Robert
Adam in Edinburgh

Centrepiece of north side of Charlotte Square
Described below in chronological order: No. 8 Queen Street - Register House - David Hume's Tomb - Charlotte
Square
University Old College on
separate
page
Click on photos to enlarge
Notes in italics from Pevsner Architectural
Guides,
Edinburgh by John
Gifford, Colin McWilliam and David Walker (1991),
Yale University
Press. The quotations are extracts only, appropriate to
the images.
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No. 8 Queen Street is
distinctively the work of Robert Adam, 1770-1 for Baron Orde. (Boswell
wrote 'This respectable English judge will long be remembered in Scotland
where he built an elegant house and lived in it magnificently.'). Working
within the City's rules, he (Adam) used the long frontage for five
generously spaced bays and exactly defined the proportions of the whole
with the characteristic precision of Craigleith stone. Tripartite
doorpiece with tiny guttae under the frieze, its smooth columns set
against square-cut rustication which is separated by a Vitruvian scroll
from the dead-flat upper wall. The mansard, but not the form of its
windows, is original. ... |
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Register House, E end of
Princes Street. Robert Adam's long frontage with corner turrets stands
austerely elegant at the entry from the Old Town to the New. Begun in 1774
... a domed rotunda within a quadrangle ...
The basic formula is Palladian, a piano nobile over rusticated arches. The
novelty is in the simplicity of its treatment, e.g. the expanse of plain
wall between and above the upper windows, and the tall (but not giant)
Corinthian columns of the centrepiece repeated at the ends. This cool
authority is not Palladian but Neo-Classical in spirit, well attuned to
the strong quadrangular form of the whole. The grace-notes that
characterize Adam the decorator are few but telling, e.g. the fluted
frieze with paterae that becomes a single panel over the central order,
the chaste geometric turrets (miniatures of the main building), and the
little roundel of the Royal Arms (originally of Liardet's cement) fixed in
the pediment like a seal. ... The Wellington Statue in
front of Register House is by John Steell, 1848. |
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The west side of Register
House, and New Register House, set back behind Adam's
building and really in West Register Street, was designed by Robert Matheson
in his most accomplished Italianate manner in 1858-63 ... |
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David Hume's Tomb. Old Calton Burying Ground
... The finest work is the David Hume Monument by Robert Adam, 1777, a grandly Roman cylinder of rough
ashlar with a fluted frieze on the lower stage, a bold Doric entablature
on the upper. Big urn in a niche above the doorpiece. Adam's preliminary
sketches show that the tomb
of Theodoric at Ravenna was the starting point for his design.
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Charlotte Square is the grand
finale of the First
New Town (map)
the last section to be built and the only one designed as a single unified
scheme. The architect was Robert Adam (design 1791).
...
North Side.
A row of eleven houses composed as a 100 m. palace-front of uncommon
finesse and grandeur in which movement is always complemented by
stillness, repetition by variety, plainness by intricacy. Vertically, the
stonework graduates from rock-faced basement to regular ground-floor
rustication, then flat polished ashlar on the first and second floors.
Horizontally, this flat plane is dominant throughout the twenty-one bays,
the rhythm maintained by not-quite-semicircular window heads through the
ground floor of the pavilions and links. Pavilions slightly advanced, each
with a doorway between overarched Venetian windows (Adam showed three
windows), very broad pilasters above, and a crowning sphinx in front of
the pyramidical roof.
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Centrepiece with four pairs of attached columns (Adam's own version of
Corinthian), the ground floor breaking forward beneath each outer pair to
unite the inner pairs whose frieze of inverted garlands is interrupted by
a plain panel at the very centre. Statues were meant to stand on the
pediment. Only the centre bay of the ground floor is arched. At the first
floor, single windows alternating with overarched tripartite windows like
those of the pavilions; the sidelights of the outer two were built up in
the C19. ...
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East elevation. The E has
overarched first-floor windows linked with a fluted frieze, and on the
chimney-head, flanked by balustrades, a serpentine fluted panel like a
Roman sarcophagus; not very well related to the main front, but entirely
in the spirit of late Adam. The execution at least was by Alexander
Stevens, who built the whole E pavilion. |
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West Side of
Charlotte Square. Adam's 1791 design for two identical blocks
each side of St George's church (below) was largely carried out
after 1803, when the buyers of the feus were allowed to have taller windows
than those shown by Adam - a privilege already given to the feuars of the S
and E sides (below). Each block is a short palace-front. The end
pavilions are variants of those on the N side with narrower pilasters (Ionic
this time) and rectangular ground-floor windows. Attached Ionic columns on
the five-bay centrepiece, its wide middle bay with a giant first-floor
tripartite window under a segmental fan of glass. Below, a Roman Doric porch
... Deviations from the Adam design as regards doors and windows are quite
eclipsed by what has happened to the roof-line: the pyramid roofs at the
centre and ends are lost in a continuous ridge which was broken by early C20
attics each side of the church and by clumsy additions on Nos. 15-16.
... |
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West Register
House, originally St. George's church, in the centre of the west
side of Charlotte Square. Not begun until 1811, Robert Reid adopting
Adam's 1791 scheme of portico, dome and flanking pavilions, but making it
bolder in mass and simpler in detail - the latter no doubt in the cause of
economy. ... Reid's dome is a slim, Neo-Classical edition of the
dome of St. Paul's (though clad in green copper), complete with a tempietto
lantern. ... The rear elevation to Randolph Place is impressively
simple, with a Venetian window and lunette above, and shows that the
interior was of Greek-cross plan. ... |
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South Side of the Square. A
repeat of the N side with larger windows and no sphinxes on the end
pavilions, but the tripartite windows in the centrepiece are intact. ... |
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East Side of the Square.
A lower-key version of the W side, designed without the
central porches and tripartite windows but the centrepiece supposed to
have an attic storey with a large lunette window, the attic storey was
omitted when Robert Reid redesigned the centrepieces in 1810. ...
For more information on Charlotte
Square, see the
Pevsner publication above. Alternatively, essay
here by Julian Small. |
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Also by
Robert Adam on this website: University
of Edinburgh - Old College |
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Links:
The
Architecture of Robert Adam
Impressively comprehensive website, including extensive essays on the
buildings above, with illustrations
Robert
Adam at Wikipedia
Full
list of works by the Adam family.
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Map
(searchable)
More
of Edinburgh at Astoft
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