The Dome is a building on
George Street in the
New Town
New is an adjective referring to something recently made, discovered, or created.
New or NEW may refer to:
Music
* New, singer of K-pop group The Boyz
Albums and EPs
* ''New'' (album), by Paul McCartney, 2013
* ''New'' (EP), by Regurgitator, ...
of
Edinburgh
Edinburgh ( ; gd, Dùn Èideann ) is the capital city of Scotland and one of its 32 Council areas of Scotland, council areas. Historically part of the county of Midlothian (interchangeably Edinburghshire before 1921), it is located in Lothian ...
,
Scotland
Scotland (, ) is a country that is part of the United Kingdom. Covering the northern third of the island of Great Britain, mainland Scotland has a border with England to the southeast and is otherwise surrounded by the Atlantic Ocean to the ...
,
United Kingdom
The United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland, commonly known as the United Kingdom (UK) or Britain, is a country in Europe, off the north-western coast of the continental mainland. It comprises England, Scotland, Wales and North ...
. It currently functions as a bar, restaurant and
nightclub
A nightclub (music club, discothèque, disco club, or simply club) is an entertainment venue during nighttime comprising a dance floor, lightshow, and a stage for live music or a disc jockey (DJ) who plays recorded music.
Nightclubs gener ...
, although it was first built as the headquarters of the
Commercial Bank of Scotland
The Commercial Bank of Scotland Ltd. was a Scottish commercial bank. It was founded in Edinburgh in 1810, and obtained a royal charter in 1831. It grew substantially through the 19th and early 20th centuries, until 1958, when it merged with th ...
in 1847. The building was designed by
David Rhind
David Rhind FRSE (1808 – 26 April 1883) was a prominent Scottish architect, mainly remembered for his public buildings, banks, churches and schools, most of which are now listed buildings
In the United Kingdom, a listed building or ...
in a
Graeco-Roman
The Greco-Roman civilization (; also Greco-Roman culture; spelled Graeco-Roman in the Commonwealth), as understood by modern scholars and writers, includes the geographical regions and countries that culturally—and so historically—were di ...
style. It stands on the site of the Physicians' Hall, the offices of the
Royal College of Physicians of Edinburgh
The Royal College of Physicians of Edinburgh (RCPE) is a medical royal college in Scotland. It is one of three organisations that sets the specialty training standards for physicians in the United Kingdom. It was established by Royal charter ...
, which was constructed in the 18th century to designs by
James Craig, the planner of the New Town. The Dome is a category A
listed building
In the United Kingdom, a listed building or listed structure is one that has been placed on one of the four statutory lists maintained by Historic England in England, Historic Environment Scotland in Scotland, in Wales, and the Northern Irel ...
. The current operating business is Caledonian Heritable, a hotel, bars and restaurant group founded by Portobello born entrepreneur Kevin Doyle (also Archerfield, Ryan's Bar, & co)
Physicians' Hall
![The Physicians Hall on George Street in Edinburgh 1770](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/5/55/The_Physicians_Hall_on_George_Street_in_Edinburgh_1770.jpg)
The Dome stands on the site of the old Physicians' Hall, by architect James Craig. As the winner of the New Town planning competition in 1766, he received few commissions for individual buildings within his masterplan. However, he did design the Physicians' Hall for the
Royal College of Physicians of Edinburgh
The Royal College of Physicians of Edinburgh (RCPE) is a medical royal college in Scotland. It is one of three organisations that sets the specialty training standards for physicians in the United Kingdom. It was established by Royal charter ...
. This fine building was largely demolished to create the current building, but parts of the frontage appear to be re-used including the fine
Corinthian Corinthian or Corinthians may refer to:
*Several Pauline epistles, books of the New Testament of the Bible:
**First Epistle to the Corinthians
**Second Epistle to the Corinthians
**Third Epistle to the Corinthians (Orthodox)
*A demonym relating to ...
columns.
Aesthetically, the Hall was striking and beautiful to the eye. Its foundation stone was laid in 1776. The building, with an frontage, had a portico supported by four Corinthian columns and gave the College of Physicians a permanent home again after several decades in a building behind the Royal Infirmary on what is now Drummond Street.
[Hamish Coghill, 2005] Unfortunately, the sense of permanence was not achieved because the Hall did not suit the need of the physicians. Since the Hall was built for lecturing purposes both for students and existing physicians, it is said not to have achieved its original goal. Being offered a large sum for the George Street site, the College relocated slightly to the north on Queen Street (and remains there still).
Outlook on transformation
Owned by Scotland's Commercial Bank, a new project by architect
David Rhind
David Rhind FRSE (1808 – 26 April 1883) was a prominent Scottish architect, mainly remembered for his public buildings, banks, churches and schools, most of which are now listed buildings
In the United Kingdom, a listed building or ...
was on the horizon for the now empty lot. Previous to this architectural movement, the Church was the central structure in terms of financial dedication. Now, money was filtered and dedicated to the construction of banks and commercial property. "This undermined the political power of the old society of landed and established religious interests was now followed by a further acceleration of capitalist-led social and economic transformation".
[Miles Glendinning, Ranald MacInnes, and Aonghus MacKechnie, 1996] This means that to represent Scotland's more socialist outlook, buildings focused on serving the community as a whole, not just an elite or selective audience.
The Scottish capitalist movement was an architectural turning point in Scotland. "The earlier building types of capitalism were refined and elaborated. Banks and insurance companies built ever more grandiose headquarters and branches in the cities, along with offices for lawyers, shipping firms and land agents; the construction of bank chambers from the 1840s (as with David Rhind's work for the Commercial Bank) constituted one of the biggest ever building campaigns in Scottish cities".
[ To further portray the socialistic thinking, the Commercial Bank's style focused a great deal on unity, a fundamental value of the belief. "The whole is sculptured in a very high style of art, the prevailing feeling of the different groups being in harmony with each other, blending into a whole, and so uniting with the details and general effect of the edifice as to combine the tout ensemble into an interesting and delightful unity". In terms of economic outlook, Scotland's views had changed from Socialistic to Capitalistic.
]
Construction of the bank
David Rhind saw this perspective of capitalism and traced the idea roots all the way back to Greek society
Ancient Greece ( el, Ἑλλάς, Hellás) was a northeastern Mediterranean civilization, existing from the Greek Dark Ages of the 12th–9th centuries BC to the end of classical antiquity ( AD 600), that comprised a loose collection of cult ...
. "From the mid- 1830s and early 1840s, while Thomas Hamilton and Playfair had continued to exploit the potential of explicitly Grecian architecture, William Burn
William Burn (20 December 1789 – 15 February 1870) was a Scottish architect. He received major commissions from the age of 20 until his death at 81. He built in many styles and was a pioneer of the Scottish Baronial Revival,often referred t ...
, David Bryce
David Bryce FRSE FRIBA RSA (3 April 1803 – 7 May 1876) was a Scottish architect.
Life
Bryce was born at 5 South College Street in Edinburgh, the son of David Bryce (1763–1816) a grocer with a successful side interest in buildi ...
(Burn's partner 1841–1850) and David Rhind had begun to move towards an astylar Astylar (from Gr. ''ἀ-'', privative, and ''στῦλος'', a column) is an architectural term given to a class of design in which neither columns nor pilasters are used for decorative purposes; thus the Riccardi and Strozzi palaces in Florence a ...
, Italian palazzo-like classicism for some commercial buildings and club-houses, and a Graeco-Baroque grandeur for others – in both cases, combined with a somewhat Greek sharpness of detail".[ With this mindset, a classical revival became highly evident in Scottish architecture. "By the end of the 1840s, there developed that aspect of ]Neoclassical architecture
Neoclassical architecture is an architectural style produced by the Neoclassical movement that began in the mid-18th century in Italy and France. It became one of the most prominent architectural styles in the Western world. The prevailing style ...
, known as Greco-Roman, whose influence was strongest among Scottish banks".
Rhind embraced these ideas as he started to construct the building which is now called The Dome. "The front of this banking-house, a really magnificent structure, which has been erected in George Street, exhibits a Corinthian hexastyle portico ninety-five feet in width, of great general beauty, and having a bold but not obtrusive projection; the columns of which it is composed, six in number, as the name of its style indicates, are thirty-five feet high, of very graceful proportions, with a happily adapted intercolumniation
In architecture, intercolumniation is the proportional spacing between columns in a colonnade, often expressed as a multiple of the column diameter as measured at the bottom of the shaft. In Classical, Renaissance, and Baroque architecture, in ...
, and having elegant well-relieved and spiritedly carved capitals
Capital may refer to:
Common uses
* Capital city, a municipality of primary status
** List of national capital cities
* Capital letter, an upper-case letter Economics and social sciences
* Capital (economics), the durable produced goods used f ...
". In other words, the building is representative of Doric order
The Doric order was one of the three orders of ancient Greek and later Roman architecture; the other two canonical orders were the Ionic and the Corinthian. The Doric is most easily recognized by the simple circular capitals at the top of col ...
and Greek classicism. The windows of are arched and simple, very similar to those designed by Andrea Palladio
Andrea Palladio ( ; ; 30 November 1508 – 19 August 1580) was an Italian Renaissance architect active in the Venetian Republic. Palladio, influenced by Roman and Greek architecture, primarily Vitruvius, is widely considered to be one of th ...
in the Villa Godi
A villa is a type of house that was originally an ancient Roman upper class country house. Since its origins in the Roman villa, the idea and function of a villa have evolved considerably. After the fall of the Roman Republic, villas became sm ...
. The front architrave
In classical architecture, an architrave (; from it, architrave "chief beam", also called an epistyle; from Greek ἐπίστυλον ''epistylon'' "door frame") is the lintel or beam that rests on the capitals of columns.
The term can ...
is quite comparable to the Temple of Agrigento.
The sculpture on the portico is by Alexander Handyside Ritchie
Alexander Handyside Ritchie (16 April 1804 – 24 April 1870) was a Scottish sculptor born in Musselburgh in 1804, the son of James Ritchie, a local brickmaker and ornamental plasterer, and his wife Euphemia. The father in turn was the son of a ...
.
The Commercial Bank
Not only did the Commercial Bank capture ideology of society but it also captured a sense of beauty. In April 1847, ''The Scotsman
''The Scotsman'' is a Scottish compact newspaper and daily news website headquartered in Edinburgh. First established as a radical political paper in 1817, it began daily publication in 1855 and remained a broadsheet until August 2004. Its par ...
'' wrote, "'the rich and massive architecture of the front', and the interior decoration 'in a style which is not less than gorgeous'".[ It can be drawn that the interior again resorts back to a classical style with columns and a central dome. David Rhind clearly took advantage of light source, by constructing the dome of glass, as well as giving the building a more modern appeal.
]
Present day
The Commercial Bank of Scotland, through a series of mergers, is now part of the Royal Bank of Scotland
The Royal Bank of Scotland plc (RBS; gd, Banca Rìoghail na h-Alba) is a major retail and commercial bank in Scotland. It is one of the retail banking subsidiaries of NatWest Group, together with NatWest (in England and Wales) and Ulster Bank ...
. However, the walls, windows, floors, and dome of the building remain present today.
David Rhind incorporated the use of light by using a glass dome, and made use of space with a large central lobby. Although one of many buildings in a Greek Revival style
The Greek Revival was an architectural movement which began in the middle of the 18th century but which particularly flourished in the late 18th and early 19th centuries, predominantly in northern Europe and the United States and Canada, but ...
, The Dome stands unique on George Street with its stunning pediment
Pediments are gables, usually of a triangular shape.
Pediments are placed above the horizontal structure of the lintel, or entablature, if supported by columns. Pediments can contain an overdoor and are usually topped by hood moulds.
A pedimen ...
and long rich history.
See also
* List of restaurants in Scotland
image:The Dome Edinburgh.JPG, The Dome, Edinburgh, The Dome in Edinburgh
This is a list of notable restaurants in Scotland.
Restaurants in Scotland
Edinburgh
*
*
*
*
Glasgow
*
* Pink Peacock
*
Links coming soon
* Cail Bruich (f ...
References
*Cleghorn, George. (1848
''Ancient and Modern Art, Historical and Critical''
Vol.1, p. 180 (W. Blackwood & Sons) Accessed 28 March 2010.
*Coghill, Hamish. (2005) ''Lost Edinburgh: Edinburgh's Lost Architectural Heritage''. (Edinburgh: Birlinn)
"New Building of the Commercial Bank in Edinburgh"
''The Fine Arts' Journal''. No.24, Vol.1, p. 383 (17 April 1847) Accessed 28 March 2010.
*Glendinning, Miles; MacInnes, Ranald; MacKechnie, Aonghus. (1996) ''A History of Scottish Architecture: from the Renaissance to the Present Day''. (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press)
External links
*
{{DEFAULTSORT:Dome, Edinburgh
Restaurants in Edinburgh
Nightclubs in Scotland
Category A listed buildings in Edinburgh
Old Town, Edinburgh
Neoclassical architecture in Scotland