In the early 1880s, John Gray offered to finance a new school of science and art in Aberdeen, on the condition that the governors named it Gray's School of Science and Art.It was housed in a building at Schoolhill in the city centre next to the Aberdeen Art Gallery.In the early 1950s, Tom Scott Sutherland (1899–1963), an Aberdeen architect who had attended the School of Architecture at Robert Gordon's Technical College gifted Garthdee House and its surrounding estate to the School of Architecture, along with a substantial endowment.The current building was designed by Michael Shewan and was influenced by the Illinois Institute of Technology campus (particularly the S. R. Crown Hall) designed by the American modernist architect Ludwig Mies van der Rohe.These facilities include studios for painting and drawing, printmaking, photography, ceramics, jewellery, 3D design, as well as computer labs and life model changing rooms.