Mark Chalmers

Happy New Year.  By all accounts, 2014 will be an important one, so I'd like to mention a few of the issues which will hopefully emerge in the next few months.  First off is our architectural identity, which is inextricably tied up with the definition of nationality, and that of course is up for debate.

Nationality means little once you realise that folk are the same the world over.  Welsh, Scots, English, Irish – we’re all Jock Tamson’s bairns.  By contrast, places are distinct, as are the buildings which emerge from them.  Architecture is influenced by local materials, climate, tradition and so on, and we should celebrate the variety that creates.

Perhaps the greatest challenge is to convince ourselves: witness Carol Craig’s recent book, The Scots’ Crisis of Confidence.  Some architects feel uneasy about overt Scottishness, perhaps scared to appear parochial, yet previous generations including Mackintosh, Lorimer and Hurd suffered no such hang-ups.  Do the detractors fear an outbreak of crowsteps?  No danger – because as Richard Murphy said, Scottish architecture is not about a national style.

Instead, it’s an approach.  The “stern exterior with a sensual interior” which Carl MacDougall identified in Painting the Forth Bridge, is typically Scots.  Likewise, the courtyard form, the re-entrant angle, deep-revealed windows in massive walls, and pitched roofs with skew parapets evolved in response to particular conditions.  Individually, few of these are unique to Scotland, but in combination they became characteristic.

The notion of Scottishness applies on a city-wide scale, too: our tenement blocks constructed from stone are quite different to the brick-built terraces typically found south of the border.  The pattern of riggs and closes in our medieval towns, and the great set-piece of the New Town, aren’t replicated elsewhere, but are distinctly Scots solutions to the universal brief of laying out cities.  Some even date back to the days before 1707…

In fact, there’s solid proof that independence will spur on a distinctive architecture.  When the National Movement emerged in the 1920’s, it formed part of a broader Scottish Renaissance.  The Saltire Society was created soon after, then Reiach & Hurd wrote Building Scotland, a manifesto for a native Scots modernism.  From that grew Robert Matthew’s work in the late 1950’s, including Dundee and Edinburgh universities, and the hydro stations in the Breadalbane range.

Just as importantly, that generation of Scots architects also took a philosophical position.  They published articles, put forward manifestos, and defended their work in public debate.  Today’s independence campaign could catalyse something similar, and perhaps find a resonance with Robert Matthew’s declaration that the architect’s task is “to lay the foundations not only of a new architecture, but of a new society”.

Independence could be good for the construction industry, too.  Already, devolution has enabled work to begin on the new Forth Bridge, the Alloa and Waverley rail lines, and reconstruction of the A9.  The rural housing crisis needs a solution, and an independent Scotland will need venues for its new institutions.  Building all those could provide a decade’s work.

To rationalise: my conviction is that Scotland can prosper without the Union.  After all, why wouldn’t the country which produced so many inventors, gave birth to the Adam brothers, Mackintosh and Geddes, and has copious natural resources, succeed on its own account?  Next, I hope to explore this train of thought in more detail, with not a "Cassandra" in sight.