Since all fifty of the articles I wrote for the Lighthouse website have disappeared, in its slow motion takeover by A+DS, I’ve lost a great deal of what folk call “web presence”. Thankfully I have the original files sitting on this Powerbook so from time to time I’ll re-post pieces which are appropriate to current events or what I’m working on now. This one was originally posted in December 2007, and will be followed by some new thoughts in light of the swingeing cuts meted out by the current Tory government…
From the moment of its birth, Scotland was shaped by war. Our country was forged in battle by the great Pictish warrior kings – Onuist, Nechtan, Drosten – and victory over the Northumbrians over 1300 years ago created a Scottish nation with its heart in Strathmore, the Angus valley which separates Highland Scotland from the Lowlands. As a result, our architecture is martial – the characteristic Scots building is the castle.
From prehistoric hill forts such as Dunadd, Bennachie and the Caterthuns; through rock fastnesses like Stirling, Dunottar and Edinburgh, the line continues through Ruthven Barracks which dates from the time of the ‘45, to Fort George, which is still used as a garrison by the Army. Modern Scotland is shot through with our bellicose attitude, and given expression by the massed ranks of the Tartan Army; a national anthem – Flower of Scotland – which taps into the spirit of Bannockburn; through to the stature of Rob Roy, the Wallace and the Bruce in our national pantheon alongside Burns, Hume and Adam Smith. We’re imbued with a warlike character.
Mons Meg
Yet this belligerence is not sentimental, nor a thing of the past. Modern Glasgow was shaped by two world wars: Beardmore, Fairfields, John Brown and the many other Clyde shipyards built the most powerful navy the world has ever seen. War also created a legacy of fortifications, and not just at Scapa Flow and the inches in the Forth, but in concrete blockhouses and pillboxes and gun emplacements from the Clyde to Invergordon to Loch Ewe. The world’s largest explosives factory was built outside Annan. In fact, Beardmores were the first integrated arms company in the world, building battleships, submarines, airships, aircraft engines and excelling in many of these disciplines. In fact, the armistice of 1918, with the resulting treaties and “peace dividend” were extremely bad news for them, as their R&D work on new technologies came to an abrupt end.
Today, if we were allowed inside Faslane, Coulport and Glen Douglas, the naval bases on the lochs north of the Clyde, we would find an impressive series of sheds and underground caverns packed with giant conveyors, robotic forklifts, and smart-chipped parts for ships and submarines. Lossiemouth is the RAF’s largest fast jet base, and with its sister stations at Kinloss, Milltown and Tain is effectively a small military city sitting alongside the rapidly-growing town of Inverness. Cape Wrath on the far north-west tip of Scotland is given over to a giant bombing range; and the enormous runway at Machrihanish, once the Master Diversion airfield for transatlantic flights suffering problems, has been used for many secretive test flights.
Britain, despite the talk of its being a failing power in world terms, spends more on defence per capita than any other country in the world, except the United States. Several weeks ago, on 27th November, HMS Diamond was launched into the murky waters of the Clyde from BAE Systems’ shipyard at Govan, whose slipways used to belong to the mighty Fairfield Shipbuilders. Diamond is the latest in a fleet of new destroyers, each costing £600m, which are claimed to be the most advanced in the world, and whose destructive capability exceeds that of a WW2 battlecruiser. Aside from the superlatives, it is obvious that this is a new type of ship – the angular planes of its superstructure, and the polyhedral, faceted surfaces of its bridge instantly make it different from everything which went before. There are no cluttered masts antlered with aerials, spinning dishes, revolving radars, Bofors gun barrels poking out… it’s a Stealth ship.
HMS Diamond
Opposite the toastrack blocks at Glasgow Harbour, the shipbuilders are creating something genuinely new. The buildings have bolted steel frames, and are clad in EPDM-gasketed curtain walling, which are techonologies from the 1890’s and 1950’s respectively. In contrast, BAE’s ships have nothing in common with their predecessors – their powerplant, hullforms, armaments, sensors, structures, materials have all changed beyond recognition. HMS Diamond makes the new buildings opposite look old-fashioned, and makes other ships seem traditional and reactionary. In the first years of this new century, Stealth geometry has taken over from fractal geometry of the 1990’s as a new paradigm. Stealth influences many things – the American F22 Raptor aircraft, the Lamborghini Reventon sports car, and its entree into the construction industry, Plasma Studios’ architecture. Today, Deconstructivist architecture has discovered military aesthetics – and however inappropriate a technology transfer, we use low radar signature shapes for visual effect.
Today, we are living through the onset of digital war: satellite imagery and smart bombs with TV cameras in their noses, and the influence of the military has returned. The nightly news assaults us with terrorism and guerrila warfare, but that is only a part of it. We are returning to the total war, a concept born in WW2 where the whole of society bent itself to a military end, and everything was militarised. With the current round-the-clock coverage of a troubled world, we are more aware than ever of the role of the military. As a result, camouflage, epaulettes and forage caps are back in fashion, and “Stealth” is the modern aesthetic.
The close parallel to the progress of Stealth is the way “streamlining” became fashionable during the Art Deco 1930’s, as a metaphor for speed. Speed was the holy grail in those days of the Mallard locomotive, the Bluebird car and the S6B aircraft. Even today, vehicle designs pick up on steamlining as a design cue, even though that's absent from architecture nowadays. Stealth is a metaphor for how we live now – survivalist, commando-style, terrorist-proof. it is inevitable that our architecture will reflect the rest of society. Already, the unconventional war being fought againist terrorists has affected the detailing of our architecture. There are concrete blockade barriers outside buildings, dragons’ teeth on access roads, and polylaminated glass to resist bullets and bombs. CCTV and PIR systems have become universal on new buildings. Measures to counter ram-raiders in the 1990’s have become the means to defeat car-bombers today.
Alvis Titan bridgelayer
Alongside building the world’s most advanced warships, Britain is the world’s largest maker of armoured vehicles, thanks also to BAE Systems and its Alvis, Vickers, and Hagglunds subsiduaries. The Armstrong Works turns out the Titan bridgelayer, a hugely impressive piece of kinetic sculpture powered by a 1200hp engine, which can build a 26 metre bridge span within two minutes – and can go on to span gaps of 60 metres. The country which invented the tank has developed the tracklaying vehicle to a point where 60 tons of steel and composites can travel cross-country over fields and ditches at up to 50mph. Tanks, just like medieval castles, have glacis – the sloping surfaces which deflect artillery. However, these flat polyhedral shapes – which you would imagine might increase visibility to radar – actually reduce it. Diamond and the other Type 45 destroyers, each displacing alomost 8000 tons, are said to appear li\ke a fishing boat on enemy radar screens.
The military works with a precision and swiftness which puts the construction industry to shame – although military spending is around 2.2% of Gross Domestic Product, whereas the construction industry represents around 6.5% of GDP, depending on which indicator you use. Draw your own conclusions. We publish books like “Why is the Construction Industry so Backward?”, yet the answers are there if we wish to look for them. We can use Vickers as an illustration. The Vickers company used to make ships, bulldozers, steel and cement plant. As time went on, its management saw that more promise lay in ships and steel than bulldozers and cement, because the margins were higher, and each time the construction industry suffered a depression, the factories which made bulldozers and cement plant stood idle. Today, Vickers Shipbuilding and Engineering (now part of BAE Systems) operates one of only three or four shipyards in the world capable of building nuclear-powered submarines.
So what? The relevance is the increasing influence of the military sphere on civil society. All through our history – and that of our European peers – war was a regular occurence, as Hobbes, Malthus and many others predicted. From the Boer War, the Great War, WW2, Korea, Suez, the Falklands, Bosnia, to the two Gulf Wars, the last century was shaped by it. Designers admire military design, for its utility, its robustness, and austere functionalism – and because we were exposed to the aesthetics of war for so many years. However, after the founding of CND, followed by the Peace movement in the 1960’s, meant that the military realm was increasingly distanced from civil society. After all, the Peace movement is an anti-War movement, and society was worn out by the all-out militarism of the first half of the twentieth century. The influence of the Ministry of Defence waned, and military programmes like the TSR2 were cut back. When it was axed, the TSR2 was the world’s most advanced warplane, at least five years ahead of any other aircraft.
TSR2 prototype
There’s a commonly held truth that war drives technology forwards. The military-industrial complex which developed electronics, information displays and plastics for aircraft like the TSR2, also indirectly created many of the things with which we define our civilisation– microwave ovens, computers and the internet, G.P.S. systems. They all spun off from what Churchill called “war science” – and although most people feel that we spend too much money on machines for killing people with, we happily accept the progress in civil society which comes only from warlike aims. Swords into ploughshares, we move forwards by adapting war materiel to peaceful ends. Of course, this is one of the finest examples of moral relativism that you’re ever likely to come across… and today we are living through a strange inversion of society, where civilian life is violent and filled with aggression, stemming from terrorism to gang culture and video games; whereas the military take on peacekeeping roles, and sailors can be kidnapped without a shot being fired. But we were aware of everything that happened to the sailors, in real time.
The result of it all is that the military have a far greater grip over the public imagination, and ordinary peoples’ lives, than we acknowledge. As a result, the military’s culture and tropes – like Stealth – are part of a wider currency that we all understand. Since belligerence is part of the human character set, it’s better than we understand that and benefit from it, rather than trying to repress it. Thousands of years of history prove that we can’t.
