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'FOR so urbane and sophisticated an architect as Robert Adam it is easy to forget that he was a Scot." What sublime condescension! Or is it just unreconstructed Scottish cringe? Yet the author, Alan Tait, is professor at Glasgow University and his remark opens the catalogue of an exhibition at the National Gallery exploring Robert Adam's creative process through his drawings.
There is little argument that Adam was Britain's greatest architect (unless you want to settle that he was Scotland's and leave the honours in England to Christopher Wren). Frank Lloyd Wright was certainly America's and a major exhibition of his work is on view at Kelvingrove, part of the Glasgow '99 Festival of Architecture. No cringe there. The Mohammed Ali of architecture, Wright was happy to declare himself, not just America's, but the world's greatest architect.
Still, leave Wright for a moment: one hardly needs to counter Professsor Tait's ill-judged apology by saying that like his friends and contemporaries, Allan Ramsay, David Hume, or Adam Smith, it is precisely Adam's urbanity and sophistication that mark him as a Scot; that he was one of that extraordinary community of Scots in the 18th century who set out to reinvent the world from first principles and largely succeeded.
For Adam, first principles were to be found in the architecture of Greece and Rome - "Bob the Roman" his friends called him. But while he studied it with passion and scholarly care, he also looked beyond to Egypt and to the castles of the Middle Ages to find the grammar of a new language of architecture. The drawings here, selected from the 9,000 in the Soane Museum, begin with his studies in Italy: drawings of Roman ruins but also fantasies on the theme of ruins in landscape.
Back in Britain, with his brother James, he established a busy workshop, but oversaw every detail. You...