Yet Shaw cannot be rated with Soane or Schinkel as a nineteenth-century architect of absolutely the first rank; nor yet with his American contemporary Richardson, even though Richardson’s career came to an end a score of years before his. Shaw’s work reflects all too clearly, despite his own vast and sanguine assurance, the general uncertainties of the years after 1870. Webb, though less successful and famous, eventually had more influence, not so much on English architecture in general as on the more creative and original men of the next generation. The later history of European architecture would be much the same—if not that of American architecture—had Shaw never existed; but the modern architecture that first came into being after 1900 in various countries of Europe owed something directly, and even more indirectly, to Webb. In this way Richardson also has more significance than Shaw, despite his lack of influence abroad, for Sullivan and Wright in America both learned much from him. Norman Shaw was born in Edinburgh in 1831. Brought early to London, he was taken on in his early teens by Burn, the Edinburgh architect then settled in London, who had so great a success designing Jacobethan and Scottish Baronial mansions for the high aristocracy in the forties and fifties. Shaw also studied at the Royal Academy, winning in 1853 their Silver Medal, and in the next year their Gold Medal, with the award of a Travelling Studentship that took him to Germany, Italy, and France. The project which won him the first medal was a surprising production for its period, and quite without relation to his own High Victorian Gothic work of the next decade that has been described earlier (see Chapter 11). A vast design for a college with central domed block and side pavilions loaded with giant orders, this project is more Vanbrugh-like than Second Empire. In some sense Shaw’s career was to come full circle stylistically; but even in the Gaiety Theatre in the Strand in London of 1902-3 and the still later Piccadilly Hotel he would hardly be as whole-heartedly Neo-Baroque again.