Alan Reiach (1910-1992) was one of Scotland's most celebrated Scottish architects. He studied at Edinburgh College of Art (1934-35) and was supervised and much influenced by Frank Mears. He travelled in England and Norway, Russia and USA and sketching rapidly gave way to photography as his chosen method for recording what he saw. He undertook major architectural surveys, of 'International' architecture in Europe and North America (1934-37) and of Scottish vernacular architecture (1930s and early 1940s), the latter forming the bedrock of his publication Building Scotland (1942). The photography which forms the output of these surveys is a crucial record of architectural heritage.
Reiach's survey seems to have begun in 1937 at a time when the work of the National Trust at Culross and other preservation campaigns in face of the 1935 Housing Acts had started to regard Scottish vernacular architecture as worthy of preservation. He conducted his Caithness survey in his spare time during 1937, which was made more difficult by his being posted to London that year. He returned to Edinburgh in 1938 to take up a two year Research and Teaching Fellowship at the College of Art and after 1940 was made a member of the Scottish Office Team to oversee the Clyde Valley Regional Plan. He continued his surveys between 1938 and 1942. The project seems to have effectively ended by 1943.
The surveys of towns seem to have begun by recording areas close to the original site of the Mercat Cross, thus emphasising buildings such as kirk, castle, tolbooth, inn and town house. The surveys are inconsistent in their coverage and in some towns looked at some areas targeted for re-development but ignored others. The range of buildings covered was extensive, however, and covered rural as well as urban areas. There is some overlap in coverage of buildings in the surveys undertaken by Ian Lindsay, first financed by Lord Bute with the support of the National Trust for Scotland. The photographic record of that survey was, however, dispersed amongst the records of the National Buildings Record and its successor the National Monuments Record of Scotland.
Reiach used his archive to inform the reports he drew up in his capacity as Secretary of the Scottish Housing Advisory Board and the styles of architecture he recommended in Planning our New Homes in 1944 were influenced and illustrated by examples from his survey.
From the guide to the Alan Reiach photographic collection, 1929-1950s, (University of St Andrews)
