Page "Alexander Thomson" Paragraph 10

Thomson's villa designs were realized at Langside, Pollokshields, Helensburgh, Cove, the Clyde Estuary, and on the Isle of Bute.

His " mature villas are Grecian in style while resembling no other Greek Revival houses ,... they are dominated by horizontal lines and rest on a strong podium.

" According to Gavin Stamp, " Thomson carefully designed his villas with symmetries within an overall asymmetry in a personal language in which the horizontal discipline of a continuous governing order — whether expressed or implied — was never abandoned.

Regarding similarities to Frank Lloyd Wright, Stamp states, " It has often been remarked that there are clear resemblances between the early houses of the Prairie School and Thomson's horizontally massed design, with its low-pitched gables and spreading eaves -- together with a connecting garden.

" As Sir John Summerson noted, " There is something wildly ' American ' about Thomson -- a ' New World ' attitude.

You can see it in the villas ... a sort of primitivism, ultra-Tuscan.