Street, he suggested closely spaced parallel tenements built within a central courtyard, with open ends to facilitate ventilation. He further proposed that alternate streets be glazed to provide greater warmth and safety for residents. Although these ideas did not catch on at the time, later research and computer‑aided design reconstructions have demonstrated how revolutionary his proposals were for improving workers’ housing and have underpinned the argument that he introduced into architectural discourse some of the essential elements of sustainable building. His published writings include the Haldane lectures on the history of architecture (1874) and his Inquiry as to the Appropriateness of the Gothic Style for the Proposed Building for the University of Glasgow (1866), in which he attempted to refute John Ruskin’s and Pugin’s claims for the superiority of Gothic architecture.

Thomson’s family connections extended into missionary and scientific work abroad. One brother, George Thomson (1819–1878), became a Baptist missionary in Limbe, Cameroon (then known as Victoria), where he combined religious activities with a passion for botany; an epiphytic orchid originally named Pachystoma thomsonianum, now known as Ancistrochilus thomsonianus, commemorates his work. A nephew, the Rev. William Cooper Thomson (1829–1878), served as a missionary in Nigeria; the bleeding‑heart vine Clerodendrum thomsoniae was named after his first wife. Within architecture, Thomson’s influence extended beyond Britain. The British émigré architect George Ashdown Audsley closely followed Thomson’s ornamentation in several secular buildings in the United States, most notably the Bowling Green Offices (completed 1896) in New York City, whose highly carved granite base is in the Thomson manner, with Chicago School–style brick floors above.

Alexander Thomson died on 22 March 1875 at his home in Moray Place, Strathbungo, Glasgow, fittingly in one of his own creations. He was buried on 26 March 1875 in the Gorbals Southern Necropolis, in the lair adjacent to that in which his five deceased children had been laid to rest, and was later joined there by his widow, Jane, in 1889. His obituary, written by his friend Thomas Gildard, appeared in Building News on 26 March 1875; Gildard also went on to write an early biography of the architect. Immediately after his death, the Glasgow Institute of Architects established the Alexander Thomson Memorial. A marble bust by John Mossman was presented to the Corporation Galleries in Sauchiehall Street and is now displayed in the Kelvingrove Art Gallery and Museum. The Alexander Thomson Travelling Studentship was founded “for the purpose of providing a travelling studentship for the furtherance of the study of ancient classic architecture, with special reference to the principles illustrated in Mr. Thomson’s works”; the second recipient was Charles Rennie Mackintosh, thereby linking two of Glasgow’s most significant architects. Holmwood House, generally considered Thomson’s finest and most original residential work, has been restored by the National Trust for Scotland and opened to the public; during renovation, nineteen panels of a classical frieze depicting scenes from Homer’s Iliad were discovered beneath layers of paint and wallpaper, underscoring the aptness of his nickname “Greek” Thomson. In 1999 a major retrospective, “Alexander Thomson: The Unknown Genius,” was held at The Lighthouse in Glasgow, highlighting the need to preserve his surviving buildings. That same year he was commemorated on a Clydesdale Bank £20 note dated 9 April, his birthday, issued to mark Glasgow’s designation as UK City of Architecture and Design; the note’s obverse bears his portrait, while the reverse features an interior view of the dome of Holmwood House. Despite long periods of neglect in the city his work helped define, Thomson is now recognized as one of the most original and intellectually rigorous architects of the nineteenth century.