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Sir John James Burnet

1911 Encyclopedia Britannica

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"SIR JOHN JAMES BURNET (1859-), Scottish architect, whose father was an architect in Glasgow, was born in that city in 1859, and was educated at the Western Academy, entering the Ecole des Beaux-Arts, Paris, in 1874. He passed three years in the studio of Pascal, whose direction and guidance had a strong influence on his future design. After his return to Glasgow Burnet's first important commission was the Royal Institute of Fine Arts, the beginning of a series of important public buildings in various places in Scotland. Amongst these are the offices for the Clyde Navigation Trust, the Glasgow Athenaeum, the Pathological Institute - an extension of the Glasgow Infirmary - and the lay-out and building for the International Exhibition at Edinburgh, in 1886. He carried out also much ecclesiastical work, notably the Barony church at Glasgow and churches at Arbroath, Brechin and Larbert. Amongst the larger business buildings designed by Burnet are the head office of the Union Bank of Scotland, and in London the important completion of the Selfridge premises, in collaboration with J. E. Graham, of Chicago. Entrusted with the addition of the new galleries at the back of the British Museum, a work which eventually took him upwards of nine years, Burnet, with a view of informing himself as to the conditions of museum design elsewhere, visited in 1895 various European galleries - Paris, Berlin, Vienna and others. In the following year he visited the United States, in order to obtain information for his designs for new laboratories for Glasgow University. He was knighted in 1914, and among his other honours were the LL.D. degree at Glasgow, and membership of the Institut de France, the Societe Central des Architectes Francais, and the American Institute of Architects.