William Burn was a Scottish architect. He received major commissions from the age of 20 until his death at 81. He built in many styles and was a pioneer of the Scottish Baronial Revival, often referred to as the golden age of Scottish architecture.
Edinburgh Academy
St Johns Princes Street Edinburgh
Ceiling of St Johns, Princes Street, Edinburgh
Melville Monument in St Andrew Square, Edinburgh
Scottish baronial architecture
Scottish baronial or Scots baronial is an architectural style of 19th-century Gothic Revival which revived the forms and ornaments of historical architecture of Scotland in the Late Middle Ages and the Early Modern Period. Reminiscent of Scottish castles, buildings in the Scots baronial style are characterised by elaborate rooflines embellished with conical roofs, tourelles, and battlements with machicolations, often with an asymmetric plan. Popular during the fashion for Romanticism and the Picturesque, Scots baronial architecture was equivalent to the Jacobethan Revival of 19th-century England, and likewise revived the Late Gothic appearance of the fortified domestic architecture of the elites in the Late Middle Ages and the architecture of the Jacobean era.
The sheriff court in Greenock (1869) is a typical Scottish Baronial building with crow-stepped gables and corbelled corner turrets.
Scrabo Tower, a folly in Newtownards, County Down, by architects Lanyon and Lynn (1858)
Claypotts Castle consists of a rectangular central block with two round towers crowned by square garret chambers. The corners of these chambers or cap-houses are strongly corbelled out over the round form and have crow-stepped gables.
Dunrobin Castle is largely the work of Sir Charles Barry and similar to the ornate conical turrets, foundations and windows of contemporary restorations such as Josselin Castle in Brittany.