George Meikle Kemp
British architect
Died when: 48 years 286 days (585 months)Star Sign: Gemini
George Meikle Kemp (25 May 1795—6 March 1844) was a self-taught Scottish architect who designed and built the Scott Monument in Edinburgh, Scotland.
The poorly educated son of a shepherd, but showing talents in woodworking as a child, he was apprenticed to a joiner and millwright.
Kemp travelled and worked as a millwright for several years and, exercising a childhood fascination for Gothic architecture, took the opportunity to study many of the most important Gothic buildings in Scotland, England and France.
As a result, he was said to have had a first-hand knowledge of Gothic architecture which was unrivalled in Scotland.
Settling in Edinburgh, Kemp won a competition to design a monument to the Scottish novelist Sir Walter Scott.He supervised its erection on Princes Street in the city but at the age of 48, before the building was finished, he drowned in the city's Union Canal.
On its completion the monument was acclaimed and, despite his lack of formal training and with only the one building known to be for certain to his design, Kemp came to be revered as an architect.
Disablingly shy and socially awkward, while able to memorise exact details of buildings and measure precise distances by eye, Kemp is considered to have been high on the autism spectrum.
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