Dr Robert Proctor’s research lies in two main historical areas: late-nineteenth to early-twentieth-century French architecture and design and mid-twentieth-century modern architecture in Britain. Within those areas he specialises in the architecture of commerce, particularly in relation to the city; Art Nouveau architecture and design in France, especially its relationships with scientific discourse and with commerce; Beaux-Arts architectural education in France and Britain; modern church architecture; theories of ritual and space; and relationships between religious architecture and the modern city. His approach combines the history of architectural design with other forms of history, including histories of economics, science, and religion.
Dr Proctor studied at Edinburgh and Cambridge Universities before arriving in Glasgow, where he has been Lecturer in the History of Architecture since 2002. From his research on the department store in fin-de-siècle Paris emerged an interest in the architect René Binet, which, funded by a British Academy grant, led to several articles and an introduction to a reprint of Binet’s own book, focusing especially on the architect’s interest in evolutionary science as made popular by German biologist Ernst Haeckel.
Much of Robert’s research has been stimulated by the availability of extraordinary archive resources in Glasgow: he has published on Eugène Bourdon, a French Beaux-Arts-trained architect who transformed the education system at the Glasgow School of Architecture in 1904; and on Gillespie, Kidd & Coia, whose modern architecture from the 1950s to 1970s included major university buildings and one of the most important groups of modern churches in Britain. Research on modern church architecture has led to the award of a major Arts and Humanities Research Council grant for a book on Roman Catholic Church Architecture in Britain between 1955 and 1975, due to be published with Ashgate.
Robert is keen to supervise PhD students in any related areas. He is currently supervising PhD student Christine Hui Lan Manley’s project on density, ‘urbanity’, ‘Townscape’ and housing in Harlow New Town; and he recently supervised the completion of Dr Frances Robertson’s PhD on and drawing practices amongst engineers and draughtsmen in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century.
Outside the GSA, Dr Proctor maintains links with the Society of Architectural Historians of Great Britain, for which he is website coordinator, and the Arts and Humanities Research Council, for which he regularly reviews research grant applications. He has peer reviewed articles for academic journals, given papers at many conferences, and has been invited to give papers and lectures in Europe and America.
In 2011, the Arts and Humanities Research Council of the UK awarded Dr Proctor a major 20-month Research Grant for a project entitled ‘Roman Catholic Church Architecture in Britain, 1955 to 1975′. The grant was awarded to enable the applicant to write a book on this subject, due for draft completion by the end of the award period and publication in 2014. Read more at the project blog.
