On the corner of Govan Road and Napier Street once stood Napier House, a tenement for local workmen, until it was demolished in 2009. Today, there is little evidence to tell the history of the site and the horrific accident that occurred there. In this talk we’ll be joined by Kathy Wheeler to find out more about this story. 

On the afternoon of 20 September 1898, the top floor of Napier House collapsed while under construction, killing five workmen and ending the career of William J. Anderson, the architect. Anderson was a prominent figure at the time. He had won the first Alexander Thomson Traveling Studentship in 1887; served as the first Director of Architecture at the Glasgow School of Art starting in 1894; wrote the first English-language history dedicated to Italian Renaissance Architecture in 1896; and designed buildings in both Glasgow and Dundee. 

The formal inquest into the Napier House accident was published in The Glasgow Herald and several architectural journals. Through the interrogations of Anderson and the workmen on the site, the inquest shows how the relatively new material of concrete was managed on the site, as well as the hierarchy of labour, and the role of the architect. 

The loss of Napier House is a loss of not just the physical building, but also of the people involved in its design and construction.

Kathy Wheeler is a Senior Lecturer the University of Tennessee College of Architecture + Design where she teaches architectural history and theory as well as design studio. She fell in love with Glasgow while doing archival research on William James Anderson for her book Victorian Perceptions of Renaissance Architecture (Ashgate, 2014) and returns to the city as often as she can to continue that work.

She received her Ph.D. from MIT in the History, Theory, and Criticism of Architecture; her Masters in Architecture History from the University of Virginia, and her Bachelor of Architecture from the University of Tennessee.

This talk includes discussion of suicide which may be distressing for some attendees.