Egyptian Halls - Architecturally Considered
The following is a piece written by the late Mark Baines in 2019, whilst chairman of The Alexander Thomson Society.
The Egyptian Halls, Union Street, is quite possibly one of Glasgow’s greatest buildings. Designed by Alexander Thomson from 1870 and completed in 1872 for the iron manufacturer, James Henderson Robertson, it is a deep plan, six storey building with four shops occupying the ground floor and basement with a further four commercial levels above. From the centrally positioned entrance a stair, with Thomson patterned cast iron balustrades, rises to the upper levels behind which is aligned a pair of hoists and a secondary stair in an octagonal shaft. Originally a department store, a bazaar and exhibition rooms the building subsequently suffered an ignominious series of occupancies and, the shops aside, has remained vacant for many years. It is a unique building that combines utility, intelligence and artistry to create an urban palazzo like no other.
The plan is shaped precisely to the plot and extends fully from the street to the narrow, rear service lane. The upper three floor plates are punctuated for light and air by two square light wells located in the heart of the plan and to either side of the stair. The floors and flat roof are supported on a symmetrically disposed cast iron frame of columns, primary and secondary beams with concrete infill. The cast iron frame is extended at shop level to support the principal street façade. Decoration is restrained if not sparse. The undressed masonry rear wall is load bearing with regularly spaced windows each divided, or subdivided, by characteristically idiosyncratic cast iron mullions of bespoke detail. The street façade is, predictably, far more complex, clearly designed to impress and one of Thomson’s finest contributions to Glasgow’s urban landscape.
Three, individually modelled colonnades, each consisting of nineteen columns, successively rise above the decoratively framed, plate glass shop fronts and extend without interruption across the full expanse of the façade, inclusive of the party walls. The intervening entablatures culminate in a massive cornice which artfully conceals the uppermost floor lit by a continuous clerestory window angled towards the gutter behind an upper parapet.
No hint of the internal frame is revealed externally. Indeed, one of the intriguing curiosities of the building is the disjunction between the interval of the cast iron frame within and that of the masonry columns outside, an arrangement which would appear to deter, or even deny, easy internal partitioning of the floors. In contradiction to this notion, the façade explicitly expresses the open continuity of the floor levels without compromising their possible subdivision.
The colonnaded façade is in fact a structurally autonomous, loadbearing masonry screen with its own disciplined integrity of column and beam and a forerunner of the curtain wall. This is real construction, not applied cladding.
What follows is truly extraordinary. For in the Egyptian Halls, Thomson’s genius is fully revealed in a gravity defying descent from sky to street. It therefore seems logical to describe the building from top to bottom.
The weight of the cornice is manifestly resisted but forcefully carried by freestanding cylindrical, tapered and fluted columns with curvaceous flared capitals which all but conceal an independent, continuous screen of timber and glass placed behind. This reprises equivalent details in the Double Villa, Holmwood and the long lost Cairney Building. Below, coupled by a recesses and conjoined capitals, pairs of square section columns of plain detail are followed by an advanced plane of equally slender, but single elongated square section columns surmounted by elaborate, structurally implausible bracketed scrolls, a detail more akin to cast iron rather than masonry This imparts a sense of weightlessness, or suspension, rather than support. One could easily be persuaded by the idea that either of these columnar arrangements could have formed the mould for the other. Correspondingly the three intervening entablatures proportionately diminish in depth in harmony with the progressively slender profiles of the columns. Each range of columns is consequently attuned to the depths of the entablatures above and below. This allows the whole ensemble to finally alight on the broad expanse of the delicately framed plate glass shop fronts. Compression surrenders to tension and convention challenged.
Perhaps, in this building, Thomson was trying to reconcile the apparent aesthetic difficulties, if not futility, of assembling a masonry structure over a near transparent base. Interestingly, if not paradoxically, the oblique view offers a contrasting interpretation.
From this vantage point the foremost planes of the columnar facade diminish in height and progressively recede, level by level, from the street to meet the umbrella of the cornice, a calculated gradation equivalent to the entasis of a classical column. For in fact the distribution of the mass of the columns is greatest at the lower level than the top, a clever visual contrivance achieved by Thomson’s skilful manipulation of the column profiles in relation to that of the entablatures and the necessity of the structural buttressing at first floor level. The pronounced horizontality of the entablatures contrasts with the verticality of the colonnades within which the windows disappear in what now appears to be a physically dense, highly articulated wall, its repetitive modulation vividly amplified by perspective foreshortening, light and shadow.
Unusually, in Thomson’s work, the Egyptian Halls is an apparently open composition, the whole contained by the adjoining buildings whilst held together by its own innate sense of proportion. By relinquishing his customary physical enhancement of a building’s extremities, the composition of the Egyptian Halls perhaps comes closest to the dramatic notion of infinity which Thomson so admired in the architecturally imaginative paintings of his near contemporary, the artist John Martin..
As such, the building stands firmly alongside the classical precedents which inspired it as well as Renaissance structures such as Bartolomeo Bon’s Procuratie Vecchie and Jacopo Sansovino’s library, both in Venice, as well as Palladio’s transformational loggia circumscribing the Palazzo della Ragione in Verona. Later commercial buildings would include the Louis Sullivan’s Wainwright Building and Carson Pirie Scott store in Chicago, albeit both these facades encase steel frames. Contemporary examples are exemplified by Raphael Moneo’s City Hall in Murcia, David Chipperfield’s Kaufhaus Tyrol department store in Innsbruck and Eric Parry’s office building in Finsbury Square, London. All these buildings exhibit similar compositional principles in the explicit structuring of their very different facades.
Simplicity of conception conspires with compelling logic to create a building of undeniably sophisticated and subtle complexity. Repetition, machined mass production and innovation are all evocatively celebrated in Thomson’s salute to the burgeoning industrial city by way of abstracted historical source and original thought. The Egyptian Halls is an architectural masterpiece.
