Edinburgh School of Architecture and Landscape Architecture (ESALA)

ECA has always been a place of experimentation and collaboration, celebrated for enabling students from different disciplines to work alongside and with each other, and for creating strong linkages with other institutions. We trace our history back to the Trustees’ Academy founded in the 1760s which, over the course of the next century, operated from some of the most iconic buildings in the city, including the University’s Old College and what is now the Royal Scottish Academy. The first Professorship in an ECA subject area was created for Music in 1839 in the name of John Reid, with the Watson Gordon Chair of Fine Art founded some forty years later, the first of its kind in the British Isles and a turning point in the teaching of the History of Art. Following the establishment of the Reid Concert series in 1841, which continues to this day, the Reid Concert Hall was built in 1859. We’ve been known as Edinburgh College of Art (ECA) since 1906, following a major reorganisation of higher art education in Scotland. At the time, we were governed by the city Council and divided into four Schools: Drawing and Painting, Design and Crafts, Architecture, and Sculpture. We moved into what is still our Main Building in 1909, when the first of our annual Revel parties took place and, by 1913, our Cast Collection had been installed in the Sculpture Court.