Book review: Land of Stone

[edit] Land of Stone: A Journey through Modern Architecture in Scotland by Roger Emmerson

‘Hybrid, ubiquitous, low-brow, high-brow, conflicted and thus deeply plural.’ This is how Professor Andrew Patrizio describes the Scotland explored by architect Roger Emmerson in his new book on the nation’s modern architecture.

This contradictory nature is evident when you compare the words of Karel Čapek and Louis I Khan. Playwright Čapek (who is credited for introducing the word ‘robot’) deemed Scotland’s architecture ‘stonily grey and strange of aspect’, whereas famed American architect Khan found it simply ‘fairytale’.

Emmerson’s book Land of Stone: A Journey through Modern Architecture in Scotland does not dwell on the superficial elements of architectural design. Instead, it gives far more focus to the ideas and inspirations that drove Scotland’s city-builders and designers.

Emmerson explores how modernity itself shaped the designers who shaped the nation in turn. He examines the role played by external forces and events, the developments of theory, philosophy and politics across Europe and the world, and how they intersected with Scotland’s own unique view of itself and its own cultural identity.

What makes Scottish architecture Scottish? What ideas drive Scottish architecture? What has modern architecture in Scotland meant to the Scots? Ever since the ‘granny-tops’, rattling and clanking in the wind to draw smoke up the tenemental flues from open coal fires, caught his attention as a three-year-old, architecture and its many parts, purposes, processes and procedures has fascinated Roger Emmerson. For him, architecture has always had profound significance. In Land of Stone he seeks to disengage widely-held conceptions of what a Scottish architecture superficially looks like and to focus on the ideas and events – philosophical, political, practical and personal – that inspired designers and their clients
to create the cities, towns, villages and buildings we cherish today.

[edit] About the author

Roger Emmerson was born in Edinburgh and attended Leith Academy. He studied architecture under Sir Robert Matthew at the University of Edinburgh and under Professor Isi Metzstein at the Glasgow School of Art, graduating from there in 1982. He has worked in London, Newcastle upon Tyne

and, mostly, Edinburgh, running his own practice, ARCHImedia, from 1987 to 1999 while concurrently teaching architectural design at Edinburgh College of Art when he was also visiting lecturer at universities in Venice, Lisbon, Stockholm, Copenhagen and Berkeley. Since 2000 he has worked extensively in the fields of architectural conservation, housing, education and the leisure industries throughout the UK, retiring from architectural practice, although

not architecture, in 2016. He is married and lives in Edinburgh close to his four children, their partners and his seven grandchildren. He devotes his free time to writing, painting and playing guitar.

[edit] Publication details

Land of Stone: A Journey through Modern Architecture in Scotland by Roger Emmerson 9781804250167
Royal Paperback. £25.00

Luath Press Ltd 543/2 Castlehill, The Royal Mile, Edinburgh EH1 2ND committed to publishing well written books worth reading www.luath.co.uk

This article appears in the AT Journal issue 146, summer 2023 as "‘Stonily grey and strange of aspect’ and ‘fairytale’ – the story of Scotland’s unique sense of architecture explored in new book".

--CIAT

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