Architecture Feature

Professor Alistair Rowan, Author of the Architecture Feature

Alistair Rowan was born in Belfast in 1938. He studied architecture at Edinburgh College of Art, took a Ph.D in architectural history in the University of Cambridge and undertook post-doctoral research, on late Baroque architecture in the Veneto, at the University of Padua, Italy, in 1965 and 1966. He later worked as a journalist in London with Country Life magazine and was appointed Lecturer in the Department of Fine Art in the University of Edinburgh in 1967. In 1977 he became the first professor in the History of Art in University College Dublin, a post that he held until 1990 when he became Principal of Edinburgh College of Art. He is a founder member of the Ulster Architectural Heritage Society, was Chairman of the Irish Architectural Archive from 1982 to 1986, and was elected Slade Professor of Fine Art at the University of Oxford for 1987/88. In 1987 he made a series of programmes with RTE on the history of Irish church buildings – ‘God’s Houses’. He has served on the Historic Buildings Council for Scotland from 1986 to 1994 and has been President of the Society of Architectural Historians of Great Britain and of the Architectural Heritage Society of Scotland. In December 2000 he retired from Edinburgh College of Art and accepted an invitation from University College Cork to become its Professor of the History of Art and to set up an undergraduate courses in the College. He retired from UCC in September 2003. He is an authority of the architecture of Robert Adam and is an author and editor of the Yale University Press Buildings of Ireland series.