Introduction

This book sets out to define and analyse the phenomenon of the ‘hero building’ as an architecture of Scottish national identity. The Scottish hero buildings are part of a wider international tradition of monumental buildings stretching back several centuries. It has been argued, indeed, that the emergence of the eighteenth-century cult of monumentality, exemplified by the works of architects and theorists such as Ledoux and Boulléé, performs a role in stabilising the foundations and providing certainty and permanence for the emerging bourgeois city, just as the Enlightenment philosophy of Descartes and others had provided for stabilisation of modern science and rationality. ¹ By the nineteenth century the bourgeoisie had developed the cult further and exploited monumental forms to maintain security and certainty in the tumultuous age of nationalism, industrialisation and rapid urbanisation. As Mari Hvattum writes, the monument cult is ‘both a symptom of and a tool for a deep restructuring of society its view of nature and its conception of history’. ² The type of monument built to promote such stability and continuity in nineteenth-century Europe would typically exploit the figure of a ‘hero’ or of ‘heroes’ involved in the establishment, liberation or aggrandisation of the ‘nation’, and around whom all classes of the nation could be expected to rally and cohere. The type is thus nominated here as a ‘Hero Building’. It is a pan-European and American phenomenon, as is seen in, for example, the Regensburg Walhalla, a Greek-style temple completed in 1842 as a hall of fame with hundreds of statues of historic heroes of the Germanic people, and the Altar della Patria, a Roman monument begun in 1890 and completed in 1925, dedicated to Victor Emmanuel, the first king of a reunified Italy.