Group 02: Embedded Modernism, Glasgow

Scotland+ Venice

PAST + FUTUREEMBEDDED MODERNISM

Our Project Glasgow study began with a discussion of another project, Koolhaas and Olbrist’s marvellously engaging study of the Japanese Metabolists titled, Project Japan. My colleague’s recommendation came with clear instructions: Project Japan had ‘to be read from cover to cover’. I tried but failed in the directed task, excitedly jumping pages to follow the thematic narratives spliced through the publication. Regardless of reading technique we both agreed the ‘big picture’ approach delivered through identifiable themes was both the strength of the book and the inspiration for our publication. Accordingly our publication is arranged into four broad thematic sections, built evidence in the form of case studies of key buildings of the period, verbal evidence in the form of interviews with the period’s protagonists, contemporary speculations in the form of observations on our key theme of Glasgow’s ‘embedded’ modernity, and urban utopias in the form of commentaries on a series of un-built utopian projects accompanied with digital animations produced by the project team. Threaded through these themes are a series of related articles that support, challenge and contradict the thematic content of the publication, leaving the reader to formulate their own conclusions, and hopefully stimulate trains of thought which in turn might act as a catalyst for their individual enquires.

So whether you are a ‘cover to cover’ consumer or itinerant page-hopper we hope you enjoy the contents of our ‘newspaper’. Read All About It!

Project Glasgow Team

U S E R ’ S G U I D E

EMBEDDED MODERNISM is credited to the following contributors and guests:

Alan HooperArchitect, Programme Leader, Department of Architecture, The Glasgow School of Art

David PageArchitect at Page/Park Architects, Visiting Professor, University of Strathclyde

Andrew Frame University of Strathclyde

Christopher DoveThe Glasgow School of Art

Fraser MaitlandUniversity of Strathclyde

Jamie WhelanThe Glasgow School of Art

Professor Andy MacMillan OBEArchitect, Glasgow University Emeritus Professor

Frank WalkerArchitect, Historian

Iain MacLarenArchitect

John BarrArchitect, Photographer

Katherine RossProducer, Director Timeline Films

Mark BainesArchitect, Senior Lecturer, The Glasgow School of Art

Miles GlendinningProfessor of Architectural Conservation, The Edinburgh School of Architecture and Landscape Architecture (ESALA)

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Dental Hospital

Fleming House

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The rear façade of Mackintosh’s Glasgow School of Art gazes southwards beyond Thomson’s equally masterful St Vincent Street Church, to the distant landscape where the precedent for its harled wall and punched windows is evident in Scotland’s Baronial residences. Beyond being the recipient of the Alexander Thomson Travelling Scholarship, Mackintosh made little reference to Thomson either in his architectural oeuvre or writings, instead referencing Glasgow’s largely erased medieval architecture in the East façade of his renowned art school. In this respect Mackintosh is typical in his generational response to that of the preceding generation. Since the arrival of the 20th century modernist interventions in Glasgow’s urban core latter generations have largely ignored their contribution to Glasgow’s built heritage. As such the limited engagement with buildings of this ‘recent’ period is mired in the actualite of their realisation preventing discourse around the urban intentions of their designers and the broader cultural ideas that informed their conception.

Our interest in the mid-20th century period of modernity in Glasgow aligns with Aldo Van Eyck’s view of architectural tradition as the manifestation of embodied themes rather than external appearances. Likewise our interest in utopian thinking, visions of the ideal city, explores embodied themes across the globe and in relation to the subject of our study, Glasgow’s dense urban core. This publication is a call to action in this regard, to re-engage with the concerns, ideas and motivations manifested in Glasgow’s version of modern architecture in the middle of the 20th century, to identify the buildings and the designers that exemplify the period. Our endeavours have been inspired and shaped by our impassioned call of our project curator, Neil Gillespie, impassioned call to explore and communicate ‘a moment in Scottish Architecture when a light of modernity shone with clarity and a sense of purpose’.

The setting for our explorations is Glasgow’s 19th century grid-iron planned urban core; a conscious decision to engage with modernity in the heart of city rather than in isolated instances on the periphery. As Gomme and Walker clarified in their seminal Architecture of Glasgow, first published in 1968, Glasgow’s urban significance lies primarily in the collective, corseted by the city’s 19th century grid-

iron plan, rather than individual buildings. As such we argue that the process of embedding modernist architecture in the morphology of the 19th century urban grid offered mutual benefits for the city collective and the individual ‘embedded’ buildings.

But what kind of ‘newspaper’ is this?

The content of this newspaper was produced during the months of July and August 2014. The timeframe did not permit fully researched and definitive content. Instead the chosen medium was exploited to report urban ‘stories’ as they were emerging, incomplete and not wholly substantiated. Our team adopted a journalistic rather than scholarly approach, valuing speculation, observation and opinion over definitive reporting. Accordingly the contents of the newspaper are conceived and offered as points of departure, a series of prompts for future more sustained enquiries, and like Glasgow’s grid-iron plan, open ended with the odd cul-de-sac. Our modus operandi was ‘maximalist’, appropriate in our opinion to Glasgow’s vibrancy, rather than finely tuned minimalism. Whilst we enjoyed the freedom of our unshackled imaginings, as our city baked in the summer sun, we took our responsibility seriously and engaged a specialist historian of 20thC modern architecture to check our ‘copy’ for inaccuracies. And whilst our output is not research-proofed we are confident it will meet our original intention to engage a broad audience with the period when Glasgow’s modern architecture ‘shone with clarity and a sense of purpose’.

As we burned the midnight oil to achieve our print deadlines we had the musings of ‘pop philosopher’ Elvis Costello on the ephemeral nature of newspapers ringing in our ears:

‘You better speak up now if you want your pieceYou better speak up now it won’t mean a thing later

Yesterday’s news is tomorrow’s fish and chip* paper’

E D I TO R I A L

*Fish and Chips is a traditional British fast-food dish generally served wrapped in newspaper, the associated condiments

exhibiting broad regional variations within Scotland; salt and vinegar in the West of Scotland, salt and sauce in the East.

Heron House

College of Building & Printing

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Anderson Centre

College of Commerce

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PAST + FUTURE 1

The field of investigation suggested by Rem Koolhaas spans a century, beginning in 1914 and ending in 2014. The broad brief proposed is to explore and

‘... generate a global view of architecture’s evolution into a single, modern aesthetic, and at the same time uncover within globalisations the survival of unique national features and mentalities that continue to exist and flourish even as international collboration and exchange intensify.’

Neil Gillespie, of Reiach and Hall, has responded to this challenge - not least in his own brief to the four geographically selected participants - by a search for the

‘...moment in Scottish Architecture when a light of modernity shone with clarity and a sense of purpose.’

In broad terms the response from this team in the West is that the West of Scotland and, in particular, inner city Glasgow has been historically subject to a number of globalising tendencies, modernism amongst them and in focusing on the specific impact on the architectural culture of Post War Scotland, we can place this in a broader historical context.

Our study begins with one building at the beginning of this age and ends with the same building - the Glasgow School of Art.

Our end point was intended to be the launch of Steven Holl’s ‘shadow’ Art School extension but events have determined that appropriately it stays in the shadows of this bookended 100 years.

The completion of the Art School in 1909 falls outwith the start-date of 1914, determined in the Biennale brief. Max Hastings, in his book Catastrophe (Europe Goes to War 1914) gives credence to our lack of chronological precision by documenting the plunge into modern darkness of a world war that marks the beginning of the modern era, as defined by Koolhaas. That cathartic year of 1914 blew away the complacent cobwebs of indulgent politics in a wretched slaughter of state and subject. Hastings’ argument is that 1914 should not only be seen as the beginning of an age but the end of a prolonged period of posturing and rearmament for an inevitable conflict. Archduke Franz Ferdinand’s shooting was the spark that set it off but in its prelude lay the origins of the following madness.

We advocate a similar position from our unique perspective of the West of Scotland, that through an understanding of a specific building - the Art School - in relation to the 19th century city, we can therefore understand the city in the 20th.

Glasgow, more than many other cities, has absorbed the impulse of change in remarkable ways. Where Venice can be said to still be the physical expression of its first medieval evolution, Glasgow has been the subject of two transformative global pulses that have transformed its character.

It was the first of these to which the Glasgow School of Art was a response. The 19th century grid emerged at its outset as a means to enlarge the medieval cross of streets to meet the fast expanding industrial population growth. That universal system had been in development for more than 75 years before the Art School was conceived. In broad terms the Garnethill site and geometry commanded that portion of the grid. The Art School can be said to epitomise and acknowledge that remarkable quality.

Crucially though in its gable and rear elevations the Glasgow School of Art looked back to the pre-grid age of the vernacular ‘Scots’. It alludes to and laments the loss of the medieval old town – interestingly Mackintosh visited Venice on his student Thomson fellowship tour. In adhering to the grid it bridges back to an earlier fast disappearing era. We would suggest, in Koolhaas’ terms, that it embodied a mentality, a cultural root looking to a deeper history, in spite of the adoption of the city’s contemporary democratising and modern grid plan.

Where Alexander ‘Greek’ Thomson was happy to singularly celebrate the universal applicability of the modern grid and the appropriateness of an adopted systematic ‘classical’ architectural language to it - Mackintosh reached back to the city’s immediate past, fusing his nostalgic reflections with the embrace of contemporary issues associated with the grid.

2014 has proved a momentous and traumatic year for Glasgow School of Art. On Friday the 30th of May a fire took hold in the west wing of the school, which due to remarkable skill was contained - and this only weeks after the adjacent Steven Holl designed Reid Building was opened. The latter heralded, a century on from the original, a significant expansion of the Art School estate. The new building has had a rough critical ride but in the spirit of a melodrama, the villain has been transformed, becoming now the buttress to the restoration project which is getting underway. In spite of doubts about proximity it has become a generous reassuring presence to the Art School which none of the previous 20th century projects really achieved.

In technical terms how does this new building sit in relationship to the Koolhaas hypothesis?

As Mackintosh did before with the original building in referring to a lost medieval past, Steven Holl makes an echoing homage. He locks the new building into the city grid, he adjusts its form in response to its special neighbour and in section and plan it draws organisational inspiration from the original. What is crucial about it is that in nearly every response, internally and externally, it responds to the context of the Mackintosh building.

But at the same time it refers to the freedom of a modern sensibility by mastering a large volumetric challenge, the need for the sense of greater accessibility focussing on the entrance and circulation. At ground level and as a surface it is remarkable yet in its difference it does seem to fit.

What lessons do we learn from this? Simply that good architecture embeds itself in its context whilst at the same time taking advantage of a contemporary sensibility. In that sense we can flip Koolhaas’s challenge regarding ‘absorbing modernity’ to a future manifesto plea for ‘modernity absorbing.’

What our study has found is that this lesson was not unknown to architects in the mid 20th century and it is through their examination we can seek to capture that ‘moment in Scottish Architecture when a light of modernity shone with clarity and a sense of purpose’, a clarity and purpose that enabled modernity to absorb the existing city!

Before we do so however we need to understand the specific meta-narrative that shaped the 20th century urban form just as the grid did the 19th century.

A B S O R B I N G M O D E R N I T Y1 9 1 4 2 0 1 4I N T R O D U C T I O N

2 EMBEDDED MODERNISM

Two modernising plans shaped the 20th century inner city straddling our era of interest, the Bruce Plan of 1945-6 and the later Highways Plan for Glasgow 1965. Both were uncompromisingly brutal in relation to the previous guiding model, the 19th century grid.

The Bruce Plan essentially started again by developing a linking infrastructure of roads based on the vehicle that necessitated, in thought at least the comprehensive removal of every building save the City Chambers and indeed the Art School. The later plan evolved from its principles concentrated on the super infrastructure of strategic vehicle movement leaving the encircled inner city subject to less specific developmental fixes.

It is unclear, to say the least, why a city that was almost undamaged by the war subsequently felt it necessary to act in planning terms as if it had suffered significant devastation. There was a mixture of causes: the sooty deprivation of much of the tenemental fabric and the smog filled air, the need for a post-war fresh start mixed with that modernising pre-war rhetoric, all captured in the memory of that whiter-than-white Glasgow Empire Exhibition of 1938 in Bellahouston Park – full of hope, newness and brightness, a memory that must have lingered during the dark days of the war. The Bruce plan may have embodied all of these things, but the fact that it was not implemented was a result of the pragmatic limitations of its delivery. In many ways the ultimate Highways Plan of 1965 was more pragmatic, adopting a portion of the Bruce vision which was deliverable, while apportioning the rest for others to sort out in a more piecemeal fashion according largely to the contemporary influence of the time.

It is difficult to swim against the tide – if the world mood is flowing in the opposite direction. But there were a number of architects who structured their response to this overwhelming modernising zeal in a different way.

Our project investigates the impact of mid-20th century modernist buildings on Glasgow’s historic urban core. Under the theme of ‘embedded modernity’ the research explores the interplay of two distinct spatial orders; the continuous urban tissue of Glasgow’s 19th century morphology consisting of blocks, street and squares corseted by a strict grid-iron plan, and the 20th century Modernists’ pursuit of the ‘rational’ city, manifest in a porous arrangement of object buildings set in space, seeking escape from the strait-jacket of the urban grid in the pursuit of new ‘healthy’ urban territories.

Glasgow in the middle of the 20th century witnessed two departures; the well-documented exodus of the inner city population outwards, initially to the 1950s peripheral housing estates and to the open fields of the new towns, and the less documented departure of the mid-century Modernist buildings upwards from the ‘grounded’ city into the air, a performance of architectural levitation, exploiting a repertoire of architectural devices including stilts, bridges, plinths and platforms. Two departures: one horizontal and land-based, the other vertical and air-bound. Our project tells the story of that vertical departure, driven by the radical approach of the mid-century Modernist architects to the city and their contextual but often transgressive responses to the Glasgow they encountered, a city manifesting the diverse city programmes of working and living in the continuous and coherent urban order of the city grid. This is also the less well-told story of Modernist integration rather than wholesale replacement, predicated on selective demolition, infill and adaption rather than the brutality of a tabula rasa approach. Our project argues that in meeting the demands of Glasgow’s grid-iron plan the modernist buildings embedded in Glasgow’s gridded urban core are better buildings for having met those challenges, and whilst Glasgow indulges in the wholesale demolition of isolated tower block housing, one might argue that the very integration of those ‘embedded’ buildings has contributed to their longevity.

The intention is to demonstrate a form of ‘embedded modernity’ through a selection of building case studies that evidences a more nuanced approach to Glasgow’s existing urban context, the insertion of object buildings and the hewing of open space from the continuous urban fabric of the city grid. The project seeks to rediscover the radicalism of the buildings under scrutiny through a careful editing of their everyday banalities of material degradation and insensitive ‘improvements’ to reveal a moment in the life of Glasgow where the existing city order was radically challenged by a new spatial and formal paradigm. The primary aim is to act as a call to action, to re-engage with Glasgow’s modernist legacy in the process of developing Glasgow in the 21st century.

CITY OF EMBEDDED MODERNITY: WORKING IN THE CITY GRID

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Our four weeks of research has been all embracing but not conclusive. It seeks to place in context and bed in the modern age of development, its extreme visions that might have shaped the city’s thinking and the specific actions of a number of architects that sought to reinforce it on the ground.

We have been helped in this task by many sources, at the Mitchell Library’s cavernous archives, Glasgow City Council, Historic Scotland, RCAHMS, Glasgow School of Art, and a research programme by Ross Brown looking into what he terms Scottish Brutalism – a programme which is a remarkable developing resource - not to mention firsthand accounts from some of Glasgow’s most prolific architects.

Our intention is not to examine the specific histories rather to capture that spirit which may have value to us in the future. Detailed analysis is underway in many of these archives and research programmes, but we seek to interpret them.

A HUNDRED YEARS ON

PAST + FUTURE 3

Fleming House, or Cambridge House as it was originally named, is located on Garnethill within sight of Charles Rennie Mackintosh’s Glasgow School of Art. The area has a mix of tenures with varying plot sizes and buildings of differing materials and scales, characteristically different to the predominant stone structure of the city to the south.

The existing site originally formed part of the Tramway and Omnibus Depot, which was recessed in the hill and whose building lines extended out beyond the tenement buildings along Rose St and Renfrew St. The city had seen a great deal of post war developments of similar scales take place in the late 1950s, and the area of Cambridge Street was to be no different.

The plans for Cambridge House were drawn up by the architects Robert F. Bluck and Associates commencing at the turn of the 1960s. As a Glasgow based group of architects and designers, Bluck worked on a large amount of multi storey, large scale architectural interventions in the city centre, dealing with Glasgow’s interesting topography, architecture that engaged with Glasgow’s historic 19th century grid.

The site allocated for the project would be the corner between Cambridge Street and Renfrew Street. The speculative developer of the project was the firm of Commercial and General Investments Ltd. The juxtaposition between the level Cambridge Street and the steeply sloping Renfrew Street presented an interesting design challenge for the architects, who needed the massing of the building to engage with these conditions, yet allow pedestrian access throughout. Similar in response to the Wylie Shanks Dental Hospital, the building aimed to bridge the gap between these two topographic levels, and allow free movement through the building, freeing up much of the grand plane for public activity. These parameters generated a plinth, which inhabited the commercial and retail programme, allowing for viable activity at street level.

Fleming House originally had an open promenade with level access from Rose Street, as can be seen in early photographs of the building. Unusual for its time, the scheme had a prominent public entry level, attempting to give the public a new ‘datum’ to exist within. It is unknown whether this level was intended to be infilled with retail at

CASE STUDY 0.1

F L E M I N G H O U S E , 1 9 7 1ROBERT F. BLUCK & ASSOCIATES


Embedded Modernism 5

a later date, but subsequently the promenade at second floor level was eventually filled in, and is still inhabited by local businesses today.

Crowning the plinth there is a tower. This vertical element sits at ground level on Rose Street, and contains the high rise office floors (now residential) of the project. The 11 storey tower becomes the main focus of the project.

Possessing a simple mass, the building takes a non-hierarchical stance towards its roof space, as it does not make use of the roof top for any social purposes, unlike other projects built around the time, where roof top space was often regarded as key to the social aspects of modern living. The building remained in use largely through its life as a high rise office building, however like many contemporary buildings of the 1960s, due to poor build quality and raw materials, the fabric of the building started to decay.

In the early 1990s the building was in danger of demolition, but a project was launched to investigate the viability of Fleming House. Its fortunes were turned around by Glasgow based architects Armitage Associates, who undertook the development of the building, to restore its former character. Armitage Associates described their approach to the exterior of the project as ‘ as minimal as possible’ allowing the building to remain in its original modernist character and not to interfere with the exterior fabric. Armitage Associates did however aim to fully restore the interiors and services of the project to bring Fleming House into the 21st century. Their work was recognised in 2001, when the practice won an award for Best Domestic Interior in the Scottish Design Awards.

PAST + FUTURE 5

World’s fair. This stripped classicism seemed to suit all needs. Inevitably, however, disillusionment with ostentatious display seeded the advent of a new attitude, an advocacy for the removal of all supplementary aesthetic values. The modern world, or those who acted in its name, postulated the servicing of a new socially liberated and aware population for which there was little or no time for embellishment with a new architectural language. The idea of architectural expression directly representing a particular individual’s wealth, or a nation’s virility, was replaced by the collective global common language of modernism.

Glasgow’s contemporary architect’s adoption of this new idea was as vigorous and enthusiastic as their predecessors in their own time. Glasgow was not the source of the new aesthetic, but again it leant on exploration elsewhere, brought it back and made it its own. One rich seam in this exploration was again to be found in looking west into the vertiginous canyons of New York and one building in particular - the Lever Building.

It introduced the idea of plinth as distinctive mediator between the tower and its street plane. Of course New York’s towers had often stepped down but usually gradually, tower and plinth graded in scale for effect. Skidmore Owings and Merrill invented this distinctive type juxtaposing the horizontal of the low plinth with the verticality of the straight -forward tower. In construction term, it was simple and effective.

It was a building type perfectly suited to Glasgow, where the plinth could correspond with the three and four storey urban scale of the adjacent city blocks, leaving the exploitation of the upper levels

to pack in additional space in unencumbered slabs and towers.

The flexibility of the system was singular; it could deal with the varied built scales of the city as at the now reclad St Andrews House (1964) by Arthur Swift and Partners, on the corner of Sauchiehall Street and Renfield Street where the plinth stepped from two to three storeys to meet its neighbours with the tower taking the city side corner for emphasis; or it could master the slope of the topography as at Fleming House (1961) by Robert F Bluck and Associates on the corner of Renfrew Street with its east west slab sitting centrally and introduction of retail activity on an upper level.

In under a hundred years the architectural typology of the city had been established and turned on its head, reinforced as the city’s wealth grew, abstracted and then transformed into something altogether new. An architecture not of mass or symbolic association but an architecture consistently of two parts, to the street and to the sky. It is perhaps regrettable that it did not become the model for all development in the city, evoking at one and the same time a street level urbanity as well as a skyline energy. Unfortunately elsewhere these vertical markers left out that baseline of civility to the detriment of the mid twentieth century legacy.

Collectors and connoisseurs who want to get to know this post 19th century Glasgow can profitably take an early Sunday morning loop around these muscle-men of the city when the traffic is scarce. Between Hope Street and Renfield Street and Central Station and Sauchiehall Street one can readily capture the key highlights of this upward trajectory.

Our argument is that 19th century Glasgow and its three, four and five storey tenemental crust, overlaying the grid, became the raised platform for mid twentieth century urban expansion. Of course that is an over simplified view. Glasgow faced growth pressures well before then but without the undercurrent of the need or desire for wholesale urban renewal. Simply there was a need to bulk up and grow bigger at the commercial heart of the city. Of course the evolution of the lift helped and much has been written of its contribution to the verticalisation of built form. Its introduction into Glasgow staircase cores in the characteristic bird-cage wrap inside the stair form served that opportunity to grow higher.

The first of a number of these skyward trends elaborated decorative themes already explored closer to the ground. Whilst the floor plates adapted to the relative plot dimension within the grid, the facades adopted an eclectic piling of this street level architecture not now to the side but on top in ever more varied and complex variations. In a microcosm of the pre-1914 competitive struggles between countries with imperialist and colonialist aspirations, so too Glasgow’s thrusting business leaders jostled to leave their mark on the city. What characterised their representational desires was to be different, the result a liquorice assortment of architectural types all jostling for attention - from Peddie and Kinnear’s early Hope Street super enlarged tenement; John Campbell’s cliff faces further up the hill; James Salmon’s virtuosic (“Hatrack”) St. Vincent Chambers building and his later fairytale tower, Lion Chambers, - and, of course, the further classical adventures epitomised in the confection of columns, arcades and domes of ‘Greek’ Thomson’s Gordon Street offices. A by-product of this call by each for attention was a curious collective effect. The play of window and wall, bay and indent, column and dome, transformed these streets into deep gullies faced by creviced and pinnacled sides with crested tops - a veritable stone landscape, encrusted with adopted representational carved stone flora.

It is difficult to pinpoint the juncture at which the acceptance of this multivalent position changed. Some point to the polished glazed brick backs of some of these soaring giants, backs where no elaboration took place, simply the repetition of window in wall, others to the disenchantment with the adoption of superficial rather than intrinsic value systems but perhaps most likely of all - moods simply changed.

There had always been a tendency in Glasgow to look to its western cousins of the grid cities of New York and Chicago. There in the desire to reach higher the stripped language commercial language of McKim Mead and White, Burnham or Sullivan enabled that vertical extension simply with ground level colonnades with punched hole windows above and simple skyline cornice above. Commerce had emptied out the basket of classical values leaving only the muscle of architectural power in the form of columned base, wall plane and top. And in Glasgow’s echoing constructions there were thunderous results now not for successful entrepreneurs but for banks, for example in the hands of James Miller on the corner of St Vincent Street and West George Street.

Short lived, this mode of expression drowned in the exhibitionism of competing political systems where ever more extreme power performances came to represent the impending clash of nations - we need look no further than the 1937 Paris

A N U R B A N L O O P


Our story of Utopia begins in 1914, with the work of the Italian Futurists and their sole architect Antonio Sant’Elia, a movement that produced some of the most influential and famed work of the pre-war years.

Their words were radical and their proclamations were assured. However, Futurism found its detractors in Italy, as would be expected given the combative, and at times quite merciless, manifestos they authored. The Rationalists, themselves accused of lacking the “impetuous creativity of the Latin temperament”, often found themselves at odds with the Futurists, both ideologies later competing for public and political approval in Italy’s post-war landscape. In 1931, Rationalist Giuseppe Terragni condemned the Futurists as “scenographers whose lyricism functioned well on paper, but could not be translated into architecture”. It is true that Antonio Sant’Elia’s drawings are curiously devoid of plans and sections, instead he draws almost entirely in perspective, carefully choosing viewpoints so as to dramatise his subject. Resultantly, his architecture transcends the human scale, each building becoming a monument in support of the manifesto. This criticism is acknowledged too by Giulio Carlo Argan’s observation in his 1930 essay, that Sant’Elia’s conception of the Future City is the “ideology and psychology of architecture, rather than architecture”.

The Futurists related their creativity as much in words as with lines, and particularly with Sant’Elia’s 1914 “Futurist Manifesto of Architecture”, the illustrations serve to support the text as Sant’Elia tears down what he sees as the “architectonic prostitution” of neoclassicism, proposing in its place the radical notion of a new city for each generation, an “immediate and faithful projection of ourselves”. In it, Sant’Elia declares his abhorrence of both “traditionalist cowardice” and the avant-garde, instead envisaging a city not of facades, but of emotive concrete forms, where inspiration is drawn from the mechanical rather than the natural, and where lifts scale the facades of buildings like “serpents of steel and glass”. The manifesto is belligerent in its language , and ruthless in its call for abandonment of the old, inadvertently inviting comparison with the words of Mussolini, and leading

many to label the Futurists, and Sant’Elia, despite his membership of the socialist party, as proto-Fascists.

The label seems an unfair slight on Sant’Elia’s legacy, and it is with a tragic air that he is held up in history as a hero for the Fascist cause. Following his death at age 28 in 1916, the surviving Futurists, and in particular the founding member Marinetti, publicly aligned themselves in the following decade with the Fascist agenda in an attempt to preserve their legacy as a wave of change swept over Italy. Sant’Elia became a martyr to the cause, his life and death were distorted and romanticised, his final words on the battlefield were posthumously re-imagined, and he was gradually manufactured into a suitable figurehead for modern architecture in Italy.

Retrospectively, his words in the 1914 manifesto could be interpreted simply as those of rebellious youth and of architectural naivety, rather than of a recklessly nihilistic agenda. Sant’Elia speaks of a new city for each generation in one line, while fetishising monolithic, seemingly permanent, structures in the next, a strange contradiction that can be attributed to a young architect swept up by the optimism, and to an extent, the delusion surrounding a war in which Italy felt they would surely triumph. Though their mystique was perpetuated above all by themselves, Sant’Elia was caught up in the romance of the Futurist movement, right until his death.

Antonio Sant’Elia’s work may never escape the shadow of Fascism but, as observed by Lebbeus Woods, his drawings were “the first by a European architect to project a vertical city, one composed not only of towers, but also of stacked layers of streets, plazas, and the mechanical movement of cars, trams, and trains”.

This idea of Utopia resonates just as strongly today, 100 years on, and in many ways, the scale and ambition of Sant’Elia’s drawings and writings broke through a glass ceiling in architecture, paving the way for those Utopian master plans that followed in the rest of the 20th century. If nothing else, Antonio Sant’Elia challenged cowardice, daring architects to move away from traditionalism, and into a century of modernism.

U T O P I A 0 . 1THE FUTURISTS - SANT’ELIA

In his book Utopias and Architecture (2005) Nathaniel Coleman makes an eloquent argument for utopian thinking as fundamental to the invention of meaningful architecture at the collective level of the city and at the level of the individual building. As such Glasgow can be understood as an amalgamation of utopian thinking, most explicitly stated in the interplay between the original 19th century new town gridded utopia of block, street and square, subsequently interrupted by the urban interventions of the modernist vision of a new ‘rationalised’ Glasgow in the following century. Whilst the former might be characterised as an urban process of extension and densification, essentially the filling-up of the city centre, the latter employed a counter approach of de-densification, a strategic emptying of the urban core. To this day the manifestations of the grid-iron plans developed in the 18th and 19th century define Glasgow’s urban core, however it is the 20th centnury Modernists desire for a more radically ‘cleansed’ city that is the subject of our study.

Koolhaas’s ‘Absorbing Modernity’ polemic, fuelling his curatorship of the 2014 Venice Biennale, posits the notion that orthodox modernism has had a neutralising impact on our once uniquely characterful cities. Our research of Modernist buildings within Glasgow’s grid-iron core suggests a counter argument, presenting a more nuanced absorption of the modernist approach within the 19th century city where the robustness of the urban grid structure formed both a collective resistance and a rich matrix for the Modernists interventions, resulting in a complex interplay of the old and the new. Glasgow’s modernists had to struggle with the architectural and topographical demands of grid and ground and arguably the resultant buildings are better for that struggle. This is not the story of Modernist buildings located in splendid isolation but of tough urban buildings shaped by the demands of their urban setting, buildings that wrestle with the demands of the ‘grounded’ 19th century city to rise upwards in search of new territories of daylight and fresh air in which to express their rational forms. Arguably these buildings, alongside the impact of the 20th century transport infrastructure, represent the most profound challenge to Glasgow’s grid-iron core, and can legitimately be regarded as localised manifestations of Robert Bruce’s unrealised 1945 modernist vision for Glasgow. They can also be perceived as the embodiment of partial utopias under the terms eloquently expressed by Coleman (2005); ‘exemplary architecture is always part of some potential whole imagined by it’s architect, a whole that serves as an organising model - even if for the realisation of only a single building - conceived of as a partial utopia.’

The best of Glasgow’s 20th century modernists demonstrated, through their urban interventions, a sensitivity and understanding of the utopian visions of the previous centuries, only by embracing the utopian vision of these modernist architects can contemporary architects make meaningful urban interventions to Glasgow in the 21st century.

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CITY OF PARTIAL UTOPIAS

PAST + FUTURE 7

It is a remarkable achievement. Every move is exploited to create effect but to what end. If we take the urban layout as focused on creating space for the temple of St Vincent Street then by extension each move seeks to further that intention. It is hard not to see the ensemble then as a mountain in the city carved as at Delphi to form the theatre terrace the platform for The St Vincent Street temple with the rugged peaks of the tower slab sheltering it with its in part bouldered base - a brilliant conception.

It was never understood as such, and understanding and love of it dwindled if it was ever there. Now re-clad and the amphitheatre filled in, it has lost much of its potency but not the power of its idea. In the Fountainhead the hero is battling for his individual right of self expression but he realises that his success is dependent on public support. For modernism to win he has to win the public. Of course that was just a story but you can’t help but think Stephenson sought not public acclaim but ‘Architectures’ vindication. He made a true piece of architecture, seeking only to reconcile the accommodation requirement into a composition of utter reverence and empathetic monumentality. The toss of the coin left Roark our cartoon hero on the side of glory, for Stephenson it was the last scratching of what would now appear to have been a brilliant nib.

For every creative act that has some success, the ground is littered with those that don’t - people who have tried and not quite got there. Maybe the task was too much, opportunity came at the wrong time or simply it didn’t work. It is a strange stimulant - adversity, whilst there is no guarantee that you will emerge from it - the ‘inspire’ myth persists and for architects its talisman of the fifties and sixties was the book and the film representing an architect’s battle for the right of creative freedom and in particular the ability to practice what they believed. Ayn Rands Fountainhead, a tale of the flowering of talent, crushing failure and ultimate retribution is an epic in biblical form, on the theme of the spirit of creativity. That the hero architect asserts the pre-eminence of modernism is particularly appropriate to our study. Gary Cooper captures it heroically in the film version, classical torso caught in the light breaking stones at the bottom of his metaphorical decent and exile before his Frank Lloyd Wright ascension into the architectural firmament.

Real life doesn’t quite echo our big screen achievers but in the film and books focus on the construction of a then remarkable modernist tower the idea of struggle reaches its apotheosis - a tower not of social value but representing the power and the force of architecture itself.

Of all the towers in our study one stands out for its unique expressive qualities - Heron House next to ‘Greek Thomson’s St Vincent Street Church. Its powerful profile differs from others in our study in the intensity of its architectural articulation but more of that later, the question we have is where did it come from? And that is where it gets interesting. Derek Stephenson’s practice only seemed to last a few projects including: an earlier project for Guardian Insurance which became the Strathclyde Regional Headquarters before being demolished, the Park Circus tower precinct before being recycled in the 2000s, a remarkable housing development of bricks and mansard roof forms in Langside which had an early history of technical problems and Heron House. Each of these projects were distinctive, the seeming practice of a sophisticated hand.

Line them up in a row and the question remains what came before and what came after and what of the history of the architect. Under this practices name there is no prior history and what would seem after the success of achieving this set of buildings, no follow up. Was Derek Stephenson’s practice broken on the recessions of the 1970s, not adapt to the community focus then emerging or did the uncomfortable architecture of his office simply not win favour and the architect committed to his modernist expressive vision refuse to deviate from his architectural values - in the spirit of Howard Roark in the Fountainhead. That is worthy of further study - but whatever after Heron House there was nothing. Heron House after a short gestation of practice work is its culminating piece - and it is heroic, a complex architects architecture. And as if to make the tale more poignant still, it has itself been over clad and significantly altered. It is to historic photographs we have to resort to see the real value of the piece.

The task Glasgow’s Howard Roark took on was an awesome one - to build a substantial footplate in the shadow of another of Greek Thomson’s finest works, the St Vincent Street Church. Imagine it as the equivalent of building beside the Art School today. Stephenson’s concept embraced that challenge and almost every move can be seen as articulating the task of bedding a new setting for the church at the same time as constructing a new floor plate.

Thomson’s plinth becomes Stephenson’s datum. Here we find one of the most articulated contemporary plinth and tower relationships to have been developed in the city. Stephenson seems to see the plinth as a pyramidical stepping base to Thomson’s church and thereby by default to his own tower slab occupying the opposite diagonal corner. To either side of the church the plinth is left open: on the St Vincent Street side to maintain views of the tower and to the south to emphasise a temple like podium. Here the podium becomes a landscape of Olympian amphitheatre and terraces stepping down the slope in a series of terraces expressed as canted stepped and ramped planes on the gable elevations.

A stairway cut through the plinth aligned on the tower negotiates the different levels before deviating around the east facade of the church to St Vincent Street.

This landscape of terraces under which ran a single retail unit - the first Habitat outside London in Glasgow, acted as the linking base for Stephenson’s tower. The stepped idea is retained but now in the form of a sequence of bays and terraces that rise up to form a rugged podium to spring the slab above.

The office slab takes its cue from Thomson’s temple front scale, its module taken from the column base to underside of pediment. The pediment depth on the tower slab is formed by an indented floor plate and this arrangement is repeated three times up the height of the tower. The gable is split by the escape stair to create two bay elements repeated on the frontage in a sequence of five bays. The top recession finds a particular craggy articulation as a series of pavilion like forms the most prominent being the central lift tower echoed down the building at upper plinth level with a pronounced canopy articulation.

The lowest of the tower expressed box modules is extruded in the form of an L around the eastern edge to touch St Vincent Street and engage with the adjacent tenemental scale.

D E R E K S T E P H E N S O N


When we set out to make the series “Dreaming the Impossible:Unbuilt Britain” for BBC4 we were searching for long abandoned grand plans which would have radically changed the face of Britain and there can be few schemes to rival the ambition of Robert Bruce’s 1945 plan for Glasgow. When I first laid eyes on “The Bruce Report,” or to give it its rather long winded official title: ‘First and Second Planning Reports to the Highways and Planning Committee’, it was hard not to be fascinated by this 1940s vision of modernity.

Robert Bruce was just 40 when he was appointed to the position of Master of Works for Glasgow City Council and began work on his “masterplan”. He was not an architect but this little known Glasgow engineer wanted to achieve what Le Corbusier had failed to create; a truly modern city of vertical towers and streamlined transport hubs – albeit combined with a more conservative classical spirit of Beaux-Arts order. All trace of Glasgow’s Victorian and Edwardian past was to be laid waste by the demolisher’s wrecking ball and a new utopian future created which, in his view, would transform the lives of ordinary Glaswegians for the better. Ignoring the essentially hypothetical, manifesto-like character of these documents, many architectural historians I spoke to were genuinely horrified by Bruce’s vision and dismissed the plan for its clumsy utilitarian approach that saw the city as simply a “machine for living”. But as a programme maker I wanted to understand what had motivated Bruce and those who supported him, to propose such a drastic solution to Glasgow’s problems.

Frustratingly the last few planners, architects and city counsellors that worked through this era were gone but newspaper reports, council minutes and other archive from the period helped to piece together a compelling story of a time when many could argue, however rhetorically, that the best thing that could possibly happen to Glasgow was to bulldoze the whole place. The Lord Provost himself enthused in his introduction to the plan that; “Sweeping changes are proposed but Glasgow’s citizens have a right to demand that their children should have a city no less healthy and no less beautiful than that which Mr Bruce envisages.” The thought that the City Chambers, Central Station and other landmarks could have been swept away is indeed shocking, but hindsight is a wonderful thing and few could dispute that Glasgow was a city with serious problems in the 1940s. And while the public information film “Glasgow Today and Tomorrow” which was made to promote the plan was produced in the style of the most unsubtle war propaganda of the day, the shots of families of five crammed into a tiny room, all sleeping in one bed, were very real. Could Bruce’s new plan for Glasgow have solved these problems ? And if so, would the loss of some of our most treasured buildings been a price worth paying? We’ll never know.

Although it was not really much more than elaborate visual rhetoric, Bruce’s plan was actually approved in principle by the city’s planning committee and a huge model of the scheme was put on display to show Glaswegians the great changes which were to take 50 years to realise. Of course, it didn’t happen and Robert Bruce, the man who almost changed Glasgow beyond recognition, is largely forgotten.

T H E B R U C E P L A N

Though early Modernism was on the ascendancy in Europe by the 1920s, galvanised by the architecture of Le Corbusier and Mies Van Der Rohe, it was not until the Empire Exhibition of 1938 that it found favour with the Glaswegian public. Heralded by Scottish Field as “a miracle flowering in a Glasgow suburb”, the Empire Exhibition in Bellahouston Park was the single most “concentrated and comprehensive display of ‘New Architecture’ seen anywhere in Britain before the [Second World] War”, and the introduction of an architecture markedly different from the Victorian and Baronial styles to which the public had grown accustomed.

In the economic depression following the First World War, Glasgow suffered as much as any British city. With a local economy dependent on heavy industry and foreign markets it’s recovery was laboured. Re-arming the country following the War went some way towards stimulating the shipyards and buoying Glasgow’s industries, although the conflict that was to then follow puts this revival into sardonic perspective. Glasgow, however, retained it’s status as the Empire’s Second City, and it was Edinburgh’s Lord Provost who motioned that if Britain was ready to stage the “most extravagant exhibition ever held in the United Kingdom”, it should be with Glasgow as host.

The temporary nature of the Empire Exhibition meant that steel would be the prevailing construction material, as it had been in both the 1901 and 1911 exhibitions. However, where the frames then were used as the basis for “deceptive pastiches of permanent structures”, all produced in a traditionalist style, the lead architect of the 1938 exhibition, Glaswegian Thomas Smith Tait of Sir John Burnet’s London practice, denounced the archaic architecture of exhibitions past in favour of a modernist style, an approach that would have been considered unwise in the face of a mostly conservative public. He reasoned that with such a short period of construction, ostentatious detailing was out of the question, so he would instead endeavour to curate an exhibition that was dignified, and unified in it’s materiality, scale, and construction techniques. He did, however, dislike the term “modernist” in reference to his exhibition - “That is a word I do not like. In this case it means nothing, for the design has been conditioned by function and materials, and not by time.”

When the exhibition opened to 150,000 visitors on the 3rd of May 1938, praise for the modernism on show, was unanimous among critics and the public. Thomas Tait’s use of words like “Dignity” and “Gaiety” appealed to the Glaswegian sensibility, earning him a measure of latitude with the public, and the fact that, as a Glasgow native, he was “one of their own” would do no harm.

Though the largest structure in the park, the Palace of Engineering was unquestionably impressive, arguably the highlight of the exhibition was a young Jack Coia’s Palace of Industries North. A departure from the church commissions for which he was recognised at the time, it remains the enduring image of the exhibition, capturing the essence of Tait’s masterplan in its balance of function and form.

However, in a sobering reminder that architecture never stands still for long, a single building in the exhibition defied Thomas Tait’s universal aesthetic. The South African Pavilion, standing on Kingsway, was designed by then 78 year old James Miller in the Dutch Colonial Style, a design that was unyielding in the face of modernity. Having begun his career in 1877, James Miller’s presence reminds us of the sometimes unforgiving haste with which architectural styles evolve, and gives the Exhibition additional resonance as marker, and as a transition, in Glasgow’s urban history.

T H E 1 9 3 8 G L A S G O W E M P I R E E X H I B I T I O N

“BOLDNESS IS REQUIRED IF EVEN STILL BOLDER STEPS ARE NOT TO BE REQUIRED IN LATER YEARS. PIECEMEAL BITS OF “PLANNING AND IMPROVEMENTS” NEVER WILL DO FOR GLASGOW – IT IS TOO OLD, TOO ILL PLANNED, AND TOO IMPORTANT.”

ROBERT BRUCE 1945

PAST + FUTURE 9

10

Originally named Stow College of Hairdressing, the college was founded by the Glasgow Corporation in 1956. Initially situated on John St, the college moved to its present site on Cathedral Street in 1963 and was renamed the Central College of Commerce and Distribution, to emphasise its orientation to serving the needs of the local community and industry.

In 1972, the Central College of Commerce, while remaining committed to building and developing began to expand its programmes, to create an extensive portfolio of courses which included business studies, information technology, hair and beauty, legal studies and accountancy.

Designed by Wylie Shanks Architects, the new facility opened in 1963, having been built for a cost of £350,000. The scheme was undertaken by the young, talented Peter Williams, the architect responsible for some of Wylie Shanks’s most prolific designs of the sixties and seventies; in recognition of this design excellence, in 1964 the college received the Civic Trust award.

The site is located on the corner or Cathedral Street and North Frederick Street in a prominent location atop a steep hill within sight of George Square, Glasgow’s civic centre. The constraints of the site itself posed very few challenges to Williams; the terrain is relatively flat, and affords the opportunity of remarkable views facing southwards down the city whilst also benefiting from unobstructed natural light with the availability of passive heat gains from the south.

Programmatically, the brief required educational facilities for the college’s expanding course list and influx of students. It is executed as a 7 storey block stretching longitudinally along Cathedral Street in an east-west direction, delineated as a stacked series of black and white cladding elements with 6 strips of flush, horizontal gridded glazing elements.

The ground floor is recessed from the main line of the elevation set atop a slight plinth amidst 10 elegantly proportioned bays of circular piloti, a cardinal motif of interwar modernism most famously represented in Corbusier’s Villa Savoye. This allows the entrance vestibule to be recessed, thus creating an arcade of sorts for users of the building to navigate by.

C O L L E G E O F C O M M E R C E , 1 9 6 3WYLIE, SHANKS & UNDERWOOD

CASE STUDY 0.2


The entrance, approached up a set of centrally placed steps, is emphasised by a horizontal canopy that provides shelter whilst clearly defining the building’s entry point.

The first floor acts as a transitional element between the ground plane and the 5 upper floors, featuring recessed terraces to the east and west achieved by retracting the building’s external leaf to the structural grid line.

The integration of a Corbusier-influenced sculptural rooftop (especially echoing the Unite d’Habitation in Marseille) differentiates the scheme from more typical concrete framed buildings of that time by adding a diverse, building silhouette. Rooftop silhouettes were a long-established feature of Glasgow, and had historically been provided by stone statues and embellishments. This does provide a welcome alternative to the proliferation of mechanical ducting and building services prevalent on most ‘new’ rooftops of the time.

The bulbous, porthole-pierced mass seated above the building was originally used as a gymnasium with the curvaceous form of the structure contrasting sharply with the glass and travertine-faced structure below. Constructed from a cast in-situ concrete post and beam structure that is organised rectilinearly as a 10 x 3 bay system, it utilises the structure to act as a series of solid trays seemingly floating between transparent glass sheets – an impression achieved by setting the facade out from the structural line.

In 2000, having been renamed the Charles Oakley Building, it became a ‘Category B’ listed building in recognition of its importance, both as historical reference and as a skilful exemplar of international Modernism. The building’s style is testimony to Scotland’s absorption of international influences; skilfully repurposing them and sensitively asserting itself within the rigid Glaswegian city structure.

PAST + FUTURE 11

Weir building on the University of Strathclyde campus), I can remember the period when the 29 Comprehensive Development Areas in the city were first designated. Everything was cleared for the motorway, many tenements were swept away and people were getting these new houses with inside bathrooms, and we all thought this was a brave new world. And we were genuinely enthusiastic (I don’t remember being enthusiastic about the Bruce Plan), we were excited about the idea of sweeping entire tenements away and giving people new clean houses and so on. And then maybe twenty or thirty years later you have a different view, because times change and views change, people do things like the rehabilitation of tenements and your views change over time. So, nothing is absolute in terms of opinions, but, no, I don’t like it and I didn’t like it then.

You described in your essay, ‘The Glasgow Grid’, about the tenement being both a building and an urban type, in that the tenement couldn’t exist without the ground around it. Do you think that’s almost a criterion for designing a Modernist building in the grid - that there has to be that relationship between the two? Tenements can exist outside the grid, there’s no doubt about that, of course, and the grid was designed originally not for tenements, but on a certain plot size. Plots were then aggregated to accommodate the tenement at a certain scale. I think the question of scale and plot size is critical. When you put something else into it . . . for instance, I think the most successful modern buildings in the grid are those which have narrow plots. There’s a building by King, Main & Ellison on West Regent Street, one of the earlier modern buildings, but because it’s on a narrow site, just like earlier buildings such as James Salmon’s Lion Chambers, it seems to me to work because, although it is taller than the original scale, nevertheless, it maintains that plot size, that slot into the street facades. And I think that’s important, when you sweep everything away and do something radical it doesn’t work so well. I think, too, the rectilinear quality of classicism elevationally fits with the plan, which is also classical originally.

Frank Arneil Walker studied at the Glasgow School of Architecture from 1955 - 1960. In 1961 he joined the practice of Professor Frank Fielden, Head of the Department of Architecture & Building Science at the University of Strathclyde, who had been appointed architect for the University’s new School of Architecture Building. Later John Cunningham, architect and town planner, joined Fielden & Associates as project architect for the new School.

What did the Modernist generation contribute to Glasgow’s core urban grid in the mid 20th Century? What did the modernist generation - whatever that is - contribute to the core? Nothing in terms of urban structure really, unless you count the interference of the motorway. But the Modernist generation, I would say, would be the architects that were practising in the ’30s, ’40s and maybe the ’50s too. After that, it was Post-Modernism, mostly. In terms of urban structure, the only thing I can think of that’s of any real consequence would be the introduction of the motorway and what that achieved, positively and negatively. Obviously it eliminated large chunks of tenemented Glasgow - perhaps unfortunate in that somewhat later the tenement rehabilitation started and so some might have been saved. On the other hand, the fact we created the motorway took the traffic out of the centre and in a way saved the gridded core of the city which otherwise might have succumbed to heavy traffic in one way or another. I think if you want to look at it positively, by creating that ring they sealed in the urban structure of Glasgow.

Looking at the Bruce Report and the Highways Plan we see a pragmatism of the former being executed in the latter. Do you think if the Bruce Report had been fully realised the pragmatic approach to context would’ve destroyed the urban grid? I think if they had actually realised the Bruce Plan, which I don’t think would have ever been realised, it would on the whole have been a disaster. In fact, it would have destroyed most of, if not the entire, grid and, even worse, it would’ve destroyed the architecture. I wouldn’t take the Bruce Plan seriously at all. It was an extreme view of what the city should be like - and a bit delayed in a way. Le Corbusier had wiped everything aside long before that.

Let’s talk about the local scale, with particular reference to the six buildings we are focussing on in Glasgow as examples of embedded Modernism in the grid. Working in Glasgow at the time, did you see these working particularly successfully or unsuccessfully then and in the years that have passed? Well, first of all, if I can comment on the idea of ‘embedded Modernism’, it seems to me, if you’re using a word like ‘embedded’, the implication is that this Modernism - the individual building or buildings - is sunk into something completely different, of a different character. And the embedded item is very much unusual or aberrant in the context. Also I think it implies a kind of tight positioning so that, thinking of the term ‘embedded Modernism’, I would think of buildings like, for example, the former BOAC building in Buchanan Street. It is ‘embedded’ in the sense that it actually uses a plot size of the dominant urban structure and puts a new type of architecture into that plot size, tightly constrained. And there aren’t many examples of that I can think of. The examples you gave are Modernism, embedded certainly in the centre of Glasgow, but they extend over more than one original plot, so they create a new kind of context, of place, for the building which wasn’t there in the original intention. So they’re using a few bits or plots of the grid to make room for a bigger building and, on the whole, I would say it’s not generally successful. But, on the other hand, when that’s done on a larger scale, like Bothwell Street or Atlantic Quay, where you take away a whole chunk, then they can make the new kind of modern cityscape, which works in itself but maybe doesn’t have much link to the grid or scale of the city.

What’s your opinion on the more extreme examples such as the Bourdon Building, which crosses the street? No, I don’t think it’s successful, I don’t think it’s a good idea, and I don’t think I thought so at the time! It’s difficult to go back and view how you felt once you get to a certain age - I don’t wish to appear old - but, for example, I can remember as a student in 4th or 5th year, in this building (the James

I N T E R V I E W 0 . 1F R A N K A R N E I L W A L K E R


How well do you think we’ve treated and cared for these examples of Modernist architecture in the city? On the whole, I would say that, not just in Glasgow, we don’t maintain buildings as well as we should - speaking about the exterior of buildings that is. We don’t feel we should wash buildings, we might wash the windows but we rarely wash the stonework or marble. But whether the situation in Glasgow is any worse than elsewhere in terms of maintenance, I doubt it. Climate had a lot to do with the problem; it’s certainly true that the Clean Air Act transformed Glasgow. I mean, to go back to when I was a student, everything was black, the buildings were black, it was completely different. So, in that sense, it’s been a tremendous progress.

Working in Glasgow at the time, early to mid ’70s, what was the atmosphere like, when some of these buildings went up? How easy was it at the time to get a building built? I suppose you could say that it was difficult to a degree to get the Comprehensive Development Area plans through, but not that difficult because, as I say, on the whole most people wanted something new, they wanted to escape the black city with the toilets on the stair landings and things like that. So there was a positive view of that too, and even the idea of the new towns and depopulating the city to an extent was also welcomed for the same reasons; people would get a decent house, a decent kitchen, a bathroom, a garden maybe and fresh air. When I was in practice in the ’60s, we were involved in two major projects, the School of Architecture Building at the University of Strathclyde and the Refectory Building at the University of Glasgow. There was no difficulty in terms of getting the kind of design we wanted. Maybe that was because clients were sympathetic. It might have been a different matter maybe when you come to individual clients, say for building a house, you could find it very difficult to design a modern house for them. In fact that’s still the case. So I wasn’t aware of any great difficulty getting the designs we were involved in through.

We understand you moved from practice into academia at a time when projects were plentiful and fees were fairly substantial. Why did you decide to make the move? I worked in a Glasgow office in the summers, and after I finished university I continued to work there for a year before joining Professor Fielden’s practice. During that period we built the Refectory and the School of Architecture. At the time I did some part-time teaching, as many young architects did. When Fielden went south I set up practice with my partner John Cunningham. We had a big project at East Kilbride at the National Engineering Laboratory site; it was more of an industrial project but it was big and brought in money. But we needed more. We both liked to teach in the design studios, so we did that and I personally got to like that rather more than John. I had also been teaching a little bit in the evenings at the Glasgow School of Art, teaching architectural history. John and I both taught in the design studio at Strathclyde. The practice was doing well, but not fantastically well, and I grew to like the teaching more and when a post came up for a lectureship at Strathclyde I applied for it and got it. I kept up the running of the practice but eventually I realised that both couldn’t be done, so we broke up our partnership amicably, John went into partnership with someone else and I started to teach full-time with a little bit of practice on my own, very little. I made the move because I liked it, I enjoyed the academic life. It gave me, I soon realised, the opportunity to write. I realised pretty soon, as a lecturer that if you wanted to advance you had to go and get a doctorate, so during the 70s I got my PhD. I don’t regret it, I enjoyed what I did.

Are we right in saying that your doctorate has to do with Czechoslovakia? Yes, yes it was on ‘Architecture in the Czech Lands 1830-1930’. Now there you get some of the best Modernism in Europe of the ’20s and ’30s, ‘embedded’ in the city. These ’30s buildings - some of them are of very high quality - are generally slotted in in different parts of the city. It works in a stimulating manner. I suppose one reason for my interest in that part of the world was my wife, whom I married in 1963. She was born in Yugoslavia but her father’s family were originally Czech. At the end of my student career I was awarded the John Keppie Scholarship and that granted me a certain amount of money intended for study in Europe. I asked one of the tutors at the time, Fred Selby, “Where should I go?” Most usually went to Greece or Rome, for obvious reasons, but I wanted to do something different. He said, “Well every architect should see Prague.” So I decided to go there in 1960 with my (not as yet) wife. I was completely swept off my feet architecturally, I have to say, the first time I saw Prague. It was the time of Communism, it was difficult. It wasn’t dangerous, but it was edgy. On the other hand, there was no commercialism, no rampant capitalism, no McDonalds or anything like that. And so the city, which hadn’t been affected by wars for 300 years, was relatively untouched and had absorbed 19th century architecture and 20th century architecture. But the old urban structure was still there, Baroque and late Gothic. I was just bowled over; I’d never seen anything architecturally like that and I kind of fell in love with it then and there. I resolved to do something as a consequence of this affection and when I realised that I should maybe try to do a doctorate and I already had architects friends in what was then Czechoslovakia I decided to relate my studies to Czech architecture.

Was there any point at which you regretted not being involved in the day-to-day design of Glasgow? Yes, I mean there’s no doubt you miss the pleasure of designing and the pleasure of seeing what you’re designing take shape, you do miss that. But what you don’t miss is the need to get the next job in or argue with contractors or argue with clients, or take people out for dinner that you might not really like in order to get a job. Fortunately my partner was better at that than I was. But I didn’t miss that. Weighing in the balance, no regrets.

If we can just go a little bit towards our project in Venice - we had mentioned that it is utopias we’re looking at as one aspect - we’ve just got a line here from your excellent Glasgow Grid essay: “The grid delineated a capitalist world, aggressively colonial in its potential for limitless replication, yet at the same time neither aristocratic nor paternalistic but, in its cellular centre-less organisation, democratic. The grid was indeed the concretization of the Glasgow utopia.” So, just looking at that, we have looked at some of the Metabolists’ works and Geoffrey Jellicoe. What do you feel the value of looking at these utopian ideas in architecture is? It’s a good question. I think utopian ideas are always necessary; one can’t stand still so you must have a new view. But principles have to be adapted to conditions, to practicality and so on. You have to compromise; ultimately you have to because I think the principle can rarely be achieved. One can’t think of a utopia that’s actually been achieved.

That’s an element we have looked at, the idea that fragments of utopias have existed, that the full scale has never been. I think it is good to have utopian ideas, to have a theoretical view and then to implement that in so far as you can, within context and to be aware that

you can’t just sweep, for example, the whole of Glasgow away and put the Bruce Plan down. It’s not realistic, nor would it be desirable, but maybe there are things in the Bruce Plan that you can implant to a degree. Life is like that, you can’t live without compromising. And the results are often much more interesting, the idealistic Bruce Plan implies a flat tabula rasa when actually Glasgow’s has its hills. If one goes back to the grids, particularly the Blythswood New Town, when put on a hilly site it’s a completely different experience, it’s quite an interesting experience compared to the flat site where the grid might become dull and boring. On a hilly site quite the contrary, it gives you an orientation and sense of how the space is organised but the experience of the space, the perception of the space is completely different - up and down and round the corner.

To refer to a rather famous building which deals with a hilly site, we can fast forward to the present with the Glasgow School of Art. Do you think that the Mackintosh School of Art library should be reinstated as a facsimile of the original? Yes I do. I thought you were going to ask me about the other building!

What do you think of the Reid Building? Well, quite recently I was through the inside for the first time. I found the interior spaces very stimulating and I like the austerity of it. I liked the harsh whiteness of it, it’s really fundamentally architectural. I thought some of the detailing was pretty shabby, really disappointing some of the ceiling details and the lack of skirting and there’s the possibility that the white walls will get dirty. Externally, I liked the scale of the building in relation to the street and the Mackintosh building, and I liked how inside you can see the Mackintosh building in a way as never before. But the glass cladding, I’m not sure about, I don’t think it’s a particularly good choice but maybe it’ll grow on me.

How did it differ to your expectations

before you went to it? Did you have a preconception of what it would be like inside? Well I knew about these “driven voids” as they call them, I thought in a way that these were just crying out for suicides, people throwing themselves off the top. I remember in the old dog-leg stairs of the college at Strathclyde, one of our students throwing himself off. That’s a long time ago. One hopes that doesn’t happen, but you could easily leap over. But, of course, that can happen in any building, you can’t really do much about that. I don’t think it’s quite the building that’s rated in the blurb. I looked at the book with Chris Platt’s essay on it; I can’t say I read it but the building is portrayed in glowing terms. It is a considerable building. I’m not sure it’s a great building.

Do you think it changes

the Bourdon Building in any way? Having the three stages of Glasgow history in the one block? That’s quite interesting, but I don’t think it does much for the Bourdon, you won’t persuade me on that one!

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PAST + FUTURE 13

U T O P I A 0 . 2H U G H F E R R I S S

The name Hugh Ferriss will probably not immediately resonate with many. However his works, and more importantly his legacy, almost certainly will. As a delineator, it was Ferriss’ job to create drawings and sketches of buildings; having trained as an architect he was naturally adept at the reading and recording of the built form. Although creating no buildings of his own in his lifetime, author Daniel Okrent praised him posthumously and quoted a colleague of his who claimed he “influenced my generation of architects more than any other man.” If it were possible to distil a lifetime of work down to a single word, Hugh Ferriss’ would undoubtedly be ‘influence’.

Ferriss’ delineations created dramatic and emotive views of buildings, using his medium expertly to create dark, morose scenes, encasing each in what could be called a permanent night. His use of fog only added to this sense of dystopia, a word often used negatively but which here is oddly intriguing, possibly due to his use of strong uplighting to highlight the subject in his delineations. These lights shine as a beacon of utopianism and hope in the drawing, creating what we could term a ‘dysutopia’, possessing both elements of utopia and dystopia simultaneously.

One of the earlier works on which his influence can be felt is Fritz Lang’s 1927 film, Metropolis. Filmed in black and white and portraying

a dystopian society based on class systems, it has the mise-en-scene of one of Ferriss’ delineations right down to the use of strong lighting on the Tower of Babylon, showcasing it as the central subject within the scene. It was at this time that Ferriss was perfecting his style of drawing, having created delineations for various architects, mostly in Detroit.

Looking at one of Ferriss’ completed delineations as a first time viewer, they may seem strangely familiar, a sort of déjà vu perhaps, and this wouldn’t be entirely unjustified. The fictional home of the criminal and morally corrupt, the moody and dark architecture of Gotham City oozes Hugh Ferriss’ influence on every page of the DC comic. Well known and highly regarded as the ‘Delineator of Gotham’, Ferriss’ focus on draughting American skyscrapers with such precision and graphic style formed the basis of the New York City allegory that became Gotham City. Having grown darker decade-by-decade, the Batman comic book series struggled to release itself from the grip of its light hearted 1966 television series. This was until Alan Moore and Frank Miller reinvented the series tabula rasa, using ‘The Metropolis of Tomorrow’ as a seminal reference point in the design of Gotham City. His influence is highly evident in the 1993-1995 cartoon ‘Batman: The Animated Series’ whose design of Gotham City was dubbed “Dark Deco”.


Patrick Geddes entered into urban design folklore when he coined the word ‘surgery’ to describe his work in the old town of Edinburgh. Counter to what the word surgery suggests, the careful incisions and precise stitching of contemporary conservation work, in reality Geddes’s actions corresponded more to amputations. Nevertheless the analogy holds - the idea of acting on the body of a city in a clinical manner with the intention and presumption in favour of ensuring its survival.

All cities suffer decay and cavities inevitably emerged too in the amazing grid like continuity of Glasgow’s city fabric whether by way of structural collapse, neglect or desire to modernise. Whilst in some areas wholesale removal was advocated and carried, out there was a more conscious consideration in the spirit of Geddes underlying some advocates of urban renewal.

Whether Geddes had any direct influence on this aspect of Glasgow’s post war building programmes needs investigation, but underlying that drive was in part this parallel sensibility of respect for the city body. Where the results differed from the old town of Edinburgh was in Glasgow’s adoption of the modernist spirit of the time - the stitching of the ensemble together not in a recognisable pseudo historical style but rather in what we would term the embrace of modernism. The result however was similar, the continuity of the city was preserved - the only difference, it did not pretend to be how it had always been.

One view captures this vision brilliantly - a westward look along Sauchiehall Street with Greek Thomson’s Grecian Chambers now the Centre for Contemporary Art in the foreground and the Glasgow Dental Hospital in the distance. Thomson’s three storey masterpiece, masking a ruthlessly prosaic interior, did fill an urban cavity in the grid of the city. The northern edge of Sauchiehall Street was a row of set back villas which, gradually as the city expanded westward, the sloping front gardens of which were filled in. The villa can still be seen from inside the centre.

The Glasgow Dental Hospital in the spirit of Geddes had little time for subtlety. It excavated out

the decayed villas replacing them with a three storey plinth of modern accommodation filling the garden and site all the way back to Renfrew Street. In turn this was all surmounted by a north south orientated slab block. It is the juxtaposition of Thomson’s Grecian Chambers and this new urban plinth and tower that captures the essence of this emerging new treatment of the city.

Alexander Greek Thomson represented the most coherent 19th century attempt to master the application and adoption of an appropriate grid architectural language. The Glasgow Grid was not generally embellished by nuance and likewise what Thomson sought and advocated within each individual contribution was a cosmetic but consistent expression which through variation within the theme would grace and emphasise the continuity of his city.

The Dental Hospital plinth recognises this ‘historical modernism’ and indeed echoes it, but now in the stripped but elegant proportioning of a facade - laid out in the manner of a grid. Where Thomson sought to manner his building and indeed the whole city in the spirit of the emergence of western culture and art, the Dental Hospital adopts a universality rooted in a contemporary actuality - the city is a grid, so to its face.

The root of Thomson as an inspirational guidance doesn’t finish here. His architectural extrapolations on a theme would not have countenanced any expression above the horizontal. The only exception was the towers that emerged above the sacred settings of his churches. For him the occupation of the skyline of the city could only be by anointment.

In a prescient twist the Dental tower when viewed from straight on from Sauchiehall Street turns this notion of value on its head. No longer is the breaking of the skyline a symbolic gesture of faith, but a signal and representation of a universal right to be treated fairly and well irrespective of where you come from. The ‘democratic’ universality of the grid, every street is similar, finds expression in its occupied tower floating above the urban plinth -serving belief but belief in the rights of the populace to a fair, even if in this instance - a painful appointment.

The below image of Glasgow’s skyline renders the city as an elevated slice of an urban chess set, the rarefied space of king, queen, rook and bishop filled with, campanile, spire, finial and dome, the inert references to the ecclesiastical, educational and institutional structures that defined 19th century Glasgow, below which the daily life of the city is played out in the gridded pattern of street and block. The great industrial expansion of the city threw up the 19th century defining industrial image of smoke-spewing chimneys that cloaked the city in blackness and jostled with the more refined architectural forms of the skyline. The elevator driven high-rise offices joined the elevated sky-high assembly with North American swagger at the turn of the 20th century, Chicago-style commercial chambers rising above the predominantly four-story datum of the city core. Whilst these high-rise proto office buildings introduced the ‘profits’ of competitive capitalism to the skyline, in contrast it was the egalitarian zeal of the 20th century Modernists that contributed to the elevation of housing to the peripheral skyline of Glasgow, the Anderston Centre offering a rare example of high-rise public housing in the urban core.

The Modernists desire to depart what they regarded as the diseased city drove them both outwards to the pastoral settings of the new towns and upwards in to the fresh air above the city, to territories unpolluted by both the detritus or the irrationality of the 19th century city. In contrast to the general perception of Modernist interventions in the city as insensitive, analysis of our case study buildings reveals a nuanced understanding of the building as both integrated to the existing urban tissue and singular architectural object, buildings that respond both to the street at their base and to the skyline in their upper stories. As such the selected buildings offer manifold lessons for contemporary architects working within Glasgow’s urban fabric.

OBSERVATION 0.3

C I T Y O F T H E S K Y

N E W F I L L I N G I N T H E C I T Y

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At the end of the 1950s, Glasgow Corporation set out to commission a new building for the collective faculties within the College of Building. The site chosen was at the corner of North Hanover Street and Cathedral Street, a site which had been home to the College of Building in one form or another since 1927. The faculty merged with the College of Printing in 1972 to establish a mixed facility, offering training in practical skills and knowledge. The city officials acknowledged the teaching of trades was becoming more in demand in Scotland, fully supporting the scheme which was rushed through its various stages until completion.

Designed by Peter Williams of Wylie, Shanks & Underwood, the architects of the College of Commerce, its squatter neighbour across the road (between 1958-64), the development was one of the first commercial towers within the city centre, having a position of significant prominence due to its proximity to George Square just one block south.

As with the College of Commerce, Williams’ evident inspiration from Le Corbusier resulted in the application of an aesthetic similar to that of the Unite d’Habitation in Marseille. The scheme comprises a 13-storey tower with a sculptural rooftop gymnasium and plant space raised off of the street by seven colossal pilotis- thus enabling the dedication of much of the ground level to a pedestrian passageway. The block is attentively proportioned with emphasis given to the entrance by the use of a dramatic cantilevered concrete canopy overhead.

The plan is hexagonal in shape housing identical floor plates punctured by three elevators, with further Corbusian influences in planning, resulting in the lozenge type swelling to the centre of the building. Constructed from a reinforced concrete frame, the resulting massing is signified by a 24 bay curtain walling system framed within black frames and vitriolite marble spandrel panels to the north and south elevations, flanked by two solid, sheer end gables of Italian Travertine cladding slabs to the east and west elevations. These elevations are detailed with three vertical courses of stone evenly punctuated by narrow horizontal banding. The juxtaposition between the white gables and the dark glazing gives the building its resultant character.

CASE STUDY 0.3

C O L L E G E O F B U I L D I N G A N D P R I N T I N G , 1 9 6 4WYLIE, SHANKS & UNDERWOOD


Exploiting the topography, the building sits on the steeply sloping North Hanover Street forcefully by slicing the structure line where the building meets the site’s terrain. A single storey podium block extension was later constructed to the north of the tower, constructed from precast concrete, finished with reflective glazing and concrete aggregate panels to the bulky roof section.

The interiors contain finishes such as terrazzo staircase, marble-clad balusters and timber handrails. Such luxurious finishes to a ‘third level’ institution convey a confidence in the long-term future of education in materials and crafts, an apt reasoning for the specification of materials that tended to grace the lobbies of high end commercial lobbies.

The finished building contained 13 floors dedicated to the teaching of design, furniture, building, printing and photography all housed within a contemporary building fitted with state of the art facilities, subsequently leading to a major advancement in printing and publishing, and becoming Scotland’s only dedicated print training centre.

In1964, after four years of construction, the College of Building & Printing was officially opened by Harold Wilson, the UK Prime Minister. After 2004 the College became a part of Glasgow Metropolitan College, which is now an amalgamated entity of the newly established City of Glasgow College.

In 2002 the towering College of Building and Printing and nearby Central College of Commerce were awarded B-listed status by Historic Scotland, protecting them from future development in acknowledgement of their importance in the development of modernism within Glasgow during the 20th century. Their importance is emphasised in the listing justificatory text, which argues that ‘the buildings are prominent landmarks on the city centre skyline and their significance can be justifiably considered alongside a limited international cast, including Gio Ponti’s Pirelli Tower in Milan.’

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What is your opinion on the Bruce Plan as a Utopian concept? I don’t think the Bruce Plan is Utopian. I think of the Bruce Plan as an offshoot of the garden city movement in England, alien to the Scottish culture and nonsensical in the sense that if you look at the drawings of the roundabouts you can see horses and carts but only one car. It was absurd!

What influenced Scottish architects then was the Empire Exhibition of 1938. It built a new town in 18 months by utilising the abundance for skilled tradesmen without jobs due to the decline of the shipyards. The exhibition was a sparkling manifestation of modern architecture and its aspirations. I don’t think the Bruce plan was any more than a distraction and was dropped before it even took off.

What influence do you think the Bruce plan had on the urban centre of Glasgow? That generation of architects who worked on the Empire Exhibition, some continued such as Basil Spence and Thomas Tait - they were the people that shaped the future not the Bruce plan. By the time the war finished the Bruce plan was locked in a cupboard, forgotten, the idea was gone. I do not think it was either idealistic or anything of the like, it had more to do away with the urban city and replacing it with a green suburb.

The highway plan of 1965-7 was a highly controversial plan - do you consider that as a residual idea from the Bruce Plan? The highway plan was something that was a part of the time in dealing with infrastructure. Parts of it were modernised, some were built and some were not. It creates a much better entrance to the city when coming up from London; you can stay on the motorway until you want to get off in Glasgow.

The plan you may look at is the Clyde valley regional plan which sought to surround Glasgow with half a dozen garden cities. Its intent was not quite as blunt as the Bruce plan, but it was to be implemented with more realism whilst still involving knocking down most of the city centre - the inner city ring. Glasgow Corporation were building to what they thought were similar to the modern movement, building to the idea to satellite towns, developing the outside of the city which brought about the demolition of the outer ring of suburbs in places like Drumchapel to a standard tenement / semi-detached house type.

What was your view on The International Style - the so called Modern Style - when you began practising? Most of the architectural publishing was done in London then. The early Bauhaus architects such as Gropius and Mendelssohn came to London, and then of course on to America. They were the people who brought modern architecture to Britain in that sense. When I

started as an apprentice in Glasgow Corporation we built a number of modern flats that were successful, not multi-storey. We built in more suburban areas of Glasgow that were modern in that they were picking up ‘the modern’ rather than being like Le Corbusier and Mies. Demolishing the Basil Spence towers was stupid. The flats would have sold to the middle class.

Funny though, as students we did a project to build ‘unites’ in Glasgow green and put the displaced people there and extend that until they had a green city, but later we became more practical and less theoretical.

I worked with a 70 year old architect who was building pre-fabricated houses in a factory the Corporation built in the Far East end that manufactured concrete houses with 2 storey prefabricated panels using concrete roofs. They experimented with foam slag that was a form of concrete block that’s now ubiquitous.

When do you think ‘the modern’ truly penetrated the

mindset of Scottish architects? I truly believe Modernism in Scotland in the 20th century arrived on the scene with the Empire Exhibition. It was a showing of modern technology, and the building of buildings. They used to their detriment now sheet asbestos - the ideas of frames and cladding, plywood come in so the idea of making a door out of 6 planks etc. now you had a door that was pre-manufactured with the ironmongery etc. but the ethos of Scottish modernism probably came via London - but it certainly came to Glasgow in that generation of architects. Jack Coia worked with Thomas Tait on a building at Prestwick airport that was a palace of engineering. There you will see a genuine appreciation of building that was being built as housing in Germany, France and in Europe at the time. Also, the journals were starting to be published at that time and they covered Europe. I mean Mackintosh was a Modernist - he influenced Vienna, in a programmatic sense, like a house having a front and back door/ a ground floor and a first floor. But they were modern in the way they were made.

How would you describe the decision to insert new typologies into tenemental street-blocks set within the grid, buildings such as Fleming House and Heron House? Fleming House was a purely speculative development which at the time was the kind of development that was being built everywhere. The developers started buying in construction systems from Scandinavia, Germany and America. System buildings were big deals - the government were in favour of it. They thought if you could buy a unit and put a building up fast, they could say they built so many hundred houses. I remember once the government dug a hole that was 10 x 10 feet wide and eight feet deep

Andrew MacMillan was Professor of Architecture at the University of Glasgow and Head of the Mackintosh School of Architecture, 1973 to 1994. Professor MacMillan studied at Glasgow School of Art while working for Glasgow Corporation’s Housing Department and the East Kilbride New Town Development Corporation during the 1950s. He joined the architects Gillespie, Kidd & Coia in 1954 and became a partner in 1966. He continued to work as a consultant architect after leaving the firm in 1988. Among many awards, Professor MacMillan has won the RIBA Award for Architecture on four occasions and the Royal Scottish Academy Gold Medal in 1975. He has been a member of several public bodies, including the Scottish Arts Council, 1978 to 1982, and he was awarded the OBE in 1992.

On Saturday 16th August 2014 Profressor Andy MacMillan died, he was 85. On the day of his death he was judging Scotland’s most prestigious architecture prize. MacMillan the architect, teacher, writer, thinker and raconteur never stopped. The following interview given on 15th July 2014 was his last.

What did your modernist generation contribute to Glasgow’s core urban grid in the middle of the 20th century? The Urban Grid is made from the Victorian buildings, which survived inside the motorway. The tenement was seen by the labour councillors as a degradation of the working class and they built houses that were modern in a sense - as in you would recognise they were different after the war, as in they had bathrooms and kitchens. But they were also short on facilities. In order to get money back the corporation invested in one little shopping centre in each of these suburbs in order to charge a bigger rent - but it was essentially an idea that was still to be in contact with Glasgow police, buses, etc… and of course there was work after the war - they were looking at housing in the city that would bring money into the city, so then you get the peripheral suburbs like Drumchapel and Easterhouse.

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and they said they had started on a thousand new homes, which was true - but they didn’t build them for almost forty years! An election was coming up so the party wanted some to make a big show.

What was your opinion of these new building types, as a piece of architecture and as addition to Glasgow city centre? The city centre was barely affected for a long time. By the time it was affected that kind of building within the commercial sector was based on the commercial ideas of New York and London, it was never seen to us (GKC) as being what modernity was about. The people who genuinely built modern buildings, where ‘the modern’ entered Scotland as a comprehensive idea; then it was the Empire Exhibition in ‘38 - not the commercial additions in the ‘60s and ‘70s.

How did the political atmosphere determine what was being built in Glasgow at that time? It was a bureaucracy, centrally controlled being gradually enforced on the city. We (GKC) did a lot of work for the city as a private firm. That stopped when they made a county architect or a city architects department - that’s when the degeneration of modernism happened.

I worked for a very good architect, who didn’t have a very strong personality to get his ideas built. Pollock built in the 1940’s is a much more modern estate than that from ‘45 onwards. I was working on Pollock estate with the men of the generation that built the empire exhibition. Gradually it became a centralised thing, I mean if someone farts in London we smell it up here! The city / county architects tended to rely mainly on the idea of the garden city.

Planning was done from a central office, it (planning) was a concept little understood by the people working in it. There used to be a city architects office and after the war there was a planning office, which were mainly dealing with the circulation of water.

You said that planning was a concept. Does that mean the planners did not fully understand the complexities of urbanity and its relationship to people? They didn’t understand Urbanism, the relationship of density to amenity. In Glasgow you could always step out of your front door where there was shops, chemist etc. within walking distance. In the early days there was a tram and bus stops. They didn’t grasp that. We built the most popular houses after 1950, places like Knightswood which had a front garden and back garden, simple devices to stop someone peering in your front window.

Otherwise you stepped out onto the street that were organised in a rational system. The tram routes moved into the city centre, you could legibly tell if you lived in a suburb, an inner suburb or the city centre by the height and the density surrounding you.

Was there any discussion of human scale, with the city being planned for people and not the motorcar? Around 1965 I recall giving a talk to the students in the planning department about how the Victorian city was organised with streets, sewers, tramlines and cars, trying to explain how a functional city was structured. The man in charge of teaching planning to the planning students at the time asked, ‘would you allow that in your districts?’ I couldn’t understand what he meant! I was just telling them how it was organised.

Frank Lloyd Wright’s ‘Broadacre City’ was more accurate in designing the motor suburb for both rapid transit and circulation. He designed grids too because cars prefer to go in long straight lines. There were very few in my generation that talked about the city in relation to the people, the end, the middle, the facades, the backs.

At one time Glasgow was considered the most advanced city for transport. From ‘Greek’ Thomson‘s time onwards Glasgow was becoming a modern city.

Was there a misunderstanding of the tenemental typology in the city at that time that might have prompted the encouragement of new, imported typologies? The planners had no comprehension of relationships to one building type to another. They didn’t understand that the tenement wall acted as a wall to the city with the back courtyard walls sewage systems that were needed, that were not being put onto the buildings the planners were promoting. The traditional European city is built like that too. You recognise the main street when you are going up town and down town.

They planning department worked to numbers; like how many people to the acre. 12 was the number at that time because you could grow your own food in your back garden. They had no consideration how people get to work in the morning or how difficult it was to get a pack of sugar you forgot to buy in town that morning.

Were there trends and ideas that determined the formal expression of the new builds in the city centre; ideas such as levitating blocks above the city grid, moving from the dirty street to the clean air above? There was an interest in ecology that may well have held a concern with such ideas, I mean they were thinking of building so-called green cities.

In Singapore people have manuals for how to use their homes as we once had here - how to decorated it and the like. We are uneducated now in respect to this. I think in Singapore they use the under croft of buildings much more like how Corb intended.

We have spoken about the mentalities

that were prevalent among the majority. How did Gillespie, Kidd & Coia approach modernity? We were the first generation of the Glasgow School of Art who looked at what was happened in the reset of the world. Before the war the rest of the world and Scotland were living in a not yet dead renaissance world or garden city world. Garden city was cutting edge. I mean people didn’t want to come home from working hard all day and have to go out and tend to their crop just to feed themselves. And if you didn’t you would presumably starve!

Where did you get inspiration from amongst your contemporaries and who were you looking to at that time with interest? Isi (Metzstein) and I used to read magazines and journals, we made trips to Europe and later to America to study buildings that we were interested in. Nowadays the journals are almost like a paid piece of propaganda for the likes of Chipperfield and Foster. In the early days the Architects Journal was aimed at the practical side of

the business, and the Architectural Record was for philosophical discussions about issues in planning and building - introducing us to the world!

GKC seemed to be more interested in a more contextual/ Scottish approach. What was the ethos regarding architecture and material if not to the apparent ubiquity of construction systems at that time? After the war there was a much greater concern for society. The buildings we mainly worked on were housing, hospitals, colleges, universities. We looked at buildings that were built for the community. The buildings of the current era are built by architectural stars that are seeking iconic status. The minimalists are less concerned with the practical and more the aesthetic- their attitude tended to be more superficial. A plain looking elevation that was well proportioned was more important that the differences of living on the ground floor to living on the first floor.

We lived in a time when building for ordinary people was still a big concern. Our churches were built looking back to the days when a church was a more splendid place. The movement in French religious orders influenced us in a sort of minimalist way but never to the detriment of pleasure in the building or of practicality.

At times there seemed to be definite reference to Scottish motifs, such as inhabited Castle walls. Well that is no accident. We used those ideas but in their essence rather than the direct execution of them. St. Brides Church uses the idea of a thick wall as accommodation. One reason was to hide the plaster statues in the wall that proliferate catholic churches, so we built recesses you could put them in. The ideas were straight forward; when you approach that building you could see the entrance. You could see the big door churches have, when you go past that door you encounter another that’s the size of a human being. You looked at the baptismal font where the old liturgy demanded it to be. They changed the liturgy so everything could happen on the big stage after so some of the best moments of promenade were lost.

The intention was you went up the external stairs, into a small square across which had lines leading to the front door. You had time to shrug off the secular world and by the time you passed the baptismal font your mind had time to adapt to a sacred space, a non-secular space.

St.Pauls in Glenrothes was our first church for a congregation of 250 people. There we learned the basis for how we designed religious buildings; dealing with how a funeral runs, and what was really

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important inside the space and the way it should be. Very functional and minimal with the aim to create a special space for a special function.

We built in what we felt was appropriate rather than what was common. Some buildings are brick, Glenrothes is built of concrete bricks and painted white to look like a white Scottish church in the landscape. I wouldn’t say we built for minimalism but for example in Glenrothes we built simply to achieve the desired outcome.

Those spaces were meant to be austere, rather than how Cedric Price said a church should be a ‘gilded god box’. He liked baroque churches with gold statues, I was slightly more Presbyterian in my thinking! We did buildings to the budget that was set by the archdiocese.

The BOAC building on Buchanan

Street is GKC’s most urban building. What considerations did you have with building in the heart of the Victorian city and how did that influence the design and material expression of the building? It was meant to fit into the Victorian concept of the articulation of the wall and the window. It was a very small, tight site on the corner of Buchanan Street and Mitchell lane so we had to have a minimum thickness to the wall so as to not reduce the internal space too much. It was worked out to fit that site, and that location. It was designed to be contextual. The choice of copper cladding was gotten from the need to keep the wall so thin.

Why did GKC receive so few urban commissions and, considering your obvious views on dealing with urbanity do you regret not having the opportunity to contribute more to the city centre? We got one or two projects for the city centre, but we were getting enough public works which kept us busy. The city centre then, as it is still the case now was predominately commercial projects. We had more of an interest in the social work, our generation was more interested with having a social connection than they have now - nowadays the profession admires icons. The trouble is you can’t really build a city with icons, if every building is an icon, then what is an icon anymore!?

You’re allowed landmark buildings in the city; they used to be churches and public institutions and they told you where you were in the city-the spire would tell you where you are. If you go down a New York street you know it’s a street because it’s constructed of a type. The street is a wall that separates the public domain from the private domain. Most of the great cities, Paris, Rome, Amsterdam, they are all constructed by using an urban wall that divides the street from the private which people understand, and the churches and the monuments are put at places where things meet or where there’s a need to differentiate one street from another.

And any regrets...? We did some projects in Cumbernauld and in Paisley. We would have liked to have done work on a bigger urban scale in Glasgow, but we did build a lot of buildings and quite a few churches where there is no real functional program apart from a very simple one- it’s really the creation of a space. That really helped us understand things like the difference between inside and out. It would have been nice to do more but we built a lot.

What is your view on the situation of architecture in the city now? There is a lack of understanding singularity. With that you can only afford if the building is seen as singular. If you put six church towers in a row you lose the awareness of the singular and therefore the church tower becomes less singular and less useful in its ability to signify place. Not only with church towers but with particular buildings occurring in particular places.

Also you can particularise a building to signify the difference between a school and an office block. This is in opposition to Mies’ idea of a ubiquitous language where there is no transition between the public and private, no difference in type, as in churches between the sacred and the secular. I’m not sure the majority of people build now with as much consideration, but more importantly that the building is associated with them. It should be used sparingly with an understanding of the significance of its location, and contextual significance.

How do you feel the architects of this era are dealing with building in Glasgow? I think there is a lot more understanding of city functions. I think the concept of public and private and for some people the idea of singularity within the city is becoming much more widespread.

What is your opinion regarding the

way in which the new Reid Building within the Glasgow School of Art integrates itself into the Glaswegian context? First of all, Steven Holl is more of a scenographer than an architect in my view. It’s very useful for the art school to have all the additional accommodation but I think it’s not detailed very well on the exterior. It is still a street building, it’s a bit of a bland manifestation of what Steven Holl believes is a 21st century building. It is right in certain places but the tubes of light leave me slightly unconvinced. It does recognise the block as an urban structure but I think that was just an excuse to build a big block of a building, and a good enough reason to do so perhaps.

A city has to be legible and functional. The need to understand the totality, thanks to the likes of Gordon Cullen there is a wider understanding of this now.

In Glasgow 2014, can or should Mackintosh’s library at GSA be reinstated as a facsimile of the original? I personally do think it should be rebuilt. That building probably brings in about 2,000,000 people a year to Glasgow, everyone wants to see the Glasgow School of Art. They have all the drawings needed, all the photos needed to reinstate it to its design. On the condition they do that I do not see any reason they should consider any other option.

The jewel in the mackintosh crown is the Mackintosh library. The library is an incredible complex of spaces. I often stand on the window and there is a feeling of standing in space. The arrangement of columns and beams is probably ten to fifteen years ahead of constructivism, it’s an intelligent way of decorating a building without using ornament. The intensity of the experience I think is only compared to the central area of the Soane Museum. It is too incredible of a space to not be rebuilt as it was originally design. The bay window lets you see out to the street but also lets you see in - there is a reciprocal relationship to the two views which is a very complex idea. The Ise Grand Shrine in Japan is about 2000 years old and is rebuilt every 20 years since then-that’s a question like the ‘Mac’ library, why shouldn’t the ‘Mac’ library be rebuilt like that? The art school is a crown, and the Mackintosh Library is the jewel in that crown.

Glasgow is a city shaped by ice.

The undulating landscape of the Clyde Valley, sculpted by glacial action 10,000 years ago, forms the geological foundation of the city of Glasgow. From the topographical declaration of the original medieval cathedral settlement high above the crossing of the River Clyde, to the gravity-defying buildings of Glasgow’s 20th century Modernists in their desire to depart the ‘tainted’ ground of the existing city in the pursuit of light and air, topography has remained a defining factor in the urban development and character of Glasgow. As Andor Gomme and David Walker (1968) pithily note, “Hills matter more in Glasgow than any other large city in the country; and hills, more than anything, determine the special character of Glasgow’s townscape.”

Having secured the high ground for prayer and burial, the city’s first graveyard neighbouring the Cathedral precinct, the city developed towards the low ground of the river, exploiting the river’s flat alluvial plain throughout the development of the city. Initially the river provided mere subsistence, a clean water supply and source of food, but by the 18th century the river had become a conduit for trans-Atlantic trade with the New World, firstly in tobacco and sugar, followed by cotton. By the turn of the 20th century shipbuilding had usurped trade as Glasgow’s financial base, transforming Glasgow into the powerhouse of world shipbuilding. The wealth generated by New World trading coupled with a rising merchant class both created the demand and supplied the financial muscle for the creation of Glasgow’s first new town development. Whilst the first new town plan was laid out in the relatively level ground west of the original medieval settlement, it is the draping of the relentless grid-iron plan over the shifting city topography, as executed in the second new town plan of 1796, generally attributed to James Craig and offering a unique combination of ground and grid, that remains the defining character of Glasgow’s urban core.

Located within the grid orthodoxy of individual buildings rising and falling with each topographical shift are local masterpieces that exploit the city topography to sublime effect. Alexander Thomson’s St Vincent Street Church (1859), situated on a corner location just off the plateau of Blythswood Hill, exploits the hill to assert a plinth and temple composition of extraordinary power and ingenuity. Whilst the building presents a massive monolithic stone plinth as the mediating element between the shifting ground and the ‘temple’ perched above, in reality the ‘temple’ is essentially a classical roof-light illuminating the body of the church buried deep within the stone plinth.

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original grid there was a diminution of the clarity of the embedded contributions. Our investigation suggests that development scale and ambitious programmes began to shape these fragments of the city in their own image rather than the city shaping them.

It is hard to put a date on where the mood swung - Glasgow was still building isolated towers in the Laurieston areas of the city in the mid-seventies but a crucial part of this change was the role of its two universities and indeed partners in this project.

Strathclyde University’s contribution was twin-stranded. Fundamentally important was the ASSIST movement led by Jim Johnson, Raymond Young and others to slow down and halt the then wholesale demolition of large areas of the city by advocating their repair and reuse. The second, by Frank Walker, Peter Reed, Tom Markus and Brian Edwards, began to excavate the origins of the city; its grid and urban historical planning, and document it. At a practical and theoretical level the foundation of the city had, by the early seventies, come severely under threat in spite of the efforts by those architects we have described to embed their architecture in the grid city form. It appeared that the Bruce Plan’s formal intentions were being achieved by default. It was here that the counter argument began to be made.

On the other side of the city centre at the Mackintosh School of Architecture Andy MacMillan, Isi Metzstein, and other colleagues instituted a rigorous urbanism and architectural output. The focus as in their work at Gillespie Kidd and Coia was on the importance of the architectural setting of any project. Whilst the practice had operated chiefly in the sprawling outskirts of the city and its new towns they saw their role to bring that sense of urban containment and sensibility to every project. Their work at the school explored how this reinvigorated choice of action might in return impact on the city. Indeed in microcosm the BOAC building in Buchanan Street reflects what might have been. Built at the end of our period of study it anticipated a future more modest scale of intervention mirrored by a generation of output of the school evoking a revitalised and reenergised belief in the city, lessons which extended far beyond it.

Both universities were crucial contributors in the placement of an intellectual stopper in the face of an incipient erosion of the original city. Whilst the Bruce Plan did not deliver its objective at the heart of the city, its driving vision and associated infrastructural planning intentions permeated the core of development thinking for a quarter of a century if not longer. The city’s higher educational institutions needed to re-intellectualise the foundation of the cities being, little realising that deep within the ‘raze it all’ heirs of the Bruce Plan, there was a Trojan Horse body of practicing architects empathetic to their own position. Clad in the garb of modernist construction techniques this had the potential to form a unified front with the post seventies protectors of the original city. This belated investigation seeks to undo that missed opportunity.

In contrast to Thomson’s placement ‘on’ the hill, Glasgow’s other renowned architectural master, Charles Rennie Mackintosh demonstrates a feat of architectural excavation into Garnethill for his Glasgow School of Art (1899-1910). Mackintosh roots his building deep in the hillside strata exploiting programmatic demands and poetic meaning in the setting of the school’s stone carving studios within the hill’s domain of rock and soil.

The mid-20th century modernists had other ideas about the ‘grounded’ city they inherited from Thomson and Mackintosh. Inspired by Le Corbusier’s radical urban plans and CIAM’s vision of the rigidly clarified city, Glasgow’s modernists sought to rise above the perceived ills of the traditional city in the pursuit of both the environmental benefits of fresh air and sunlight, and formal purity. If Thomson demonstrated how to place a building ‘on’ the ground and Mackintosh ‘within’ the ground, the modernists approach was to build ‘above’ the ground. The adopted architectural repertoire of Corbusian pilotis, platforms, shelves, bridges, stilts and terraces were employed to remove the new architecture physically and symbolically from the existing ‘grounded’ city. The setting of modernist buildings ‘above’ the ground offered not only a radical response to Glasgow’s urban grid and its geological foundation, the modernists gravity defying slabs provided a new datum against which to register the city’s topographical character. In conceptual terms the modernists regarded the low-rise 19th century city and its topographical foundation as a single entity, an architectural super-base upon which to construct their new city in the sun.

The Modernist buildings constructed in Glasgow in the middle of the 20th century represent one outcome of such a radical approach to the city but they are by no means the only outcome.

It is inevitable that once fresh artistic tendencies and approaches suffer from burn out. In simple terms the context for the art changes and it needs to change with it. There can be a change of attitude politically, the economy for development can alter, seeing the built output of a particular stance starts to raise questions about the values being pursued, once everybody starts doing the same thing there reaches a point of a numbing sense of dullness. The result slowly and imperceptibly is a growing desire for change.

Reflecting on the period from 1955 to 1970, what is remarkable is the extent of what now seems an exceptionally consistent programme of building prior to the city being consumed by the oil crisis of the seventies and all its associated social unrest. Whilst that was the big political and economic challenge, murmurings and doubts were emerging about the visual, technical and social impacts of what was being built. The problem with this catch-all view is that it uses a very thin gauge net, the good and the bad are captured and jettisoned. A more mature approach might have identified what was good and kept developing it.

In our studies we have identified some key examples of this quite specific Glasgow typological output of plinth and tower. Our list has not been exhaustive, there were others; a base and tower slab on Charlotte House on Queen Street (1969), the Royal Stewart Hotel on Clyde Street (1963) comprising a plinth and set back tower, a tower and plinth at Newton House in Sauchiehall Street. Half shut your eyes and you might imagine yourself in San Gimignano, a favoured destination of Glasgow architects post war with its rectilinear towers above the earthy coloured plinth of the walled town. Of course Glasgow was a quite different scale from this Tuscan hill town but there is a sense of a specifically Glaswegian scale of development shaped by the texture and dimension of the Glasgow grid - substantially smaller than American equivalents such as New York or Chicago.

We have traced these exemplary models but at the same time there seems to have been a vein of city development undertaken at a more ambitious level and scale which is worthy of further study; McCance and Livingstone Tower (1965) plinth to George Street with its cantilevered canopy, the Anderston Centre (1968-1972) with its plinth and towers above the bus station and elevated shopping centre, Richard Seifert’s base block courtyard garden and stumpy tower at Charing Cross Station (1971), and the city council’s point block towers and low rise blocks at Cowcaddens overlooking raised amenity space including a bowling green. Following this line of enquiry it would be interesting to explore how indeed this typology was stretched even further as one moved away from the city centre - for example in the Gorbals where the plinth became the perimeter blocks of housing within which towers sat and ultimately simply towers with low rise development beside it.

Our short investigation cannot determine whether this hollowing out of the original conception of the city plinth and its ultimate demise was a reflection of what we have described as the classic chronological tendency for any artistic high point to be followed by its demise, disintegration and fall from favour or simply the parallel programmes of different attitudes and regeneration strategies. What we can note is that where the city remained strong towards the centre, the grid held the pieces firmly, where through decay or motorway building the redevelopment programmes stretched beyond the

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The Dental School was established in Glasgow within the Faculty of Medicine of Anderson’s College under the provisions of the Dentists Act of 1878. By the mid-1920s the college acknowledged their current accommodation in George Square was insufficient and eventually acquired a site for development on Renfrew Street. The commission for the original building was won by the then named Wylie, Wright and Wylie. Since the late 1950s a major extension had been planned for the firm’s original Art Deco stone and cast-iron building. What stands today is the seventh scheme for the site between Renfrew and Sauchiehall Street.

The steep slope of Garnethill to the north paired with the requirement for vehicular access along Renfrew Street and pedestrian street access to Sauchiehall Street prompted the pragmatic adoption of a podium that resolved the difference in terrain between the two streets. The 7-storey tower on top incorporates the bulk of accommodation placed centrally running north-south across the site.

A suspended, largely curtain-walled, three-storey section connects the extension to the original Dental Hospital building to the northwest. A circulation core that also accommodates building services projects to the southwest of the upper block, diluting the purity of the tower & podium motif.

The roof of the podium is accessed via Renfrew Street adjacent to the original building which allows vehicles to utilise the terrace, creating a sheltered drop-off zone. From Sauchiehall Street the podium continues the building line of the Grecian Buildings (1865) by Alexander Thomson.

The Dental Hospital shares similarities to other buildings within our scope of research, most notably at Fleming and Heron House as they all address the grid and city’s topography by utilising a podium and tower composition. However the Dental Hospital does not step back from its podium as do the others, thus arguably imposing itself more prominently on the street.

The forcefully articulated building is designed with a variety of precast concrete cladding elements. Defining characteristics include a clearly delineated threshold at Sauchiehall Street level where the ground floor entrance is set back against the adjoining building, providing a symbolic

GLASGOW DENTAL HOSPITAL, 1970WYLIE, SHANKS & UNDERWOOD

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portal whilst pragmatically also providing welcome protection from the unforgiving Glaswegian weather. The composition features a simple expression of enclosing frame, repetitive, symmetrical and unadorned elevations, a trend fashionable at the time and not at all alien to the 1960s Glaswegian context . It reconciles its substantial mass with plot constraints, topography, vehicular access and the overarching desire to build into the sky, maximising the health benefits of direct sunlight and fresh air.

Constructed with a cast in-situ reinforced concrete structural frame, the building is organised into six equal bays; the square-section columns rise from street level to the top of the podium, and emerge again to define the tower within the two central bays. Above these storeys, the building is faced in ribbed precast concrete panels. Precast concrete mullions and transoms divide the elevations into regular grids, within which lightweight curtain-walling further divides each ‘bay’: almost square on east & west elevations, but rectangular to north and south.

The top storey has a recessed balcony to the south, created by the omission of a bay of curtain-walling. The projecting circulation/ service core is clad in brownish exposed-aggregate precast concrete panels.

White glazed tiles have been used on various ancillary structures, particularly perimeter walls and the projecting ventilation stacks and escape stairs which punctuate the periphery of the podium level.

Regardless of the fact that the building requires some definite maintenance and restoration, it stands proudly within its historic street-block setting, emphatically enhancing the collective definition of this part of Glasgow.

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Celebrated by Rem Koolhaas as “the last movement that changed architecture”, Japanese Metabolism marked the social and economic return to prosperity of a country that was left in ruins following its outright decimation by carpet-bombing less than twenty years earlier. As an alliance of Japanese architects, with collective ambition, the Metabolists believed that together they could work towards Utopia.

The first major project emerged from the movement in 1958, and would go onto become the lifetime project of Japanese architect Kiyonori Kikutake. As with many of the Metabolists’ projects, “Marine City” was born as a response to the burgeoning population of post-war Japan, and in particular, the lack of land and agricultural resources in the major cities. As reflected in much of his early work, Kikutake held the belief that if Japan were to continue to rebuild and grow, land should be reclaimed from the sea, a belief that manifested in the design of his floating utopia, Marine City. Anchored by a series of platforms, housing units line concrete cylinders stretching far into the depths below, and factories on the platforms above construct modular units to be fitted onto the outer walls of vast concrete towers, eventually to

be replaced when they wear out. The creation of artificial territory is a Metabolist trademark and can be identified as the movement continued into the 1960s, during which time much attention focused on the reclamation of Tokyo Bay.

A multitude of schemes were considered for the Bay, from helix megastructures to vast areas of infill, though it was Kenzo Tange, and his plan for expansion of the city that received most attention and remains perhaps the enduring image of the Metabolist movement. In presenting his proposal on national television, which was virtually unheard of at the time, Tange offered Tokyo the prospect of linear expansion, with an axis of hierarchical infrastructure across the bay, integrating road and rail, and supporting adjacent spines of residential megastructures sized for a total of 5 million residents. In their assessment, critics pointed to a lack of pragmatism in the Tokyo Bay proposal, specifically the absence of any traffic experts or engineers in Tange’s team, as being typical of the Metabolists, and this charge of naivety still occasionally reappears in contemporary assessment. Arata Isozaki reflected in an interview with Rem Koolhaas

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that “the Metabolists had no skepticism toward their Utopia”, adding that he “thought they were too optimistic”. However, Isozaki, a collaborator with (though never a member of) the Metabolists, also seems to regret that the idealistic verve and ambition of the Metabolists has been lost in the decades since. This unwavering optimism, and dedication to the notion of Utopia, endures as the key Metabolist trait, and was perhaps encapsulated best when Kenzo Tange appeared on Japanese television on January 1st, 1961. He acknowledged that his plan was unconventional, and a “fundamentally different approach”, though he earnestly appealed for the rest of Japan to unite in his ambition, asking that “rather than criticising the plan, we should find a way to back the proposal”. Ultimately, as Ralph Waldo Emerson once said, “Nothing great was ever achieved without enthusiasm”.


‘Brutalist’; hardly a description to endear an architectural style to the public at large. Indeed with the exception of the modernist icons such as Villa Savoye and Paimio Sanitorium, each located in glorious isolation, twentieth century modernist interventions in the 19th century city have had a bad press, deserved or otherwise. The problems range, at an urban scale, from the imposition of an alternative spatial structure on the continuous tissue of the traditional European city, to the shortcomings of the programmatic and technological performance of individual buildings.

As such, mid-century mainstream modernist buildings have in the main been truly absorbed within both the fabric of the city and the psyche of the city inhabitants and consequently ignored by an uninterested public. The outcome is that any engagement with buildings from this period is mired in the banal. The reality of these buildings, their execution often demonstrating questionable choices in the design and construction of the building envelope followed by insensitive ‘improvements’, militate against engagement with the radical ideas that informed their conception.

In response this study presents a series of case study buildings focussed on their conceptual clarity, not to deny the misgivings of their execution, but to engender a discussion focused on the architectural intent underpinning their conception, unburdened by technological inadequacy and the transgressions of insensitive clients.

In urban terms these buildings represent the most profound built challenge to the orthodoxy of Glasgow’s 19th century grid-iron block structure. The modernist desire to rigidly clarify the city through the removal of the city core is most explicitly stated in the un-built Bruce Plan (1945) a radical reimagining of the city, as a city of light and air, a stately modern Beaux-Arts city, a functional and hygienic city, in stark contrast to the perceived ills of the post-war city of poverty, disease, environmental pollution and general inefficiency. Whilst the Bruce Plan, as a purely hypothetical ‘advocacy document’, was unsurprisingly not realised, our case study buildings can be understood as fragments of that same vision, embedded within Glasgow’s urban block structure with, in our argument, mutual benefit to the individual buildings and the collective city.

The Glasgow Dental Hospital (Wylie Shanks Architects, 1965), included in our case studies, posits an alternative to the tendency to locate large medical facilities outwith the dense urban core, instead forming an urbane addition to its host block and street. The popular strategy of grounded plinth and elevated slab, conforms to the street whilst releasing the main body of the building to ascend above the 19th century city’s four-storey datum to exploit the benefits of sunlight and fresh air with views to the city and the open country of the southern uplands. The environmental benefits offered by the inspired ninety-degree rotation of the elevated slab to the street, resulting in the presentation of the elegantly proportioned gable to the street enables the building’s presence to be comfortably accommodated within the streetscape. Not only does the hospital offer a sophisticated example of ‘embedded modernism’ with the city core, it presents a built manifestation of the original 19th century feu plan, four storeys in the air, the original feu extending between parallel streets prior to the imposition of the urban block crust in the 19th century.

Surely a reassessment of such architectural innovation and radicalism, freed from the burden of its realisation, is long overdue.

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No architect works or has ever worked in total isolation free from influences around them. We are constantly hoovering up impressions - that is why we say to students to keep a sketchbook by them all the time to record and capture these experiences. It is these captured moments we reassemble as individual responses to particular accommodation requirements and specific contexts. To make sense of these collected memories and observations, we attempt to sort them out in our head through discussions, persuasion and thinking. From this cauldron of possibility we slowly clarify a position, focus our actions shaped by a preference, an inclination or an argued position. In short we make up our mind how and in which way to act.

One of the great Glasgow architectural tracts is ‘Greek’ Thomson’s ‘Haldane’ lectures in which he consummately argues his position in relation to the ancient Babylonian, Egyptian and Roman influences before focussing down on his chosen model of the Greek. Thomson didn’t invent the classical orders no more than Mackintosh discovered the potential of the vernacular, each however refined the type in meeting their brief and site through a re-evaluation of the potential of their preferred and honed components of architecture.

It should not surprise us then that modernism like classicism and the vernacular tradition spawned likewise its typologies, rules and procedures that shaped responses around the world and Glasgow was no different.

The College of Building and Printing and the College of Commerce in the city centre sit as classical types within the modernist idiom exploring variations on the theme amongst others of one of its original high priests - Le Corbusier. With these two buildings ground level articulation, broad middle and articulated tops they show it is possible to conform neatly to the standard grid building typology that has shaped the city but by operating with the tools of modernism harvested from across the world.

Four broad modernist technical devices characterise these diamonds in Glasgow’s architectural drawer, namely frame, shape, structural expression and skyline. Looking at the most prominent of our set, the College of Building and Printing Tower is an extruded wall of glass facing north and south framed by two immense gable slabs of travertine. It occupies a clear lineage and influence from a cluster of buildings, the Salvation Army Building in Paris to the United Nations slab

block in New York. In each the monumentality emerges from the juxtaposition of visual permeability and impermeability, a quality adopted by the architects Wylie Shanks in their buildings. These exemplars are oblong slabs, however there is another strain of articulation which may have influenced the College’s lozenge shaped plan and faceted facade and that is the expressive plan as developed by a range of contemporary architects from Niemeyer to Gio Ponti - in particular the Pirelli Tower in Milan, with its plain but canted gables and its gently rounded front face: Then there is the structural base of Immense shaped columns which is a particularly distinctive quality of the building a nod to the piloti of Le Corbusier and structural virtuosity of Pietro Nervi: Finally for the top we need look no further than Le Corbusier definition of his rooftop flourish in the Maison d’habitation in Marseille.

Its twin - the College of Commerce is a less intense variation on these four themes. Stretching across the frontage to Cathedral Street between its two side streets - it is an elegant insertion into the city. Monumentality is surrendered to elegance in the manner in which the horizontal banding extends around the block softening its outline. The plan is modest in expressive aspiration as is its structural expression of its circular base columns. The top is slightly less playful but nicely brings the idea of an articulated roof to a lower level so it can be easily seen from the street.

There is a fifth quality that makes this building important in our study - its base plinth. Where the building meets the ground it harmoniously articulates the relationship of the pavement and entrance by way of a miniature plinth of landscaping and steps and this is where the College of Commerce excels in relationship to its neighbour.

Whilst there is no doubt that the Tower is a consummate composition particularly when read from George Square, it is the lack of a conscious plinth that leaves it vulnerable at the ground. The Glasgow plinth mediated between the street and vertical form masking any incongruity between tower expression and street. Indeed we have shown elsewhere it has been a Glasgow standard in its finest buildings. In the College tower everything is carried out by the articulation of the structural columned base. It doesn’t quite carry it off when read against the challenging slope of the rising street level. The tower seems too close to the railway below for such open exuberance, whilst where there is space around the building - around the hall to the north - it erodes the city block without any true benefit. Without the mediating plinth the tower and hall sit uncomfortably in the city form.

All of our Glasgow tower examples contribute hugely to the upper profile of the city and the particular way the College of Building and Printing frames George Square is exemplary. The collection of statues and monuments of the square are seemingly echoed at the skyline by a cluster of forms playfully sitting on its monumental plinth. The intricacy of its struggles at street level are lost when reading the mass of the facade from George Square and its crenelated top but this experimental void - the plinth - leaves its urban contribution to be experienced and enjoyed from a distance not close up.

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Iain Maclaren is a partner at Wylie SHanks Architects, employed for thirty years. Iain is a Fellow of the RIAS, an accredited practitioner in Conservation Architecture and a qualified CDM co-ordinator. With a vast experience in industrial, healthcare, education and conservation projects, his project management skills on fast track and complex contracts assist him in providing leadership to the practice on marketing, client liaison and office management issues. With awards for provision of client service, he also has a keen interest in quality control and in the design phase of projects.

Let’s begin by setting the scene. Wylie Shanks were a dominant component of the modernist movement in Glasgow’s architecture of the ’60s, tell us about the nature of the practice. Wylie Shanks’s context as a practicing architectural firm was heavily industrial in the build up to the 1960s. We were known as the ‘Factory Factory’. We produced large scale industrial projects, focussing on an architecture that was cost effective, quick and efficient for the nature of building for industry. Wylie Shanks were the principle designers to some of the largest industries in the country, and were working on these and advance buildings for industry all the way through and beyond the Second World War. This utility approach to the business of architecture continued right through into the 1970s, until the partners accepted that the practice could not survive on purely industrial work, and looked to diversify its portfolio, and change its approach to the type of projects it was involved with.

So the practice looked to change its work load and focus on different areas of building. What were the main ‘new’ projects Wylie Shanks took on in this period? Motherwell Civic Centre is the first major example of a project the practice took on that was completely different to its usual industrial routes. This was a competition winning scheme in the 1960s. We also worked on the new Dental Hospital on Sauchiehall Street, an extension of the existing hospital the practice worked on in the years after the First World War.

The Le Corbusier inspired architecture of Central Glasgow in the College of Building and the College of Commerce were also significant projects in the changing of the focus of work from the practice, in terms of programme as well as aesthetics.

There was also a change in the culture of the architect being given less importance in terms of building, and allowing the contractor to take the lead in terms of construction. This design and build type of procurement was a new idea for the practice, and was something that impacted on the way projects were built.

The change in program of architecture that the practice undertook is interesting, but how does this relate to the partners of the practice? Did they willingly embrace this change of project? The work of this period is definitely the doing of one or two individuals. The original partners of the practice felt as if they had patronage to attend to. They got work, mainly industrial work, through repeat business from powerful clients, whom they regularly entertained in the accepted manner of the time. The design work that began in the 60s was due to the rise of a couple of young architects through the practice; Bill Hunter and Peter Williams. Peter was the main design inspiration of the time. His design flair, combined with our track pragmatic record meant that the practice started to win competitions. Peter was instrumental in the designing of some of the big projects at the time - Motherwell Civic Centre, Dental Hospital and the Colleges of Building and Commerce.

Where did Peter Williams’s design inspiration come from? Across the projects he worked on, are there some obvious influences of the time, and some other, maybe more hidden ones? Peter was, like many people of the mid 20th century, massively influenced by Le Corbusier. As a young member of the team, sometimes the work seemed to be slightly derivative, and took too much influence at times from projects of interest. The un-built Airdrie Arts Centre project was a good example of this. Having said that, Peter was an incredibly creative designer and was responsible for some of the greatest landmark buildings in the city at that time. Peter’s creativity worked well with the practice, his work on the Clydesdale bank on Buchanan Street being another good example of this. The project looked to retain the original facade, but behind it was a 1960s modernist interior. This was a combination of his creativity and the practice’s historically pragmatic nature, and was an early example of facade retention within the city - now a key Planning policy in many cities.

Would Le Corbusier and the International Style have been the architectural models of the time? Were they the main influences on architects and designers of the period?

Definitely. Even when I studied in the 1970s, looking at the work of Corb was the thing we did as students. We looked at and were inspired by buildings like Ronchamp and Unite d`habitation and they had great influence on the development of young architects. This wasn’t just about the design of these pieces of architecture, but we were also inspired by the ability to use concrete in new forms, and Corb’s work in new ways of thinking about the city and his elements of urban planning, particularly in Paris.

The modernist work of the practice seemed to change after this period, where there any major changes to the approach of architecture? Unfortunately he had to step down from his partnership, and went to work for Walter Underwood, who was also a previous partner of Wylie Shanks.

We then started to revert a little bit, as more pragmatic commissions started to come in again. We did a lot of industrial work for the SDA (The Scottish Development Agency) and unfortunately failed to attract the larger more attractive design commissions we all as architects strive to work on. Our work since then has diversified, with healthcare, education and conservation projects of more modest scale, some of which have attracted awards.

Do you think the impact of the Welfare State and other important political moments of the time was important to the way these projects were delivered? With all of these projects being funded by educational grants from the government or Greater Glasgow Health Board schemes, were there tight budgets and deadlines meaning that the practice had to revert back to its previous pragmatic state? Yes. We did a lot of work for the Greater Glasgow Health Board, which would now go under the banner of the NHS. This led to us gaining the patronage of GGHB, and as mentioned before, allowed us to keep getting work from them, until the after effects of the Poulson scandal brought in more transparent and competitive procurement procedures for public building.

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These buildings are particularly interesting to us, as we are investigating the new found urban agenda these buildings introduce to the city, putting a building on piloti. This almost gestures that the building should not take up space on the ground, and allow this space instead for ideas of urban realm, this also works within Glasgow’s 19th century grid condition. What was the pre occupation of the time for dealing with a gridded city such as Glasgow? I suppose the practice had not quite grasped the ideas of human scale. It wasn’t something that was generally taught or thought about at the time, most designers still influenced by huge, urban, Corb-like projects. However, Andy MacMillan at the Mac was keen to teach this to his students. He was absolutely against the closing off of the city at street level, and also the planning of the motorway building built through the city. As students we (ineffectively) stood with placards, defending the city and fighting against this idea. The motorway was going to destroy the fabric of the city, and certainly has drawn a dramatic scar through the grid pattern at places such as Charing Cross!

What were these ideas the planners had for the Motorway? We’re familiar with the overall concept of the modernist view of bringing the motorways into the city, and placing the importance on the car rather than the person in the city, but what were the consequences of this in certain moments of the city? The idea of the Planning department of the time was to create a completely segregated pedestrianised first floor, raised pavement level, with the cars using roads underneath on ground level. The building that exists today that bridges the motorway at Charring Cross was part of that idea, and is one of the few strands of the project that was built and remains. Most shops would be on the first floor level. Some of these buildings, such as the Dental Hospital still contain elements of the concept of the raised podium but fortunately common sense and human scale have predominated in more recent Planning policies.

Considering the possible imports from across the world, the podium and tower typology within seem to have been most favourable when establishing new buildings in the Glasgow grid. Do you think this idea of architecture was something that was important working in Glasgow? Yes, I don’t think it’s just the use of the podium and the tower for its own sake. It is the podium and the tower solving specific urban issues of the city, allowing high rise development, but completing the grid-iron pattern at street level.

The Bruce Plan, was an incredibly bold view of planning of the time. The idea to completely level a city-centre that was virtually untouched after the bombings of the second world war and then to build ‘towers in a park’ Was this idea something that existed in the minds of the people, the planners, and the architects of the time? The overriding Glasgow planning policy of the time was to ‘define’ the city centre, and create a line around it. This line would be the motorway, for good or for bad, it would define the city centre. The next stage was to impose a Corbusian style of towers in the city centre, to develop the city but to also use these towers as landmarks and focal points in the community. These towers however, in the eyes of the planners, were eventually to define the edge of the city centre, and they began encouraging them around the motorway, creating a series of larger scale buildings, around the edge of the city. It almost inverted the original idea of creating landmarks and in effect created a wall around the city.

Do you think there is strength in the tower elements that are embedded in the 19th Century grid, such as the Dental Hospital on Sauchiehall Street? Did grounding these buildings in the original grid help to make them part of the city, and to protect them against ideas of possible demolition? Yes, I think so. But you have to remember their survival is also to do with land values in the city, the idea that some of these dwellings can be converted into office spaces and vice versa, to match the current demand in the city.

OBSERVATION 0.6

C I T Y O F A R C H I T E C T S :G I L L E S P I E , K I D D & C O I A , M A C M I L L I A N & M E T Z S T E I N

The above title is adapted from that of the chapter dedicated to the ‘particular contribution’ of the mighty 19th century Glasgow architect Alexander Thomson, contained in Gomme and Walker’s seminal publication The Architecture of Glasgow, 1968. Like Thomson in the nineteenth century, MacMillan and Metzstein built the majority of their 20th century buildings in and around Glasgow, but unlike Thomson they built just one building which was fully embedded within Glasgow’s dense urban core on the north of the River Clyde. Their primary school in Annette Street comes close and certainly is an urbane building but the setting in the East of the city adjacent to Glasgow’s oldest park is beyond the city-defining commercial centre.

The majority of MacMillan and Metzstein’s designs were realised in the tenemental territories on the periphery of the city core or further afield in the satellite new towns of the 1950s, the majority of their architectural oeuvre consisting of the elevated typologies of church, school and college, dictating the setting of the building within its own grounds and distinct from the adjacent built fabric. The one exception is the office building built in 1970 for British Overseas Airways Corporation (BOAC) at 85 Buchanan Street, in the heart of the urban core. The expertly judged insertion of the metal-clad steel

framed open-plan office building within the street’s regiment of stone facades is both a cause for celebration at the architect’s urban credentials and mourning of the meagre contribution to the city core by such urbane architects.

Aligned with the cardinal points, when the mid-day sun dissects the street the oblique southern light highlights the building’s deeply incised windows set within the copper-clad façade, transforming the building into a heavy monolith, denying the built reality of steel and copper to blend perfectly with the adjacent loadbearing facades. Only when indulging in a second glance does one perceive the stack of offices floating miraculously above a continuous band of glass set between office stack and the largely glazed and column free shop on the street. How appropriate that a company founded on the gravity defying business of air travel should commission such an ingenious moment of architectural levitation.

Much like the nuanced urban infill facades of Thomson in the 19th century, MacMillan and Metzstein’s BOAC Building, in the century following its creation, remains a master class for all aspiring 21st century architects in the integration of contemporary architecture within a city of stone.

With all of these projects going on, where did the design inspiration come from for you as a young architect, initially as a student and then in practice? The inspiration for me and a lot of other students in Scotland came from the work of Gillespie Kidd and Coia. Andy MacMillan and the late Isi Metzstein were both very influential figures, and it was incredible to be tutored by them. Andy always spoke about the idea that the work of Corbusier and Mies is something to admire, but also to move on from. Architects like this were taught heavily in architecture school at the time, and Andy and Isi were really interested in pushing ideas of human scale, the value of the street , as well as the quality of corners of buildings. It was as much about the building as it was about the space around the building. Andy would always find lessons in architecture from anything. His lectures were sometimes just a collection of holiday photographs, but each photograph would contain an important lesson or idea about architecture.

Interestingly, when one looks at old photographs of the designers for Brasilia the team is always seemingly looking down on the scheme and never viewing it from the level of a person. Yes, however, these were ‘New Towns’. Nobody had really designed new towns before, or projects on this scale as one piece of design, so in many ways they were almost a series of social experiments, some of which didn’t work. But it did force architects not to consider the building purely on its own, but as part of a city. Cities evolve, they don’t just happen, and I suppose it’s that human level that is missing when you take out a blank sheet of paper and create something entirely new.

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When Buckminster Fuller’s name is mentioned it is almost inevitable that one’s first visions are those of his geodesic dome structures. However, this is somewhat of a disservice to someone whose career as an architect spanned some 60 years. He was not only an architect but also an accomplished author, systems analyst, inventor and Mensa’s second president. Geodesic domes merely scratch the surface of Fuller’s repertoire but it is in one of his dome permutations that we find one of his most interesting proposals.

In the late 1950s Fuller had imagined and designed a scheme which would have changed the way humankind lived, both terrestrially and otherwise. Harnessing the mathematical power of a geodesic dome, the internal volume of which increases drastically more than the weight of the components used to create it, Fuller proposed enormous mile wide cities inside these domes. Theoretically, Fuller argued, this would be possible with a temperature difference between inside and out of only one degree. In 1960, Shoji Sadao, Fuller’s architectural partner, drafted up the imagery for the ‘Project for Floating

Cloud Structures (Cloud Nine)’. These huge domes were imagined to be terrestrially bound, either free floating or tethered but also had projected uses as extra terrestrial colonies for when humanity escaped the orbit of Earth.

Analysing the project in the present day it may seem rather ambitious, possibly even far fetched. It is in the historical context that we find justification for the extreme ideology.

The United States in the wake of World War 2 was a place of rapid change, in part thanks to its own invention, the atomic bomb. Project Manhattan provided the world with its first glimpse of the raw and devastating power of the atomic age; couple that with the initial hostilities which would cultivate into the Cold War and add a race to be the first country to conquer space and it equates to a perfect breeding ground for a culture obsessed with space travel, the atomic age and the fear of invasion.

The late 1940s and ’50s gave rise to the style known in America as ‘Googie’ architecture, a style which fed directly from the zeitgeist of the era, with

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the iconic Las Vegas welcome sign being a prime example. Working in this context, it stands to reason that Fuller’s ideas and designs would tend towards futuristic visions of escapism and interstellar travel. His Cloud Nine project, as a tensegrity sphere, has that “space-like” quality that symbolised the Googie architecture era of steel and glass. Tensegrity was one of a few terms coined by Fuller, a portmanteau of tension and integrity he used solely to describe his geodesic designs.

Architecture was not the only facet of the atomic age that inspired America. 1950s cinema, or the Golden Age of Science Fiction as it is now known, provided the fuel for a generation of space enthusiasts. Films such as The Day the Earth Stood Still (1951) and War of the Worlds (1953) depicted beings from outer space invading Planet Earth, symbolising the focus on the early space race and the fear of Cold War invasion from Russia. As the ’50s turned to the ’60s the zeitgeist turned from Utopian space dreams reserved to diners, cafes and 35mm film to realistic expectations of space travel.


It is here that we find the most similarities between the real world and Fuller’s world of floating cities. President John F. Kennedy famously aimed for the moon in his speech to Rice University in 1962 when he said, “We choose to go to the moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard...” At the time of his address to the nation, the United States had already began its experimentation with unmanned craft in space, mostly satellites as a direct response to Russia’s Sputnik satellite in 1957. The particular example, which strikes odd similarities to Buckminster Fuller’s Cloud Nine project, however is the satellite with the codename, Project Echo.

Designed as a test communications satellite, Project Echo was successfully launched on 1 August 1960, and was successfully able to transmit a message from President Eisenhower to the nation. Satellite is an inappropriate word to use for the Echo 1, the term more commonly used was Sataloon, a combination of balloon and satellite. A 100-foot diameter Mylar balloon, coated in a thin aluminium coat, comprised the shell of Echo 1, one of NASA’s initial projects into space. Buckminster Fuller had been working on ideas of spherical geodesic structures since as early as the late 1920s so in that respect, it appears that Fuller was far ahead of his time; even more so considering that the first iteration of Cloud Nine was not a steel geodesic dome but instead a smooth metallic sphere, essentially a massive inhabited Echo 1.

It is clear to see, looking at the context surrounding the works of Buckminster Fuller, in particular his Project for Floating Cloud Structures, that he was so much more than just the designer of the geodesic dome - he was the embodiment of the mid 20th century American zeitgeist.

C I T Y O F C I T I E S : A B S O R B I N G V E N I C E

OBSERVATION 0.7

How appropriate in a city built on trade and industry that a Venetian-style palace should house a carpet factory rather than a duke. But Glasgow is an eclectic city. The city’s world trade routes across the Atlantic formed a conduit for the generation of wealth, and, critically for Glasgow’s built realm, for the import of architectural ideas and styles. Besides sampling Venice, Glasgow looked to that other powerhouse of 16th century Italian culture, Florence, adapting the robust palazzo envelope for the cloaking of the 19th century Glasgow warehouses that ran perpendicular to the city’s river. Banks and institutions adopted a classical composition of column and pediment, and at the turn of the 20th century Glasgow’s proto-office buildings stretched the classical tripartite arrangement of base shaft and cap to multi-storey heights in Chicago-style, notably in the commercial work of J. J. Burnet and J. A. Campbell.

The 20th century Modernists were equally referencing architecture from overseas but their influences tended towards the ideological and cultural rather than primarily commercial. The post-war zeal for the radical rationalisation in both the governance and form of the European city, under the influence of the Le Corbusier’s Charter of Athens (1943) and the declarations of the International Congresses of Modern Architecture (CIAM 1928-59), resonated with a Glasgow witnessing the consequences of industrial decline and post-war austerity. A call to action met with gusto by Glasgow’s authorities as manifest in Robert Bruce’s radical plan for Glasgow devised at the war’s end in 1945. Bruce’s purely hypothetical plan, with its (by 1945) rather old-fashioned Beaux-Arts arrays of symmetrical skyscrapers, was naturally never realised, although the city inner ring-road was partially implemented in later years. Bruce’s rival urban visionary was Sir Patrick Abercrombie who promoted a dispersed new town strategy, outlined in his Clyde Valley Regional Plan of 1946 co-authored with Robert Matthew, in contrasting with Bruce’s concentration of high-rise development constructed on the territory of the original city settlement.

The struggle between the two competing visions can be understood in spatial terms. Abercrombie’s proposals represent the flight to the countryside, to the periphery, in the forming of new towns as satellites to the established city settlements, essentially a horizontal expansion. In contrast Bruce sought a vertical expansion above the original territory of the city in his adoption of high-rise development. Popular opinion suggests that Bruce be pilloried for his urban destruction but paradoxically his vision is resolutely urban whilst Abercrombie’s departure in pursuit of the garden suburb is essentially anti-urban, at least in the sense of Glasgow’s municipal urban core.

As identified in our selected case studies, the Modernist interventions in Glasgow’s historic urban grid might be understood as utopian fragments of Bruce’s vision and as such they contribute to the Glasgow built repository of lessons learnt from abroad and laid down for future generations. But the lessons offered by our selected Modernist interventions in Glasgow in the middle decades of the 20th century are not the easy ‘cut and paste’ references of post-modern fancy, they are more complex and arguably more rewarding. Their urban credentials lie in the architects resolution of the competing demands of the ‘new’ architecture set within Glasgow’s gridded urban core, a respect for the street and block morphology of the existing city, with the desire to make buildings manifest their era and signal the post-war ideological shift towards a better, healthier and more fair society. It is in the assimilation and subsumption of our selected buildings within Glasgow’s city blocks that establishes their credentials as urban precedents and renders them worthy of study, Derek Stephenson’s tectonic tango with Alexander Thomson’s St Vincent Church in his 1971 Heron House development offering a high point of both absorbed modernity and modernity absorbing the extant city.

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As Britain and the baby boom generation entered the 1960s, the prevailing social issues had shifted from those of the immediate post-war period, and at the forefront of discussion was the public’s concern about the number of cars in British towns and cities. Since the end of World War Two, a wave of rebuilding had swept Britain, and with the passing of the New Towns Act in 1946, fourteen new towns had been established before 1960. These New Towns, Cumbernauld in North Lanarkshire and Stevenage in Herefordshire to name but two, were planned with an emphasis on the pedestrian/ car relationship. Cumbernauld, in particular, was particularly resolute in its separation of pedestrian and auto networks, and has in fact been subject to retrospective criticism, for being too convoluted to navigate on foot.

In contrast to these pedestrianised ‘havens’, the retrofit of historic towns, designed for nothing greater than a horse and cart, presented a serious problem in traffic management and public safety. Architect Geoffrey Jellicoe recognised this, likening the problem to “that of putting new wine into old bottles”, though he also stressed it was not only a concern for the present, but also for the future. Distancing himself somewhat from the plight of existing towns, he instead focussed his attention on

the future city, a city where “No person shall walk where automobiles move”, and where cars and pedestrians can co-habit, posing no danger to each other. “Motopia” was a concept where, in the words of Jellicoe, “no car can encroach on the area sacred to the pedestrian.”

Jellicoe proposed a reconciliation of town and garden, a deliberate attempt to move away from the Industrial Age, and the “agglomerations of slums which were built with no thought but the need to man the machines”. Motopia would be a New Town, seventeen miles west of London, where cars travel on highways along the roofs of buildings, and the greenery between the residential areas is preserved as such. Detroit artist Arthur Radebaurgh introduced Motopia to an American audience in the September 1960 cartoon strip “Closer Than We Think”, as a slightly whimsical, Jetsons-eque pastiche. However, Jellicoe had designs on something more pragmatic: “Motopia is not only possible, but it is practical because it is economical, the dwellings would be no more expensive than housing for a similar population in tall buildings, such as those used by the London County Council in some of its developments.”

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As this study reflects on a century of Utopian design, Jellicoe’s Motopia is key in understanding the reactive nature of Utopian ideas, and the value of these designs in encapsulating a particular moment in place and time. Geoffrey Jellicoe understood and valued the role of Motopia in the broader context of Utopian theory, writing in 1961 that it has “the advantage of crystallising the ideals of the time”, and a responsibility to “express the state or city in which we should most like to live”. By reflecting on the work of Utopian architects and theorists, we can trace a changing social, economic, and political timeline, and contextualise some of the major movements in architecture. Though in terms of construction, Jellicoe’s Motopia was at the more realistic end of the spectrum, Utopian designs are typically more fanciful, their ambition unchecked by pragmatism. Therefore, it is in Utopian design that ideals can be more easily preserved, and that the most radical and profound aspects of manifestos can be concretised.


The grid layout of the city - a layout that in fact comprises not one single unitary grid but a number of subordinate grids stitched together - is inner Glasgow’s defining characteristic. It has been the framework to contain an incredible variety of building type and use whether domestic, commercial or civic. Our key examples of embedded modernism have fitted within that grid restraint - sometimes occupying part of, or the whole block. The constraint of tying in with the grid has optimised the extent to which they are seen to fit the city form irrespective of their size or form of articulation. These lessons were not universally absorbed or accepted, in particular in relation to areas associated with the motorway construction.

The Glasgow Inner Ring Road corridor through the west edge of the centre of the city can be seen in its effect as the equivalent of the demolition of the old town of Glasgow on the High Street in the east. It just happened quicker. It had two parts. To the north around Charing Cross a partial tunnel for the motorway and ground level traffic solution feeding down from grade to the motorway below for vehicles and down to the railway station for pedestrians. At ground level some of the key set piece buildings were retained. To the south around Anderston, the motorway was conceived not as a tunnel tube under the ground but a flying bridge with a complex interweave of gyrating ramps for vehicles and pedestrians overlaid an at grade traffic distribution system connecting to rail below. Few buildings were retained and the grid was re-planned completely afresh.

Key to the new thinking was an attitude to the occupation of streets by vehicles. To the north around Charing Cross, the fragments not of the grid but key buildings hampered the potential for a clean sweep through the area, so an ambiguous relationship ensued between the various buildings. On the one hand there were the late 19th century civic and tenemental forms served by the existing street structures juxtaposed with new forms such as Richard Seifert’s project above Charing Cross station, a courtyard and perimeter block holding a tower within itself, but essentially turning its back on the street and a new block and plinth and tower to Sauchiehall Street – Newton House.

The original buildings activated the street, one internalised it to the courtyard and the third added a twist, to extend the plinth across the urban junction at an elevated level. It is this bridge element, partially constructed and later built on, that confuses the urban reading of the space. What it represents is an unresolved battle between the road as the

historical shared conduit for vehicle and pedestrian movement on the one hand and on the other a driven vision of roads for vehicles only. The elevated structure potentially bridging elevated walkways on either side of the junction and connecting plinth buildings was intended as a pressure release in case the traffic became too intense for pedestrians through offering an elevated pedestrian route.

If the ultimate physical form of Charing Cross was the ‘car crash’ of divergent values and thinking then Anderston to the south was an opportunity to sort it out once and for all: simply separate pedestrians and vehicles by elevating them above the street from the outset. This was to be achieved, however, not on a block by block basis but by aggregation together into a vaster configuration, unified by a plinth, railway below, vehicle movements at grade including a bus station with ramps and stairs up to a pedestrian network of shops, entertainment, offices and housing in towers. A perfect striated mix of activity neatly segregated compared to the apparent confusion of Charing Cross.

Where each of our previous examples, at Fleming House, the Dental Hospital and Heron House, had, to various extents, introduced the idea of upper level permeability in their plinths to negotiate level changes and introduce additional retail functions, but contained all this within each block, at Anderston this experiment extended across a number of them.

Of course the scale of this thinking was not unknown. We have discussed elsewhere the antagonism between those arguing for the new towns and those defending the integrity of the city by arguing for retention of its population and activity. In this respect the vision for the Anderston Centre (1968-1972) can be seen as a riposte to the similarly-functioning Cumbernauld town centre, much heralded at the time - only that it did not require one to leave the city to meet modern needs. The challenge was how this separated-out functionality would work in an urban situation.

Glasgow already had two models where blocks became amalgamated to serve a more complex whole - St Enoch and Central Stations. With elevated platforms on a plinth of warehousing and retail the infrastructure spanned blocks within the city with upper level pedestrian connections to the tracks from street level by means of ramps and steps through buildings both edging the street but also the railway concourse above. Here it is not the plinth that beds into the surrounding city as in our

modern precedents but the plinth edge buildings that negotiate the seamless connection. They disguise the activity within in the same way as the plinths of our modernist embedded architectures sought to disguise the modern accommodation at the upper levels whilst engaging with the scale of the city.

The Anderston Centre had a more alien presence. It did not really want to disguise itself or embed itself in the city. It was part of a marketing campaign to show Glasgow off as competitive, exuberant and forward-looking - incorporating all the mixed uses advocated at the time but all neatly set apart. It was intended to be a destination in its own right, not a piece of connective tissue to the greater city as a whole, which the 19th century infrastructural architects understood very clearly was necessary. By creating vast halls our predecessors constructed covered shelters, which served the street and building networks of the city.

Anderston repudiated that lesson. It was not conceived as another vast hall, marking a major point of entry into the city from the west but was instead a meandering complex network of passages in the spirit of village or town lanes above the bus terminus hidden below. Whilst in spirit that might have been thought to have solved the domestic scale of the relationship of the residential towers above it did not engage with the scale of the city as a working whole. Anderston, like Cumbernauld Town Centre, became stranded, detached from the real life of the city, its plinth ostensibly connective in scale but actually in function and formal terms acting like a barrier. It believed, as at Cumbernauld, in its own self interested rhetoric.

What emerges is that the city grid is a robust network that can efficiently organise urban functions, absorb change and with care provide an humane setting for civic life. It can accommodate major infrastructure by adapting its form - crucial is acceptance of the manner in which it is done. Glasgow evolved a pattern of building form in relationship to the grid, which was adapted over a century and a half to meet contemporary requirements. In what seems now like a complete aberration, the lessons, models and examples of action adopted by many of our exemplars were thrown out and replaced across a vast swathe of the city by a huge urban experiment – the Anderston Centre amongst them, whilst adopting the new formal manner of our embedded exemplars of plinth and tower did so with altogether different results.

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The Bruce plan of 1947, although never implemented, affected Glasgow city centre in more ways than one - most notably with the construction of the M8 motorway that was built upon the rubble of the old tenement blocks to the west of the city centre. The Anderston district was zoned towards significant development within the industrial, commercial and residential sectors with the high rise buildings pushed to the periphery envisaged to create a formidable ring of towers enclosing the historic city centre, one of which is Heron House.

It is an eighteen-storey office and showroom developed by the Heron Group of Companies for a cost of £1.5 million and was completed in 1971 by Derek Stephenson & Associates. Built for large corporations seeking a base within the thriving central business district of Glasgow, the ground floor retail space was let by Habitat. This being its first store outside of London, founder Terence Conran chose to avoid the city centre and establish the first Scottish branch in Anderston.

The resulting composition comprised most notably the eighteen-storey office tower which was a dramatic divergence from the typical low rise structure of the city in the 1970s. The tower sits upon a three-storey plinth that was predominately designated for retail purposes, and a five-storey accommodation block on the northern part of the block.

Most notably, and most controversially, the development almost completely surrounds St Vincent Street Church - the resounding masterpiece by Alexander ‘Greek’ Thomson. The placing of the tower element is set to the south east in an attempt to reduce the impact on the church but, even so, Heron House dissolves much of the dramatics once achieved by the singular pinnacle of the church spire.

The retention of St Vincent Lane (the lanes being service corridors, found in all of Glasgow’s inner city blocks) is achieved by the podium bridging the lane on the second and third floors creating a single storey plinth for the northern accommodation block. An evident attempt to provide an example of the much imported podium and tower typology is visible in the generously wide steps that lead from Bothwell Street to the base of Thomson’s church. Constructed and finished from the same concrete as the tower, they resembled an impromptu amphitheatre providing the public realm

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a place of prominence to sit and view the expanding city to the south. This play in levels between the upper and lower limits of the block results in a degree of permeability to the ground terrain that had disappeared within the architecture of the city.

The tower is expressed as six concrete masses protruding from the structure with pronounced vertical pre-cast concrete fins giving an impression of height rather than width. Topped with a series of seemingly randomly placed cubes, they provided unobstructed views towards the Clyde river and beyond.

The overarching aesthetic is forcefully sculptural, constructed from concrete and clad in a dull, sponge textured pre-cast concrete panel with clear glazing providing the necessary transparency. The retail units on Bothwell Street animate the street by the floor to ceiling glass frontage to the stores.

In recent years, following a series of misfortunes, the largest tenant - British Telecom - moved out and the building was facing demolition.

In 2001 Heron House was purchased by FM Developments from Standard Life Insurance to be redeveloped into 95 apartments with bars, restaurants, shops and leisure facilities. Renamed ‘The Pinnacle’, the alterations were aimed at supplying a shortage of city centre accommodation to young professionals and retirees. It has been reclad in a cheap grey system with green glass and topped by a new roof profile to the penthouses.

Derek Stephenson had attempted to provide the city with more than a commercially viable solution. As rebuilt, perhaps the testament to this building is that its ubiquity allowed it to be altered to become a home to many new residents - a fate that cannot as easily be applied to the currently unoccupied Church to the north.

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Born in Birmingham, England, in 1952. Studied architecture at the Mackintosh School of Architecture 1969 -76. Worked with Gillespie, Kidd & Coia and then in private practice. He has taught Urban Studies and Urban Building courses at the Mackintosh School of Architecture since 1982 whilst working on a number of housing projects in the ensuing period, most notably at Glasgow Cross with Gholami Baines Ltd. He has curated numerous exhibitions including Architectural Drawing as well as the architecture of Alexander Thomson, Gillespie, Kidd & Coia and Steven Holl Architects’ new building for the Glasgow School of Art. He has also written and lectured on all of these subjects and was awarded a Lifetime Achievement Award for architectural education by the RIAS earlier this year.

Why do you think modernism came to permeate central Glasgow predominantly through the realisation of commercial projects in the 1960-70s? It varies from city to city, but in Glasgow’s case, it had a lot to do with change in local planning policies, housing clearance and poor maintenance of properties of the time. The city had deteriorated, and its morale at a very low end. Something was needed to transform it, and turn the fortunes of the city around. Whether this is brand new housing or the introduction of green space, people seemed to look out of the city rather than within it.

It was logical, then, to place housing outside the city centre? I think so, if you look at the city historically, Glasgow’s history of housing has always moved west, moved south or potentially north. There was a migration of housing from the city, allowing a core of commercial and semi industrial buildings to take place in the city centre, surrounded by a ‘belt’ of tenemental architecture. This allowed for a sort of hierarchy to take place, allowing for a greater intensity in the centre and a smaller scale towards the perimeter. I suppose there has been a process of the city, post war, which has been the fragmentation of local business. A number

of large supermarkets are responsible for the decline in small retail and local businesses, which again leads to larger commercial development in the city centre. Every building then sort of sits like a petrol station, in this almost American model of individual buildings, without integration in the city. This influence is apparent in Gillespie Kidd and Coia’s educational buildings, where every building was a reaction to functional separation and tried to encompass every possible programmatic element, into one piece of architecture.

I think that seems to be the most striking thing. Regardless of programme, the outcome always seems to be the same. The buildings seem to be comprised of a podium element on the street, and a tower element above. This is the case amongst a lot of the projects of the time, whether they be commercial, educational or residential. You can still differentiate between them, maybe not as clearly as in the past, but there are subtle differences in the change in programme. It wasn’t called ‘the international style’ at the time. Magazines at the time such as Casabella and DOMUS were incredibly important ways of communicating architectural ideas cross country. It was interesting being a young student at the time. The style of these projects and the influence from abroad was key, but it was limited. The library in the Mackintosh School of Architecture was a fraction the size it is today. Corb, Mies, Aalto, Frank Lloyd Wright!

Were those the ideals you were taught as a student? We were taught principles rather than styles. Style was discussed and not imposed, but principle was key. How and where do you enter the building? And these things were critically questioned. When I got to fourth year, we started really looking at the city. It was interesting, and that’s when Isi and Andy’s influence really started on me particularly.

Would you say it was more construction based at the time? Did the course take into consideration ideas of building, more so than in today’s schools? Site, programme and technology. Isi always used to define it as the ‘Holy Trinity’. It was he and Andy who set the ethos of the school, and it still has the same structure today. I think it was more specifically dealing with an interest in context, which a lot of architects didn’t approach, it is a very important aspect of architecture. At the time it was more the programme and the function of the building that would determine its form, its expression. That was quite different than treating an historical context. The New Glasgow Society was set up to address this disdain for the historical and to address how we build in an historical context, with respect.

Was the school at odds with the current situation of architecture then? I would not say so. The influence of the time was very limited. It was more what you could actually see, rather than what you could read. The library was incredibly limited, and was often exhausted within the first term! New magazines came out with projects across the world yes, but the best you probably got at the time was the AJ and the Architectural Review.

But the international style by description is a ‘style’. When people are adopting those themes in the city, surely there must have been a rationale to use and learn from that as a style rather than to just copy and paste elements of it? I don’t think it was copy and paste. I think a lot was done in emulation. Thoughts of New York and SOM triggered all of those boxes, but without the refinement, proportion or detail. I would return to the idea of the functional. A lot of architects thought the style would come from the function. Uniformity and maximisation of floor plate were incredibly important parts of commercial architecture.

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Key examples of this in the Glasgow case would be at Charing Cross, which have a definite urban quality to them. Yes, but importantly, it continues the street. It attempts to raise you above everyday life. It even incorporates a station, which really gives it a quality. I really like the sunken garden. It keeps the circulation tight around the building. It’s not just a series of bland concrete slabs, you know?

We spoke with Andy Macmillan regarding these elements of the city; he spoke of the Victorian ideas of the city. A place for people to walk, a place for shops. After World War 2, planning seemed to be a concept that the planners didn’t fully understand. A key example of this was surely the plan of raising the pedestrian level of Sauchiehall Street, and creating a new first floor datum. Yes, and the same thing was planned for Princes Street. A first floor promenade. This whole idea of replicating the ground level comes from this historic idea of public and vehicular separation. It seems to me, with some hindsight of course, it seems to be a mistake. It further de-densifies the street. It disperses people too far. There is no intensity between these blocks, it’s just space. There is also an extended responsibility for this idea? Such things as who cleans it? Who takes out the bins?

There’s also this notion of ‘If no one owns it, then no one cares for it’. Yes, that’s the classic situation. The city owns the streets and the roads; however there is another subtler phenomenon to the street. Like how they are kept? Or not kept as the case may be. It can be very simple, one little thing can virtually destroy or bring a street down. You know, if someone just puts all of their rubbish in their front garden, never cuts a hedge, never has a hedge! And that just acts like having a bad set of teeth. It gives off the wrong impression, it’s very curious.

Speaking about the social problems, and how they contributed to the decline and misuse of the tower blocks of the city: there was a severe misunderstanding of how you build a community. However, the failure of these projects is often purely blamed in the mainstream, on the architecture, rather than these social problems of which you speak of. Yes, but housing became introverted. There was a great emphasis on generating really good plans. The qualities of the apartments themselves are actually pretty good, in its arrangement and its amenity. It is however, to go back to what I was saying that it is the spaces in between that didn’t receive the same attention. It was simply leftover space. I don’t think the kind of communities that tower blocks replaced really worked. You are less likely to meet somebody in a tower lift, than you are in a tenement stair. That’s not being romantic about it, but there is a very significant idea about an individual to a community to a district. The number of front doors, how those front doors are grouped, it is all manageable. I like that idea of housing, there is a hierarchy of how it is assembled and subdivided, I think it is fascinating. I think the tower block is a slightly simplistic way of organising it.

When visiting Fleming House on Renfrew Street, it is really interesting how it connects to Cambridge Street though a stair, and even the Anderston Centre, in the way it acts as an extension to the urban realm. Presumably people can intelligently use these spaces. Well yes, I think Fleming House, in terms of the bottom of it, accommodates the slab above very well, it’s corner position, it’s dealing with the topography. It is quite natural. It feels like it belongs.

As a clear advocate of the grid plan, how would you describe the result of the Bruce Plan if fully executed to the city centre? It would essentially have acted like a noose, killing the city.

Was it still an appropriate idea to retain the grid once the motorway was constructed around Charing Cross? Hypothetically, this could have prompted a new formal logic within this area of the city. It’s hard to think when you’re starting from scratch. What else would you do? There is logic about a grid. The thing about the Bruce Plan is it focussed on the roads rather than the buildings. It turned streets, into what I would call roads.

Andy Macmillan referred to it as the European idea of the ‘city wall’. It informs your day to day experience of a city. This is the case in Paris, Berlin, London, and the Glasgow tenement. They are all intimately related to the urban infrastructure, and one becomes indivisible from the other. You can see examples of tenements, it is a very versatile model. You can curve it, you can turn corners sharply with it, and you can go up and down hills with it. It’s simple, and most good ideas are simple at core. When you start to tease it out, it becomes enriching.

Do you think those complexities are lost in some of the case studies we are looking at? In some cases there is an attempt, definitely in terms of Anderston there is an attempt to make it into a model piece of the city. I think the Anderston Centre did that to a certain extent, perhaps if it had been better managed, like it is now, it could have been more successful. The others however do not have the same ideas. The College of Commerce for instance, standing on piloti. It has a curious relationship, or perhaps even non-relationship with the street.

Why do you think these buildings seem to attract more negative attention than the tenement within the consciousness of most Glaswegians? I think if the management of these buildings are poor, it leaves them open to the possibility of anti social behaviour.

Do you think the architecture could have worked? I think the architecture could work. If you look at how some of the projects have changed, from office to apartments, it has a lot to do with the successful management, and they work! I think you have to evaluate every building in modern times- Do you have to demolish it? It is an interesting change of use over time.

Tower blocks outside the central city grid are more likely to be demolished that those within the city. Have you an opinion to why these buildings in the city centre are retained more so than the examples outside of the city centre, for example, the Gorbals and Red Road? It seems to be easier to wipe the slate clean, and start afresh. I think the city centre almost automatically serves the residents of housing better. I’m not saying that the Gorbals was remote, but it certainly felt remote there. Again, there is nothing in the bottom of the tower! They didn’t understand how to meet the ground, or how to get out of the ground!

A typical choice to build a tower block would be about getting as much out of a floor plate as possible, do you think this was the primary consideration in the minds of the architects at the time. There was a great emphasis on numbers at the time, at the success of either councils or governments. It became a sort of badge of honour, getting quantity over quality.

Our thesis aims to investigate the idea of ‘Embedded Modernism’ within Glasgow – a series of towers that are integrated into the city’s 19th century structure, as if there is a residue of pieces from the Bruce plan overlaid onto the city blocks. However, further research into this project reveals that all of the morals go much further than the physical. They are concerned with the political and the social ideas of the time. How conscious were architects of this at the time? It is a lot to do with the social, economic and political motives of the time. Architects aren’t immune to all of these reasons. I think that they want to be part of the vision. Some of the vision may be flawed, but they wanted to be a part of it. I’m not quite sure what the situation is today!

During your time at Gillespie Kidd and Coia there was only one major commission in the centre city of Glasgow; the BOAC (British Overseas Airline Company) building on Buchanan Street. Can you tell us from your opinion why GKC were commissioned for so few city centre projects? The reason for this was that GKC were not considered commercial architects. The BOAC design was to enable them to get them planning permission on an historic street. They were perceived as artists. I think they promoted themselves on the artistic side of architecture! There is an interesting article in a school produced magazine called the MAC Journal, where other practices admitted that they were not artists like GKC were. There was a highly developed intellect that drove GKC. I think that their schools and colleges are highly intelligent, in terms of not wasting space and other really important issues of the time.

Why is it one of the only buildings on Buchanan Street that lies vacant right now? The company that took over the building did not agree with the indoor column. They spent a large amount of money attempting to move it to the exterior, and with this they removed some of the floor slabs. It is now economically difficult to re use the building in the state that the developers changed it. It is only the fact that it’s listed that is saving it.

I N T E R V I E W 0 . 4M A R K B A I N E S

PAST + FUTURE 35

How do you feel the architects and urban designers of today are reacting to the city? Do you think they are reacting to the city better, or do you think it is the same thing in new clothes? Same thing, new clothes, except maybe more expensive. The buildings are generally taller. Every commercial project seems to generate another floor or two. I’d say if you go down Bothwell Street, you can see some 1960s commercial and office buildings that work with the street slightly better. In some respects they try a little harder in terms of architectural interest. There is a lot of randomised window ‘pattern’, I think this is the kind of hallmark of this decade. However there must be a better way to do this. How does the window work? How is the room organised? Where does the light come from? These are all things we must think about, especially in the design of housing.

There is a feeling of these buildings trying to ‘look modern’, I think it’s something like the Emperor’s Clothes really!

How do you think the Reid Building sits in the grid, and sits in Glasgow? I think it’s over-scaled. I don’t mind the composition. It seems to me that I seem to have a love/hate relationship with it. That may be too strongly put, but there is a recognition of the street. But it seems to me that the material is vulnerable at street level. For me, I hate entering it. If I want a coffee, I have to walk the entire length of it and then up! All of the weight is at one end.

What kind of programmes do you think activate the street? Would the refectory have been better suited to the ground floor space? The idea with the Ref was to have it half way. A top half, a bottom half, and the idea of meeting in the middle, instead of everyone descending down the building. There seemed a certain logic in that, until you start using it! I think it’s slightly hard on the

street. It is one of those buildings that students work on in models that can be rotated on any of its axis. You can say is it better like this, or like that (rotating the model) and it has a certain ambivalence or ambiguity about it.

The retention of the student society club, the ‘Vic’, seems to have successfully kept a strong urban edge to the Scott Street/ Renfrew Street junction - would you agree with that? At least retaining the ‘Vic’ gives the building a bit of complexity; it involves a different use integrated with another use. I quite like that. Although it is a slightly curious thing.

Perhaps it is simply misunderstood, in the same way the Mackintosh Building was misunderstood in its day? How do I feel about it... I can’t find a space in it that I really like. I remember watching all of the PR events thinking; what is going to be the great space in your building? I remember Holl saying ‘I suppose the studios’ but I find it a bit repetitive. I didn’t sense the gravitas. Okay, if you look at Mackintosh. The windows, to the light in the library. Wow. As well as expressing these externally. That was the whole trick, linking the outside and the inside.

Do you think Holl misunderstood the Mackintosh building? I think he has had his own take at it, but it is still a very recognisable ‘Holl’ building, but for me it didn’t really seem to develop from the competition. I don’t like to be too hard on it, but it seems to me to be a bit of a ‘one liner’.

Do you think it’s foreign to Glasgow? Not any more. I mean the danger would be for Glasgow to be classed as a 19th century/ Victorian city and more and more it is replaced by commercial buildings and shopping centres. It is no longer alien, in the wider context of the city.

We spoke earlier about commercial developments in the city which are getting taller and taller; do you think that seems to be an inevitability of the commercial market? Do you think it’s appropriate? It depends what you mean by tall. I mean some of the Victorian buildings were tall. I don’t mind the idea of building tall buildings for ideas of them being landmarks, but they have to be in appropriate positions for it to work. It has to be about the content and the location, otherwise you could say that every building you recognise is a landmark.

So do you think the ground plane should always be active? It’s hard to say. For the city to work you also need quiet parts and you only need so many shops or bars! But there still has to be some kind of responsibility! It is a very sensitive task; where a building meets the ground. That’s where people can touch it!

Speaking about the GSA building post-fire, do you think the Mackintosh building should be rebuilt as a facsimile of the original? Personally, I do! As long as it’s a functional studio and library building.

So the library should be open again? I believe so yes, but I can imagine the endless projects of glass boxes being proposed on the interior of it. But there are plenty of other buildings in the world that can take that kind of intervention. I believe this deserves more respect. I think it should be restored, and cleverly restored. There may be moments where the fire could be remembered. There may be something that reveals the scars of the event. But that is a different approach, than a more radical intervention, a softer approach.


C I T Y O F C L E A R I N G S

OBSERVATION 0.8

As the mid-century Modernists cleaved space within the urban tissue of Glasgow’s gridded core, the unanticipated presence of block interiors and interstitial construction became highly visible. Party-walls once hidden within the crust of urban blocks were exposed, not only to view, but daylight, fresh air and interventionist opportunities.

Rather than being exploited in their new condition these walls have remained mute profiles of the building depth, subdued by development control and the legalities of land ownership. But what if these party-wall situations were regarded as a form of urban clearing, akin to the residual space in a forest resulting from the removal of a large tree? In such a situation a range of responses develop, primarily manifest in the growth of plants benefiting from the microclimate generated by the removal of the tree canopy.

Pursuing the forest analogy, the urban clearings resulting from the Modernists ‘emptying’ of the city might provide for the development of new architectural species including the animation of exposed party-walls with architectural events in dialogue with their modernist neighbours.

The lack of innovation in response to urban clearings, generated as the city morphs and changes, is symptomatic of the general lack of willingness to embrace the changing nature of the city and requires a step change in the perception of ‘residual’ space within contemporary Glasgow, universally conceived as a problem rather than an opportunity.

Gustav Mahler defined tradition as the keeping alive of the flame rather than the worshipping of the ashes. Had Bruce’s 1945

redevelopment plan been fully implemented Glasgow’s fire may have been dimmed or even extinguished, but just as the Modernist interventions have been absorbed in the urban core it is the duty of all involved in the evolution of Glasgow’s public realm to continually reassess the opportunities offered but the contemporary city. A reasonable starting point is the reassessment of Glasgow’s Modernist legacy, a re-engagement with the ideas and aspirations that motivated the Modernists dealings with the city, as well as an informed evaluation of the consequences of their actions. It is only through such a process that modernity, having been absorbed into Glasgow’s historic core, will in turn be absorbed in the future city.

Commissioned for the “Project DMZ” exhibition in 1988, Lebbeus Wood’s Terra Nova, his treatment for the Demilitarised Zone on the war torn Korean Peninsula, is a precedent for the role of architecture in the non-violent resolution of conflict, a study on the effects of “a permanent state of war”, and a model for the theoretical potential of design in achieving Wood’s own unique interpretation of Utopia for living things.

Conflict, in its various guises, is the foundation on which Lebbeus Woods built his architectural manifesto, declaring in his own words that “Architecture and war are not incompatible. Architecture is war. War is architecture”. He maintained that the idea of Utopia was beyond reach so long as ideologies, actions, and forces remained in conflict, and it was only with harmony, or as Woods describes it, “a final, peaceful, state”, and ultimately the quietude of death, that it could be achieved.

Terra Nova itself is a defensive structure in its speculative context, with Woods’ drawings outlining the construction of a steel framed canopy across the entirety of the vast battlefield, a move, that without fear or favour, completely negates the value of the front-line

to opposing forces. By deliberately obstructing the strategies of war, Woods intends to starve the conflict of aggression, bringing the border to an eventual state of harmony. Below the canopy, Woods sees the terrain as the eponymous “Terra Nova”, or a “Second Nature”, a spatial interaction between human and nature, and a move towards his dream of “Ecological Utopia”.

Notions of Utopia are recurrent in Woods’ canon, and as an ideological architect and educator, it was a subject on which he commented at length, and without reservation. His own works court catastrophe and destruction in extreme fashions. However, Lebbeus Woods routinely conceptualised in the realm of science-fantasy rather than the present reality, and as a result, we are able to consider his work without presuming it to take a cynical stance. On the subject of Utopia, he observed in 2009 that “the idea [of utopia] has all but vanished”, though he continues that its re-emergence was not precluded. As Woods put it, “Let us listen to and watch the more ambitious and idealistic of the coming generation. Only they have the answer.”

U T O P I A 0 . 6L E B B E U S W O O D S ’ P E R S O N A L U TO P I A

He reasoned that this contemporary absence of Utopia results from the decay of socialism, and the “global triumph of capitalism”, noting that past Utopias succeeded in balancing technical and architectural innovation with a pronounced social benefit. This trend is one which we ourselves have observed in the development of our Utopian story, with, for example, Geoffrey Jellicoe’s Motopia: a Utopian scheme in which the primary architectural move of lifting roads into the sky is made so as to protect the public from the spectral deluge of cars onto the once-safe streets of British towns. However, with the rise of capitalism, Woods observes that the only “Utopias” left are those that endorse, support, or otherwise harbour the rampant consumerism of our times, concluding that “Anyone can get a credit card, everyone can buy and be happy, at least until they max out their cards. So, where is the inspiration to envision ‘another’ Utopia?”

PAST + FUTURE 37

38

The Anderston Centre is a mixed use redevelopment of the southern city centre district of Glasgow. A decade after the Bruce Report of 1946, the Anderston district was categorised as a Comprehensive Development Area (CDA) by Glasgow Corporation due to its state of deterioration as a result of the city’s declining industrial sector. The tenemental streets became vastly overcrowded, insanitary residences which subsequently deteriorated into a ghetto. The new Anderston was to be built as a tabula rasa, completely erasing the existing buildings and city structure in favour of a startling mix of residential, industrial and commercial zones.

The flagship development comprising the commercial sector was won by Richard Seifert & Partners, best known for Centre Point in London. Designed as a mixed use mega-structure, it created a completely new typology for Glasgow’s typically rigid, Victorian block structure. The Anderston Centre was to provide a city within a city - a complete entity that was to allow people to live, work, shop and be entertained all whilst remaining within the confinements of the new, bright city district.

Anderston was composed of a multitude of individual elements and programmes, segregated by the full arsenal of Seifert’s design toolkit - plinths topped with towers, car parking topped with a new shopping plaza, pedestrians separated from vehicles by elevated walkways and terraces intended to free up the original ground level. It also contained all the services required of the time, a bus station under a deck carrying shops which replicated the already proven Victorian system of street level retail. The upper deck resumed the new ground level of the city which carried the three 19 storey tower blocks of apartments orientated in a north-south direction, accommodating office space and shops to the lower five floors with the upper floors containing public housing for Glasgow Corporation. The original masterplan contained a large department store and a vast polygonal entertainment centre incorporating a casino and hotel connected to the other elements via a multi-level system of sloping walkways and open-air escalators. Due to the sheer scale of the scheme, it had its own dedicated fire station adjacent to Waterloo Street.

ANDERSTON CENTRE, 1972RICHARD SEIFERT & PARTNERS

CASE STUDY 0.6


The building was constructed from pre-cast concrete, and largely finished in an unrefined mix of textured concrete, partially painted board marked concrete and brick screens. The resulting composition of concrete situates the Anderston Centre within a typically mid-1960s aesthetic, in which prefabricated elements slot together to create a composite composition.

The Anderston bus station was closed in 1993 following the expansion of Buchanan Street bus station to the north of the city centre. By that time, as it was largely un-policed, the access walkways and hidden under crofts had become a notorious red-light district.

The late 1990s efforts to regenerate the complex included upgrading of materials and recladding of the building elements mixed with closing off the once seedy underbelly by means of secure gates and CCTV. Large multi-national clients such as Morgan Stanley and the Hilton Group let the commercial spaces and, in 2008 the Glasgow West Housing Association took ownership and refurbished and reclad the residential blocks, incorporating matt grey finishes and a distinctive LED lighting system.

The Anderston ensemble displayed a coherent redevelopment with all the tools sought to progress Glasgow in the 1960s; high-rise residential, multi-level shopping, commercial offices, car parking and a bus station. The towers are still occupied, the cars and buses came and went, but the idealised separation of person and car proved to be a step too far as the result was a place lacking the intensity needed to instil confidence in such a mixed use redevelopment.

Present day Anderston is representative of the failings of mega-developments constructed from the ashes of post World War II Britain, with aspirations of hurtling us all into a brave new, modern world. In his description of the Anderston Centre in the RIAS Guide, Central Glasgow, Frank Walker writes most aptly;

“Escalators lie idle and the raised level of what was planned as a busy shopping plaza has turned into a bleak business centre, deserted and still but for the somehow sinister blink of VDUs and the bored glances of lonely secretaries. It was just a few hundred yards too far west.”

PAST + FUTURE 39

p. 1Aerial View of Glasgow with case studiesEmbedded Modernism Group©2014 Microsoft Corporation, Bing Maps Aerial View

p. 2Absorbing Modernity Axonometric©Embedded Modernism Group

p. 2Alvar Aalto’s Sanatorium, Piamio Gustaf Welin (photographer)©Alvar Aalto Museum

p. 3Embedded Modernism ©Embedded Modernism Group

p. 4Fleming House City Sketch©Embedded Modernism Group

p. 4Fleming House 2014 Photograph©John Barr

p. 4Fleming House©urbanglasgow.co.uk

p. 5Fleming House Info-graphic©Embedded Modernism Group

p. 5Fleming House Axonometric (pencil drawing)©Embedded Modernism Group

p. 6Level House, SOM Photograph©Esra Stoller (photographer)

p. 7The Futurists “Sant’Elia”©Embedded Modernism Group

p. 8Gary Cooper as Howard Roark (screen shot from “The Fountainhead”) Ayn Rand (writer), King Vidor (director)©Warner Bros.

p. 8Heron House ©Royal Commission on the Ancient and Historical Monuments of Scotland (RCAHMS)

p. 9The Bruce Plan Robert Bruce©Glasgow City Council, Glasgow Museums

p. 9The Empire Exhibition 1938©Flicker User “Paris-Roubaix”

p. 10College of Commerce City Sketch©Embedded Modernism Group

p. 10College of Commerce 2014 Photograph©John Barr

p. 10College of Commerce©The Mitchell Library

p. 11College of Commerce Info-graphic©Embedded Modernism Group

p. 11College of Commerce Axonometric (pencil drawing)©Embedded Modernism Group

p. 12Frank Walker Profile Picture©Frank Walker

List of Illustrations

p. 12University of Strathclyde Architecture Building©Ross Brown (scotbrut.co.uk)

p. 14The Metropolis of tomorrow (charcoal on paper)Hugh Ferris (artist)©Columbia University Libraries, Avery Library

p. 14Hugh Ferris Utopia©Embedded Modernism Group

p. 15Glasgow’s Skyline©Glasgow Libraries, The Mitchell Library

p. 15Religion, Industry, Commerce - The Evolution of Singularity in the City©Jamie Whelan

p. 15Dental Hospital Photograph©John Barr

p. 16College of Building & Printing City Sketch©Embedded Modernism Group

p. 16College of Building & Printing 2014 Photograph©John Barr

p. 16College of Building & Printing-view from George Square©Glasgow Libraries, The Mitchell Library

p. 17College of Building & Printing Info-Graphic©Embedded Modernism Group

p. 17College of Building & Printing Axonometric©Embedded Modernism Group

p. 18Andy Macmillan OBE FRIAS - Portrait©Royal Incorporation of Architects Scotland

p. 18St. Peters Seminary, Cardross, Scotland - Exterior View©Glasgow School of Art Archives & Collections

p. 19St Brides Church, East Kilbride, Scotland©Glasgow School of Art Archives & Collections

p. 21Glasgow- City of Geology©Embedded Modernism Group

p. 21McCance Building & Livingstone Tower©Strathclyde University Archives

p. 22Dental Hospital City Sketch©Embedded Modernism Group

p. 22Dental Hospital 2014 Photograph©John Barr

p. 22Dental Hospital East Facade©Wylie Shanks Architects

p. 23Dental Hospital Info-graphic©Embedded Modernism Group

p. 23Dental Hospital Axonometric©Embedded Modernism Group

p. 24The Metabolists & Keno Tange©Embedded Modernism Group

p. 25College of Building & Printing rooftop©John Barr

p. 26Iain Maclaren Portrait©Wylie Shanks Architects

p. 26College of Commerce Rendering (charcoal on paper)©Wylie Shanks Architects

p. 27BOAC Building, Buchanan Street Glasgow- Street View©John Barr

p. 28-29Cloud 9 - Buckminster Fuller©Embedded Modernism Group

p. 29Templeton Carpet Company (currently home to West Brewery)©Embedded Modernism Group

p. 30Jellico’s Motopia©Embedded Modernism Group

p. 31Anderson Centre Rendering©Glasgow Libraries, The Mitchell Library

p. 32Heron House City Sketch©Embedded Modernism Group

p. 32Heron House 2014 Photograph©John Barr

p. 32Heron House & St Vincent Street Church©Royal Commission on the Ancient and Historical Monuments of Scotland (RCAHMS)

p. 33Heron House Info-graphic©Embedded Modernism Group

p. 33Heron House Axonometric©Embedded Modernism Group

p. 34Mark Baines Portrait©Royal Incorporation of Architects Scotland

p. 34Queens Park, Glasgow - street view©urbanglasgow.co.uk

p. 35The Anderson Centre ©John Barr

p. 36Reid Building & The Mackintosh Building ©Iwan Baan (Photographer)

p. 37Lebbeus Woods’ Personal Utopia ©Embedded Modernism Group

p. 38Anderson Centre City Sketch ©Embedded Modernism Group

p. 38Anderson Centre 2014 Photograph©John Barr

p. 38Anderson Centre©Glasgow Libraries, The Mitchell Library

p. 39Anderson Centre Info-graphic©Embedded Modernism Group

p. 40Anderson Centre Axonometric ©Embedded Modernism Group


Credits

First published in 2014 for

‘A residency at The British Pavilion as part of The 14th International Architecture Exhibition, La Biennale di Venezia’ 26th September - 24th October 2014

Scotland + Venice is a partnership between:

Scotland + Venice was curated by:

Reiach and Hall Architects

Neil Gillespie OBELaura KinnairdLewis Thomson

The Research Groups

Past + Future - An Introduction

Neil Gillespie OBE

Laura KinnairdLewis Thomson

Group 01: ‘Being There, The Fierce and Beautiful World’

James Grimley

Chris Lowry

Fergus David

Sophie Crocker

Group 02: ‘Embedded Modernism’

Alan Hooper

David Page

Andrew FrameChristopher DoveFraser MaitlandJamie Whelan

Group 03: ‘Land Works’

Fergus Purdie

Rowan Mackinnon-Pryde

Ashley Tosh

William Purdie

Group 04: ‘Outsiders’

Samuel Penn

Cameron McEwan

Penny Lewis

Hugh Lawson

Volha Druhakova

RSA (Elect) FRIAS RIBA, Design Director, Reiach and Hall Architects, Visiting Professor, Scott Sutherland School of Architecture & Built Environment, Robert Gordon UniversityAssociate, Reiach and Hall ArchitectsAssistant, Reiach and Hall Architects

Director, Reiach and Hall Architects, Part-time Studio Tutor at The Edinburgh School of Architecture and Landscape Architecture (ESALA)Lecturer in Architecture, The Edinburgh School of Architecture and Landscape Architecture (ESALA)The Edinburgh School of Architecture and Landscape Architecture (ESALA)The Edinburgh School of Architecture and Landscape Architecture (ESALA)

Architect, Programme Leader, Department of Architecture, The Glasgow School of ArtArchitect at Page/Park Architects, Visiting Professor, University of StrathclydeUniversity of StrathclydeThe Glasgow School of ArtUniversity of StrathclydeThe Glasgow School of Art

RSA (Elect), Architect at Fergus Purdie Architects, Part-time Studio Tutor School of the Environment, University of DundeeArchitect at Reiach and Hall Architects, Associate AE Foundation Associate, Editor of MatzineScott Sutherland School of Architecture & Built Environment, Robert Gordon UniversityUniversity of Strathclyde

Lecturer in Architecture, Scott Sutherland School of Architecture & Built Environment, Robert Gordon University, AE Foundation Co-founder and DirectorLecturer in History and Theory of the City, Architectural Design Tutor, AE Foundation AssociateLecturer in Architectural History, Scott Sutherland School of Architecture & Built Environment, Robert Gordon University, AE Foundation Co-founder and DirectorScott Sutherland School of Architecture & Built Environment, Robert Gordon UniversityScott Sutherland School of Architecture & Built Environment, Robert Gordon University

Partners

© Scotland + Venice 2014All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in retrieval systems or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without prior permission by Reiach and Hall Architects.

Reiach and Hall Architects6 Darnaway StreetEdinburghEH3 6BG

Printed by Sharman & Company Ltd.

Note: Every reasonable attempt has been made to identify owners of copyright. The publishers apologise for any omissions that may have inadvertently been made.

with additional support from:

Chief Architect, Planning & Architecture Division Scottish GovernmentPrincipal Architect, Planning & Architecture Division Scottish GovernmentPortfolio Manager - Visual ArtsCreative ScotlandVisual Arts AdvisorBritish Council Scotland

Further to those listed Scotland + Venice 2014 would also like to thank additional members of the partner organisations Les Scott_ The Scottish Government, Esther Hutcheson_The Scottish Government, Alistair Donald_British Council, Gwendoline Webber_British Council, Camile Mateos_British Council.

For their assistance in communications and when we return from Venice: Morag Bain_Architecture + Design Scotland, Anja Ekelof_Architecture + Design Scotland

For reference and use of Building Scotland, Past + Future, A Cautionary Guide by Alan Reiach and Robert Hurd in 1944, we thank Jim Tough and The Saltire Society, Edinburgh

We also thank our partners in Venice: M+B Studio SRL, Endar, Francesco Raccanelli_The British Pavilion

Finally we thank all those who have either contributed or assisted in the publications and events: Reiach and Hall Architects, Miles Glendinning_ESALA, Margaret Richards, Chris Rankin_rankinfraser landscape architects, Angus Farquhar_NVA, Dr Jonathan Charley_University of Strathclyde, Ellis Woodman_ Architects Journal, Murray Grigor, Toby Paterson, Irvine Welsh, Rebecca Wober_Studio DuB, Katherine Ross_Timeline Films, John Barr, Mark Baines, Professor Andy MacMillan OBE, Frank Walker, Seán McAlister_Matzine, Stephen Mackie_Matzine, Jamie Bell_Jamie Bell Design, Rory Cavanagh, Emanuel Petit, Sven-Olov Wallenstein, Dirk van den Heuvel, Fergus Denoon, Michael Wolchover_A Slight Shift, Norma Shewan, Derry Menzies Robertson and John Barber.

Ian Gilzean

Sandy Robinson

Amanda Catto

Juliet Dean

Advisory Panel

Anderson Bell Christie Architects and Architecture + Design ScotlandCity Design Adviser, Glasgow City CouncilLecturer in Architectural History, Scott Sutherland School of Architecture & Built Environment, Robert Gordon University, AE Foundation Co-founder and DirectorHead of the Mackintosh School of ArtHistoric ScotlandDo Architecture

Karen Anderson (Chair)

Gerry Grams

Penny Lewis

Professor Christopher PlattRanald MacInnesAdrian Stewart

Past + Future

Scotland + Venice

PAST + FUTURE 41

What is the true legacy of the 20th Century Modernists in

Glasgow and what lessons do they offer for contemporary

architects working in the city? How can Glasgow re-engage

with its modernist architectural legacy? How did Glasgow’s 19th

Century urban grid condition the modernist interventions in

the 20th Century? What is the impact of Glasgow’s topography

on Glasgow’s modern buildings? What were the motivations

that drove Glasgow’s buildings upwards in the middle of the

20thC? How can Glasgow exploit the ‘residual’ spaces created

by modernist planning? What was the impact of the 1938 Empire

Exhibition on Glasgow’s modernist buildings? Is the base and

tower typology an appropriate response to Glasgow’s urban

grid? What is the significance of MacMillan and Metzstein’s sole

urban contribution to the Glasgow grid? Why is Peter Williams

the architect of Glasgow’s major modernist buildings unknown?

Who is the architect who dared ’tango’ with Thomson? What is

the impact of the Glasgow grid on Mackintosh’s and Holls work

at GSA? Who was the man behind the Bruce plan? What is the

impact of the architectural legacies of Abercrombie and Bruce on

Glasgow in the 21st Century? What is the architectural legacy of

Glasgow’s schools of architecture?

Documents

Group 02: Embedded Modernism, Glasgow