User talk:78.152.201.178

PLEASE NOTE that I cannot navigate the complicated instructions relating to suggested edits to entries in WikipediA. Let me simply say that I find your on-line Encyclopedia exceedingly useful and have from time to time contributed donations to this admirable endeavour.

Somewhat surprisingly you have an entry on myself under Alistair John Rowan which is factually wrong when it describes me as 'currently Professor of History of Art at University College Cork'. I retired as a member of staff in Cork in September 2003 when I was a little more than 65 years old. I would be grateful therefore if the entry could be brought up to date in this regard.

Your review of my career is a little lop-sided in that you describe me as an 'author of Irish architectural history' whereas a great deal of my work has had to do with British and particularly Scottish architectural history on which I have published extensively. The flyleaf of the cover of the first volume of the Buildings of Ireland on North West Ulster, published by Penguin Books in 1978 gives a more informative resumée of my carreer which you are welcome to use in an edited form: 'Born in Belfast in 1938, Alistair Rowan was educated at Cambpell College and trained as an architect at Edinburgh College of Art. After research at the universities of Cambridge and Padua (Italy) he wroked as an architectural editor with Country Life before joining the Department of Fine Art at the University of Edinburgh in 1967. In 1977 he was appointed Professor of the History of Art at University College Dublin.'

Where the entry describes me as an author of Irish architectural history this ignores the fact that for ten years (1967 - 1977) I acted as Scottish Correspondent for Country Life in which time, apart from articles juornalism on heritage and conservation issues, I researched and wrote extensive accounts on the histories of at least 16 Scottish country houses. An outline bibliogarphy of my architectural writing is contained in 'Architectural Heritage XIII, Essays in Honour of Alistair Rowan', the Journal of the Architectural Heritage Society of Scotland, published by Edinburgh University Press, in 2002. In the period in which I was a lecturer in the University of Edinburgh I also took on the task of organiising a comprehensive research exhibition to commemorate the centenary in 1976 of the death of Scotland's High Victorian architect, David Bryce, and with Valerie Fiddes, who was the exhibition secretary, I wrote the full catalogue of the exhibition which oppened in the Talbot Rice Exhibition Centre in Edinburgh University and subsequently travelled to Dundee, Inverness, Aberdeen, Glasgow and finished at the RIBA Galleries in London. part of the purpose of the exhibition - apart from giving senior students experience in documentary research - was to draw attention to the quality of Scottish nineteenth-century architecture which tended at that time to be ignored in preference to 18th century and late Georgian norms.

It was similar concerns for the survival of good 19th-century buildings in Northern Ireland which led me in 1967 to be a founding member of the Ulster Architectural Heritage Society of which I am currently a Vice President. I have always felt that the raw materials of the architectural historian demand constant protection and have ben happy to add my name in support of many preservation issues in Scotland and in Ireland. A recently documented instance of work of this character appears in account of the restoration of Newman House, St. Stephen's Green Dublin, which I wrote up in 'Art History after Françoise Henry - 50 years at UCD - 1965 - 2015'(Gandon Editions, Kinsale) pp. 163 - 195.

I have also been much involed in documenting the careers of the celebrated Scottish architects, Robert and James Adam, on which I have contributed two volumes: Designss for Castles and Country Villas by Robert & James Adam, (Oxford & New York, 1985) and Robert and James Adam: A Catalogue of Architectural Drawings in the Victoria & Albert Museum, (London, V & A Publications, 1988). [I would be pleased if these to books could be listed among my publications]. At the start of my career I was invited by the Royal Society of Arts in London to give the (three) Bossom Lectures for 1973 for which I was awarded a Silver Medal of the society and which were published in the Journal of the Royal Society of Arts cxxii, 1974 under the title 'After the Adelphi: Forgotten years in the Adam's brothers' practice. My life long interest in the genius of Robert Adam was marked by the invitation by the Soane Museum in London to curate two Adam exhibitions for them: i. 'Bob the Roman - Heroic Antiquity and the architecture of Robert Adam' in 2003 and ii 'Vaulting Ambition - The Adam brothers contractors to the metropolis in the reign of George III' in 2007. And I have published other detailed articles on aspects of the Adams' work. Coming out of my interest in Scottish country house architecture I was invited to be a founding member of the Penicuik House Preservation Trust; I served for fourteen years as Chairman of the Paxton Trust - a magnificent Palladian house near Berwick-upon-Tweed, designed by John Adam and I was instrumental is establishing the Gunsgreen House Trust at Eyemouth to secure the preservation and restoration of a splendid merchant's house, also by John Adam [elder brother of Robert & James], overlooking the harbour there.

I hope you may be able to use some of this material to make the entry on myself somewhat more rounded. Thank you for feading my thoughts.

A.J.R

My computer doe not permit me to type four 'tildes' or at least I don't know where to find them or how to do it

November 2023
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