First published in Leopard magazine five years ago, posted here by request…
In the years between the two world wars, the Modernists believed in the new, at the expense of an old world that was rotten beyond saving. They felt that art and architecture could help to build a better society: design was conceived not as a servant of private gain, but an agent of the public good. The resulting buildings had a lot to live up to – but they finally dragged Scotland out of the Victorian era and into the 20th century.
The typical Aberdeen tenement is granite-built, three or four storeys high, with an attic storey expressed as a mansard, where the roof pitch is very steep – in fact, the slates are hung almost on the vertical, and there is a stair at the back, which a passage connects to a door on the street. Otherwise, it is similar to tenements in other Scottish cities, with back greens and shared WC’s giving onto open platts. Thousands of tenements still exist, but thousands more have since been demolished, partly as a result of the 1917 Royal Commission which found that “the housing accommodation in Scotland was undoubtedly a serious cause for concern.”
Rosemount Square was a social experiment which grew from that concern, an exploration of what a modern tenement could be like – albeit a rethought, rational tenement house rather than the overcrowded slums which were being pulled down in Shiprow, Gallowgate and Kirkgate. It is a granite fortress, an island of socialist influence in douce Aberdeen. The horseshoe of flats is bounded by Leadside Road, South Mount Street, Richmond Street and Kintore Place, and surrounds an inner courtyard, which is a vastly scaled-up version of the traditional tenement back green – but where did the impetus come from?
Legislation, in fact. The 1935 Housing Act forced Scottish burghs to improve their housing stock, so that the process of slum clearance was accelerated. The shock is that it took 18 years for serious progress to be made after the Royal Commission. Once the Act was on the statute books, the Secretary of State instigated a study of housing stock in Europe – he had heard that great things were happening on the Continent. A deputation visited the Spangen and Keifhock schemes in Rotterdam, by Oud, and Karl Marx Hof in Vienna, by Ehn – their names were like epigrams from the future to Scottish architects – and these schemes became models for development, when “Working Class Housing on the Continent” was published later that year. Its authors felt that Ehn’s work was “bold, forceful and perfect”, and this made a great impression on Scottish architects who were keen to create a new kind of housing in a modern image. They just needed their chance.
In July 1937, fire broke out in the former C & E Morton’s provisions works in South Mount Street – although by that time, it was occupied by Alex “Cocky” Hunter, a local worthy who ran a small empire of junk shops. The entire block was gutted, the Council decided to acquire the 2.5 acre site for housing – and Cocky moved his chaotic operations to Castle Terrace. By the start of 1938, the City Architect submitted proposals for a four-storey granite tenement of radical design, to be set around a courtyard and accessed via thirteen stairwells. During the Thirties, and beyond, Aberdeen had one of the most capable City Architect’s Departments in the country, under Alexander Buchanan Gardner, who assembled a team of gifted designers working under him, including Alexander McRobbie (who designed the Bon Accord Baths), and Leo Durnin.
Rosemount Square was largely designed by Durnin, and it is unique in Britain thanks to its marriage of socialist precedent with Aberdeen’s native granite. At the time, the city’s Housing Convenor was the omnipresent and forceful Tom Scott Sutherland, who was responsible for germinating the idea of Rosemount Square. Politically a Conservative, he surely had no sympathy with the agit-prop of Red Vienna, yet the City Architect’s work was well-supported by the convenor and successive Lord Provosts. When Gardner encountered opposition from the elected members at council meetings, he would silence them with a magisterial, “Now gentlemen, who is the City Architect here?” Rosemount Square was approved by the Council in April 1939, and went out to tender: construction began just as the Second World War diverted resources away from civilian work.
Rosemount Square is sometimes compared to Karl Marx Hof, the largest public housing scheme built in Red Vienna – 1382 apartments – and the most famous of the super-block Hofs. Although Rosemount has only 104 flats, there are certainly similarities: the Art Deco decoration (in the form of ceramic sculptures at Karl Marx Hof); the horizontal bands of glazing; the giant arches which lead into the inner court. Beyond that, any comparison with Ehn’s work is a spurious one. When the Social Democrats were elected in 1919, Red Vienna was born and the city instigated a massive housing programme – by 1934, 64,000 apartments had been built. 400 housing blocks were distributed through the city, in which workers’ dwellings were combined with kindergartens, libraries, clinics, theatres and co-op stores. So the scale is vastly greater than Aberdeen: Karl Marx Hof is one kilometre long, with archways on a truly cyclopean scale. For architectural “trainspotters”, Rosemount Square’s horseshoe plan is actually closer to Bruno Taut’s Hufeisenseidlung scheme in Berlin.
Thus architecture in Scotland is not thirled to political cant, but the crucial step is that the public sector, and architects became involved – in the past, tenements were designed and built by in the private sector, by speculative builders. The results were distinctly nippit. However, once the profit motive was removed from construction, mass housing could be built to a higher standard. The ensuing programme of public works also helped the country to build itself out of the Depression. Injecting money into the economy by means of a programme of housing, education or healthcare buildings is a favourite technique for chancellors who want to “pump prime” the economy. Gordon Brown isn’t unaware of that, either.
Rosemount Square was designed to epitomise brightness and cleanliness: sanitation was improved by modern plumbing and the provision of internal WC’s. The horizontal windows with slim steel frames, in contrast to the chunky timber “simplex” sash-and-case windows in old tenements, created light-filled and cross-ventilated apartments. Another shift away from tradition was to move the building entrances off the street frontage, and into the courtyard. In contrast to, say, Golden Square, this building’s public face is on the outside, yet the enclosed “square” is actually hidden on the inside of the block: the four-storey horseshoe surrounds a central landscaped square which allows children to play safely away from traffic. In this, Leo Durnin anticipated the impact of the private car, and also neutralised the bane of pre-Great War tenements, the backlands with their reeking middens.
Rosemount Square’s structure is granite, but with prefabricated details and concrete balconies on the courtyard elevations. The design is simple and monumental – well-suited to the Rubislaw stone which the Council insisted on using, forming sheer walls in rough-axed granite. A high parapet partly obscures the shallow-pitched blue slate roofs and blue brick chimney stacks. This was one of the last such housing schemes, as the costs of working granite increased exponentially, and stone was abandoned in the 1950’s as cheaper alternatives took its market away. The former C&A building on Union Bridge, designed in 1956 by North & Partners as a replacement for the old Palace Hotel, was almost the last building in Aberdeen built in load-bearing granite. After that, the architecture of the steel and concrete skeleton destroyed the “stone culture”, and with it the unity of Aberdeen.
The quality which “lifts” Rosemount Square is how it embodies the modern age, and this extended to the sculptures set above the wide arches. Included in the building cost were three sculptured panels by the head of the sculpture department at Gray’s School of Art, Thomas Huxley-Jones. The allegorical figures were to represent Rain, Wind and Cold, and would have cost £500 in total: as it is, only the bas relief panels of Wind and Rain were completed, in an effort to save money. Huxley-Jones spent his early years in Wales, then won a Rome Scholarship when he was a student – he moved to Aberdeen in the 1930’s to practice and to teach, and he seems like a good example of a Modernist artist who tried to efface his own ego by serving the community.
The figures are youthful, clean-limbed in an Art Deco style, and they are at least partly inspired by Greek myth. “The Spirit of the Winds” on Leadside Road is Aeolos, the Greek custodian of the four winds, and she literally rides like the wind on her charger – although her pointy hairstyle gives her away as a flapper from the Great Gatsby. Rain, on South Mount Street, is treated more literally, and consists of a figure tipping a pail of water over the pend. The sculptures are twelve feet by five, and were executed by the mason John McKay, of Taggart’s Allenvale Granite Works. After several months’ work, they were slotted into the building like jigsaw pieces. Although McKay died in 1947, Huxley-Jones had a long-standing relationship with Taggart’s: thirty years after Rosemount Square, they worked on his sculpture for an Essex branch of NatWest Bank.
Construction at Rosemount Square was delayed by material and labour shortages caused by the war – but it did at least progress slowly, rather than being abandoned for the duration like so many others. In 1944, future Lord Provost Tommy Mitchell (Scott Sutherland’s successor as Housing Convenor) noted that a substantial portion of the scheme had been completed and many of the houses were already occupied. Yet by now, Scots housing was in transition, and the tenemental form had been rejected. 
Shortly after Rosemount Square was completed in January 1945, a housing competition at Kincorth was launched. It was to reverse everything Rosemount Square set out to achieve – low density as opposed to folk being concentrated; set on the periphery rather than being at the heart of the city; terraced maisonettes versus flats stacked up several storeys high. One criticism of Rosemount Square which Scott Sutherland had to fend off came from a determined lady who asked how the coalmen could carry their sacks up four flights of stairs. Yet the scheme was commended by the Saltire Society as the best Local Authority housing scheme completed between 1939 and 1947, and is now Grade A listed. Incidentally, it was apparently named “Rosemount Square” by Scott Sutherland himself – exerting that droit de seignur which housing convenors have.
So inner city was rejected in favour of suburb, creating sprawling estates with geometrical road layouts. It took the tower blocks of the 1960’s to change the pattern of housing once more. Rosemount Square marks the last gasp of the tenement form, of the solid granite wall, and of enlightened patronage in housing.
