Review: Playfair and the City

Abstract

Playfair and the City City Art Centre, Edinburgh 11 November 2017–25 February 2018 Playfair and the City , an exhibition supported by Historic Environment Scotland and the University of Edinburgh and presented on the occasion of the two-hundredth anniversary of William Henry Playfair's (1790–1857) City Observatory (1818), commemorated Playfair's role in the development of Edinburgh in the decades following the Napoleonic Wars (1803–15). As Edinburgh's New Town population then increased dramatically, the city experienced a “golden age” of cultural and architectural expansion. If the more than five thousand drawings owned by the University of Edinburgh support Playfair's renowned assertion that “nothing good in Architecture can be effected without a monstrous expenditure of patience and Indian Rubber,” this exhibition, comprising forty-five drawings of built and unbuilt projects, revealed his dedication to his adoptive city. John Lowrey and Kirsten Carter McKee, having previously curated William Henry Playfair: One to One (September 2012, Riddle's Court, Edinburgh), which showcased some of Playfair's one-to-one scaled drawings, returned here with an illuminating exhibition that provided another step in the rediscovery of a major nineteenth-century architect. Playfair is often described as a key figure in the transformation of Georgian Edinburgh into the “Athens of the North,” yet Playfair and the City presented him not only as a champion of neoclassicism but also as a more multifaceted architect. His relation with the Scottish capital started in 1804, when he moved to Edinburgh to complete his education, and lasted for the rest of his life. Beginning with his …