Robert Adam

Robert Adam was the most influential British architect of the eighteenth century and designed interiors as complete schemes down to the door handles. Born in Kirkcaldy in Fife in 1728, he was the son of William Adam, Scotland's leading architect, and trained in the family practice with his brothers. He spent four years on the Grand Tour from 1754, studying in Rome with the French draughtsman Charles-Louis Clérisseau and meeting Piranesi, who dedicated a plate to him. In 1757 he spent five weeks at Split surveying the ruins of Diocletian's palace, and published the results in 1764 — the first serious study of Roman domestic rather than public architecture, which supplied him with a vocabulary nobody else had. He settled in London in 1758 and, with his brother James, built a practice that dominated fashionable taste for twenty years. His argument was that Palladianism had become heavy and repetitive, and that the ancients had used a far greater variety of ornament and, above all, of movement — the rise and fall of a façade, the alternation of rectangular and apsed rooms. His interiors are unified compositions: ceilings, carpets, mirrors, plasterwork, chimneypieces and furniture designed together, in low relief with delicate arabesques, urns and honeysuckle in pale colours. Syon House, Osterley, Kedleston and Kenwood are the major houses. Culzean Castle shows his castle style. The Adelphi, a speculative terrace built on arches over the Thames from 1768, nearly ruined the brothers financially and was rescued by a lottery. He was a member of parliament and died in 1792, buried in Westminster Abbey.

• Lived: 1728 CE – 1792 CE
• Nationality: Scottish
• Roles: architect