When thinking of Glasgow's iconic skyline, it is not uncommon to attribute the buildings to architect Charles Rennie Mackintosh.

Yet when Mackintosh was still a child, another architect had already spent his life designing a great city of towers and churches.

Born 200 years ago on Sunday, Alexander 'Greek' Thomson is often overlooked as one of Glasgow's leading designers but he was responsible for some of the city's most beloved buildings.

His famous works include St Vincent Street Church, the Grecian Buildings on Sauchiehall Street and Holmwood House in Cathcart.

Thomson was born to a bookkeeper and his wife in the Stirlingshire village of Balfron in 1817.

He and his 11 brothers and sisters were home schooled and grew up working from an early age.

As ordinary as his life began, tragedy struck when he was just seven years old.

His father passed away and he was only a few years older when his mother followed but his misfortune did not end there.

He soon lost four of his siblings and had to move to the outskirts of Glasgow as a result.

He began to work in a lawyer's office in 1834 and soon some of his idle drawings were noticed by one of his clients.

It was from this interaction that Thomson later went on to work as the chief draughtsman for renowned architect John Baird on the college at Woodlands Hill.

Several years later he opened his own practice and served as president of both the Glasgow Institute of Architects and the Glasgow Architectural Society.

In 1847, Thomson married Jane Nicholson, the daughter of a famous London architect, alongside her sister Jessie and her fiance John Baird in a double wedding.

Baird invited his new brother-in-law to join him in a partnership in the next year and soon the pair had plenty of work with medium-sized villas and terraces of cottages in and around Glasgow.

He designed his first and only castle at the age of 34.

It remains one of Scotland's most famous buildings 165 years later. With battlements, oriel windows and a looming central tower, Craigrownie Castle in Cove is Scots Baronial in style and overlooks the Firth of Clyde and the Isle of Arran.

With each building designed, Thomson's fame grew as he began to shape some of Glasgow's history.

He designed the Caledonia Road United Presbyterian Church in 1856, before moving on to the Queen's Park United Presbyterian Church in 1869, which was ultimately destroyed during the Second World War.

His third church, St Vincent Street Church, still stands in Glasgow today after it was designed on 1859.

Thomson was famed for his own distinctive style deriving from Greek, Egyptian and Levantine sources - hence the 'Greek' addition to his name.

Other Thomson properties still lining the city's streets include the Grecian Buildings on Sauchiehall Street, Great Western Terrace and his own home Moray Place.

His villa, Holmwood House, is now operated as a visitor attraction by the National Trust for Scotland in Cathcart.

Not all of his monumental works have been so well-preserved.

In the Gorbals, his Caledonia Road United Presbyterian Church is crumbling after a fire tore through it in 1965.

The A-listed structure, which is one of the few remaining pieces of 19th century architecture in the area, is on the Buildings at Risk Register in Scotland.

The imposing Egyptian Halls on Union Street are also in a parlous state, having been hidden behind a web of scaffolding for the past few years.

An attempt to reopen the building as a 250-bed hotel in 2011 was unsuccessful and now owner Derek Souter has warned it "cannot now be 100% preserved" as other options for the site are assessed.

Despite his success and the building of his architectural legacy, tragedy continued to colour Thomson's life.

During the 1850s, he lost four of his five children to a cholera epidemic and a house fire.

He died in 1875 at 58 after developing severe asthma and bronchitis and was buried in Glasgow's Southern Necropolis.

Following his death, the Alexander Thomson Travelling Studentship was established, with the second winner being Charles Rennie Mackintosh.

A marble bust of the architect by John Mossman is still on display in the Kelvingrove Art Gallery in Glasgow.

The Alexander Thomson Society was established to promote and safeguard the architect's significant legacy.

This has included documenting 'Lost Thomson' - buildings that have been forever removed from the Glasgow skyline, whether it be through the architect's own choice or when the steamroller of "redevelopment" rolled through the city in the 1960s and 70s.