Scotland, despite local variation, is small enough to have something approaching a unified culture. How then does one define the ‘-ishness’ of Scottish culture? Is it geographic: everything ever imagined, built, performed, painted, danced, sung, spoken or written about within the entity now known as Scotland? Is it aesthetic: everything in that performative enterprise which has utilised identifiable formal means historically embedded in that culture?

Or is it ideational: everything which has been guided by a unique and distinct understanding of the external physical and internal psychic worlds and a response to them conditioned by and recorded in a philosophy? Frank Arneil Walker, author of Mousa to Mackintosh, prefers the aesthetic and ‘[makes] no apology for discussing or evaluating architecture in terms of form [Walker’s emphasis]’.

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