Mark Chalmers

The winter of 2009/2010 has turned out to be a reflective period for architects, commentators, and Scotland in general.  Perhaps that thinking time is a result of our having been snowbound for days on end.  We’ve been given a variety of things to think about: the colour of our government may change shortly; the economy may drop into the second trough of a “double dip” recession; architectural practices may retrench, fail – or, despite everything, pull out of their current doldrums.  Who knows, but we’ve seen these things happen before: the last time practices suffered like this was during the early 1990’s, and although architecture school insulated me from the worst of it, I do recall nervous times for practitioners.

The vision of a steady stream of work for practices, leading to smooth cashflow and regular employment, proved to be just as illusory during the Nineties as the political creed “Boom and Bust is Dead”.  A few good years, “perhaps the pattern has finally been broken?” then back to Great British Whale, an economy which dives then surfaces again.  Stasis and change are eternal themes, and in my case that meant when the Lighthouse shut up shop, so did my articles commissioned by their website.  However, the evolution of Prospect into Urban Realm means I’ve been offered another platform.  The tenor of what I write here will be similar: photo essays, explorations of lesser-known architects and marginal places, plus the odd rhetorical or polemical piece.  Given the theme of this article, I thought it appropriate to look at the see-saw relationship between Scotland’s third and fourth cities.

Dundee and Aberdeen have always sat uneasily, 60 miles apart, and we find it hard to resist making comparisons between them.  Over the past three hundred years, their fortunes have waxed and waned on the basis of mercantile wealth (Dundee); woollen and paper milling (Aberdeen); the jute trade (Dundee); offshore oil (Aberdeen) – and now both have pinned their colours to some kind of hip new cultural economy.  The Dundee Contemporary Arts centre (DCA) recently celebrated ten years in existence, whereas Ian Wood’s current battle with Peacock Arts for control of Union Terrace Gardens is the latest instalment in Aberdeen’s efforts to catch up.  At present, Aberdeen doesn’t have a full-blown contemporary arts gallery.  In terms of traditional venues, Dundee’s McManus Galleries are in the final stages of a £8m revamp, and the building is due to re-open next week; whereas Aberdeen’s Art Gallery is at an early stage of navel-gazing about its future.

Yet those two Dundonian advances over Aberdeen mask the real ambitions of both cities, which are far more expansive.  In Dundee’s case, the Victoria & Albert Museum are keen to open a northern outstation, like the Tate did in Liverpool twenty years ago.  The proposed V&A-on-Tay is already being touted as a world-class piece of architecture – yet it could easily turn into an own-goal for the city.  Quickly, the local press jumped on the Frank Gehry “brandwagon”, with Mike Galloway (the city's Director of Planning and Transportation) trying to elicit Gehry’s involvement in the gallery, which it’s already been decided will be built on a promontory jutting out into the river.  But that move seems like a pale echo of Glasgow’s policy of commissioning an icon-builder to design the new Museum of Transport on the Clyde.  Perhaps wisely, Frank has ruled himself out of the running.  How about appointing an iconoclast instead, and doing so through a limited, or even an open competition?  Somehow, you have to maximise your chances of getting the best design.

That, it could be argued, is what Aberdeen University did when they chose Schmidt Hammer Lassen to design their new library.  The European approach, the articulation of simple volumes to create spaces for people, contrasts with the school of manipulating three-dimensional forms for visual effect.  The latter, whether you call it Deconstructivism or parametric design, was born on the Pacific Rim, at the Peak in Hong Kong, and Culver City outside Los Angeles.  The twisting and torqueing of steelwork to create fractured buildings has been fashionable for the past quarter century, in the hands of a handful of architects whose star ascended during the 1980’s.  Those architects became corporate brands, and their signature style was bought in by cities keen to ape Bilbao.  That approach has now been discredited, as it’s unlikely to result in truly timeless buildings.  Aberdeen University appear to have avoided that trap, and should be commended in avoiding a mere “statement” piece of architecture.

However, the V&A run a risk of repeating their “Boilerhouse” fiasco – if they, and the city council in Dundee, are set on commissioning a NAME rather than an appropriate talent.  If you recall, Daniel Libeskind (one of the most famous of architectural iconographers) produced numerous versions of a metal box with tesseract or Rubik cube contortions for the so-called Boilerhouse extension to the V&A in London, although each evolution of the scheme was quietly shelved due to heritage or financial issues.  Hopefully those behind the V&A’s new outstation will realise that the age of the icon is over, and that Dundee already has plenty symbols on the central waterfront: the landfall of the Tay Bridge, the Discovery’s masts, the ghost of the Royal Arch.  Why not build something on Riverside Drive, which as several writers have pointed out is one of the grandest approaches to any European city (provided you don’t allow superstores to build alongside it…)

Aberdeen’s V&A-rivalling plan is to create a vast urban square.  Others have talked about the P.R. chicanery which lie behind the Union Terrace Gardens campaign, so I will concentrate on the urbanism which might result from it.  At first glance, it seems as if Union Terrace might become something like Castle Terrace in Edinburgh.  If you build a multi-storey car park in a gulley, you create lots of city centre parking (although that’s not really the done thing in 2010…) and gain a “plaza” on which farmers’ markets, carnival jugglers and political rallies can do their respective piece.  Yet the north-easterly aspect of Union Terrace is ill-suited, and creating a vast open space will open the Terrace up to the biting wind which howls in from the sea.  There is also the serious matter of destroying one of the city centre’s few green lungs, and chopping down many handsome trees.  No-one has closely scrutinised the financial side of the proposals yet, because the latter are merely a few artists’ impressions.  Maybe that doesn’t matter, because Ian Wood’s proposal is superfluous.

You see, Aberdeen already has a large urban plaza, and it was the hub of the city’s life for hundreds of years: the Castlegate.  A former market place at the knuckle of Union Street and King Street, it later became the main node in Aberdeen’s tram system.  The scale of the open space to the surrounding buildings seems far happier than a vast treeless tract stretching from Union Bridge to Rosemount Viaduct, along which empty chip wrappers will race unhindered.  Perhaps if Ian Wood had the benefit of wise counsel, his focus might be shifted towards endowing a new wing at a local hospital, for example, or bequeathing money to fix the city’s real problems.  Aberdeen has several good examples of philanthropy, such as the WW1-era Cowdray Hall next to the Art Gallery, and the Crombie family’s gifts to the University which were used to build residences during the 1960’s.  As it is, both Aberdeen and its southern neighbour have more glaring issues to deal with than the need for a large expanse of paving slabs.

Aberdeen has serially failed to build a by-pass for the past forty years, so the main route through the city is still the pot-holed Anderson Drive, constricted to the south by the medieval Brig o’ Dee, and to the north by the hellish Haudagain roundabout.  Dundee’s airport is little more than a base for flying club planes, and needs investment or perhaps relocation to Errol, to enable short-haul jets to use it.  Dundee lacks a large conference facility, whereas the AECC in Aberdeen is in financial straits.  Aberdeen’s modern ice rink has been shut as a cost-saving measure, which means that its curlers and hockey players have to travel to … Dundee’s Ice Arena, if they want to practice their skills.  All the talk about urban squares and new galleries masks the inertia at the heart of both cities.  Drivers, airline passengers, conference-goers and ice enthusiasts realise that the more everything appears ready to change, the more it actually stays the same.

A decade may pass before we know whether the new Union Terrace Gardens, or the V&A’s outstation, made a difference.