He qualified in 1996, having studied at The Mackintosh School and at Cambridge University, where he was awarded a scholarship to study architectural history, and where he later won his College’s prize in the first architectural diploma. Ross Sharpe’s Masters Thesis was on Scottish Neoclassicism, a subject which has continued to fascinate him. It was in these student years that he became acutely aware of the need to understand and represent the idea of tradition, whilst also respecting the prevailing modernist discourse.