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Scotch Baronial: Architecture and National Identity in Scotland
Paperback / softback
£24.99
As the debate about Scottish independence rages on, this book takes a timely look at how Scotlands politics have been expressed in its architecture. It is an aspect of Scottish history that has hitherto been little discussed, and yet the architecture of Scotland in particular the Scotch Baronial style has been of great consequence to the ongoing narrative of Scottish national identity. This book fills that gap in scholarship through a politically-framed examination of Scotlands architecture, tracing how it was used to serve successive political agendas within Scotland during the three unionist centuries from the early 17th to the early 20th century. It is a history which encompasses all the principal public architectural works of secular Scottish architecture of the period, from the palaces left behind by the lost monarchy to revivalist castles and the proud town halls of the Victorian age, tracing their wildly fluctuating political and national connotations. It is also a story which reaches beyond Scotland and into a wider, international picture: the Scotch Baronial was the worlds first self-consciously nationalist architecture the harbinger of an international movement of national styles, rejecting classical antiquity for local medieval inspiration. The book ends by bringing the story into the 21st century, relating the paradox of contemporary neo-modernist architecture in todays Scotland, as exemplified in the Holyrood parliament, with the paradoxes embodied in 300 years of the Scotch Baronial style