The process of re-badging and re-launching goes on, relentlessly. A few years ago while I was working on buildings for mental healthcare, I studied the evolution of asylums for the insane. It’s a specialist field, with lots of expert knowledge which I barely touched on, but it has produced a fair number of under-appreciated buildings including MacMon’s beautifully-designed facility at Murray Royal in Perth, which was completed a few years ago.
One of the most striking things I discovered was the continual renaming of places for people who have psychiatric issues. Insanity became mental illness, asylums became hospitals. The names changed many times, from madhouses to lunatic asylums and idiot colonies, then institutions for mental defectives, hospitals for the mentally handicapped, then psychiatric units and now mental health facilities. Changing the names made little difference to patients – it was a matter of semantics for politicians and administrators – but improving the buildings in which they’re cared for did. I can see a parallel in today’s sustainability movement.
As Michael Pawlyn wrote in the RIBA Journal in 2019, signing up to Architects Declare signed you up to “Regenerative Architecture” – but what is it and how do you achieve it? He quickly admitted that, “For those of us who have been involved in sustainable design for 30 years or more, it is painful to accept how badly sustainability has failed to prevent the multiple environmental crises from worsening.” That gets close to the truth of why Sustainability (which used to be known as Eco-friendly Design, and before that as Green Architecture) has been re-badged as Regenerative Architecture.
Architects Declare and their allies believe Sustainability has failed – so they’ve decided to rebadge it. But that’s a misconception. Sustainability hasn’t failed; it’s a multi-decade project and still a work in progress. Buildings today are far more sustainable than they were thirty years ago. Sustainability has achieved a great deal – albeit not the total overthrow of capitalism, which Extinction Rebellion and their fellow travellers would like to see.
Meantime, “Regenerative” in this context reveals breathtaking arrogance and ignorance within our profession about what regeneration means. For example, one of the few specifics Michael Pawlyn provides is to suggest building with materials made from atmospheric carbon: he cites wood as an example. But chopping down trees is De-Generative, because it reduces the natural world’s ability to absorb stormwater and CO2. Only by planting more new trees than you fell can you regenerate the ecosystem’s ability to absorb. That's a crucial caveat.
Then you have solar panels, which are a red herring when it comes to Regenerative Architecture. They’re certainly helpful to generate some electrical power for buildings, which may mean using less coal- and gas-powered generation; but that’s a non-issue in Scotland where almost all our electricity is generated by hydro stations and wind turbines, and nuclear power. Regardless, solar panels can’t regenerate the natural ecosystem in the way that planting shrubs and herbs creates a habitat for insects and helps to absorb water and CO2.
Biophilia and biomimicry have also been offered up as examples of Regenerative Architecture. In the early 2020’s, they became fashionable among the mega-consultancies which offer workplace design to the multi-national corporations which fill up Grade A space in our big cities. For them, supposedly regenerative design followed a formula of including some raw timber, rather than painted finishes. Living walls, often using reindeer moss or something similar, or fake green walls which approximate a living wall. A view to the outside, if you’re lucky enough to have one from your deep plan floorplate; or artificial lighting which follows circadian rhythms, if you’re not that lucky. Plus a few pot plants.
But no-one from Architects Declare has explained how a newbuild central London office tower can help to regenerate the natural ecosystem, so Regenerative Architecture joins a series of straw men and pails of greenwash which practices parade on their websites. The RIBA 2030 Climate Challenge, B-Corp, Article 25 and so forth. The whole scene is rather like a ceremony in the Wacky Races cartoons: each time Dick Dastardly needs to motivate Muttley, he gives him a medal which is proudly displayed on the dog’s puffed-up chest. Re-badging is a distraction which misses the point of what the term Regenerative actually means.
For once, I can speak from direct experience. All the generations that preceded me worked the land, but while some were farmers, my direct ancestors on Dad’s side were mostly market gardeners. During the 18th and 19th centuries they relied on horsepower for ploughing, crop rotation to keep down diseases, and animal manure for fertiliser. My grandfather was the first to buy mechanical tractors, motor lorries and use chemical fertiliser.
Market gardening isn’t like farming. The latter is extensive agriculture, whereas market gardening is intensive horticulture – in other words, using a few hectares to grow higher yield crops like fruit and vegetables, rather than a few hundred hectares to grow cereals, or grass to support grazing sheep and cattle. My family grew vegetables like carrots, turnips, tomatoes and salads; fruit like strawberries and apples; and flowers like chrysanthemums and helichrysums.
My Grandad, and my Dad after him, saw the introduction of NPK fertilisers (nitrogen, phosphorus, and potassium) and chemical insecticides like DDT and 2,4D, along with pre-emergence weedkillers make a big difference to crop yields. DDT was introduced when Dad was a teenager, and it was a tremendously effective insecticide. By the time he was in his 30’s, DDT had been banned, along with many others like Aldrin and Deldrin. We now understand that these toxic chemicals are biocides: they don’t just harm the species we’ve decided are “pests”, they also also kill helpful pollinators and destroy friendly bacteria in the soil.
These chemicals, which made post-War horticulture less back-breaking and more profitable, were counter-productive. The latest agri-chemicals to be banned (just the other week) are neo-nicotinoid pesticides, but none of this is news. For example, Strawberry Cultivation, written by Edward Hyams in the early 1950’s, was one of my Dad’s favourite books. Its opening lines read, “If man ever has to give an account of himself as chief tenant of the planet, he will be hard put to it not to show himself deserving of severe censure. He has destroyed forests, befouled rivers and seas, created deserts, hunted, tortured and even exterminated many of his fellow species, all with complacent self-satisfaction.”
My Dad and Grandad observed a cycle where most of the wonder chemicals introduced during the 1940’s and 50’s were banned during the 1960’s and 70’s: but meantime an alternative had opened up in the US. A movement called Conservation Farming emerged, which was a form of permaculture later called Regenerative Agriculture. By coincidence, one of the companies which contributed to it was Allis-Chalmers, an engineering firm in Milwaukee which was founded by a distant relative. He escaped from a life of tenant farming in Angus by emigrating to Chicago in 1841, and decades later his company had grown into one of the biggest of its kind in the world. I mentioned one of their earthmovers here.
A-C is credited with designing, manufacturing and selling the first commercially successful no-tillage planters, in 1966. The principle is really simple. Rather than driving a tractor through the field four times – once with ploughs, then with harrows, then with fertiliser, then a final time with seeders – No-Til barely disturbed the soil, and did everything in one pass. That saved time, money and fuel and most importantly it didn’t open up the soil which would have allowed nutrients to leach away. Thanks to No-Til, natural nutrients and moisture were retained and the topsoil was able to regenerate itself, naturally. By contrast, conventional ploughing degraded the soil, which meant more artificial fertilisers and chemicals were needed.
Trademarked as the Allis-Chalmers No-Til system, three toolbars were carried behind the tractor. The first had a series of coulters developed by A-C engineer Maynard Walberg, which sliced through crop residue or sod to prepare a narrow strip of soil, rather than churning up the whole field. The second toolbar carried fertiliser boxes which sprinkled a small amount of fertiliser only where it was needed, in the seedbed. Planter units were attached to the third toolbar. As an aside, the story of how Allis-Chalmers developed the No-Til planter and pioneered regenerative farming is a powerful argument for the good that enlightened capitalism can do, too.
Leaving the soil as undisturbed as possible is truly regenerative: and perhaps only foresters, ecologists, farmers and market gardeners, and conservationists can help to regenerate the natural environment in a true sense. By comparison, architects are kidding themselves: the glass and stone and steel and dead timber which we make buildings from can’t regenerate communities of plants, animals, birds and fungi. Misunderstanding what Regenerative means isn’t just semantics – it’s crucial to understanding the issue, in exactly the same way that the so-called “fireproof” insulations used at Grenfell Tower weren’t Class A1 rated, so people died. “Car-free” developments aren’t really car-free, if residents just park their cars on adjacent streets.
I hate to make predictions this early in the New Year, but I can see the current generation of dogma-driven architects repeating the mistakes of their predecessors, just in a different way. What was labelled as the worst of 1960’s architecture – such as Sam Bunton’s Red Road flats and Basil Spence’s Hutchie C tower blocks in Glasgow, T. Dan Smith’s masterplan for Newcastle, the Hulme Crescents in Manchester, and Ronan Point in London – was blamed for destroying inner city working class communities and creating brand new slums. Likewise, claiming that we can regenerate the earth by building on it is intellectually dishonest and plain wrong.
In the 1960’s, Modernism promised to remake the world, by adopting a new paradigm. We replanned cities to eliminate slums, then housed people at high density in tower blocks and deck-access slabs, prefabricated these buildings in precast concrete factories, and made it easier for cars to get around. But the streets in the sky turned into wind-blasted nowheres, precast large panel systems turned out to be difficult to assemble accurately on site, and electric underfloor heating turned out to be too expensive to use. Some buildings leaked, others were poorly insulated, some were structurally unsafe.
In the 21st century, Sustainable architecture promised to remake the world, by adopting a new paradigm. We replanned cities to eliminate private cars, then tried to raise inner city densities by prefabricating medium rise buildings in SIP factories. However, the combinations of membrane which make them airtight but vapour permeable rely on faultless workmanship on site. When mechanical ventilation with heat recovery (MVHR) systems fail due to poor maintenance, when external wall insulation (EWI) systems fail due to being poorly applied, and when heat pumps are incorrectly installed in poorly-insulated, leaky old buildings – they don’t work.
I’ve got personal experience of MVHR problems and modern EWI systems which failed in the most dramatic way – I was a small part of a team brought in to rectify the problems. That underlined to me that Sustainability is a work in progress, rather than something to discard. If we don’t recognise the limits of our competence and show some humility by doing simpler things more effectively, the results will be just the same as during the 1960’s: cold houses where old people live miserably through winter, and damp houses where children develop breathing disorders.
Before we ditch sustainability in favour of a new badge, we need to get the fundamentals right. Aim for Fabric First, rather than bolting on complex heat recovery systems in order to scrape through the SBEM calculations. Demolish as little as possible, instead upgrade everything we can – and push Westminster to abolish VAT on refurbs in order to encourage that. Finally, specify Scottish products and materials every time – not imports from China for “value engineering”.
The concepts behind sustainability are often misunderstood – sometimes wildly so. It’s been tough enough to master sustainable materials while we improve U-values and airtightness, without starting again from scratch with Regenerative Architecture: a mixture of misconceptions, extravagant promises to save the world, and greenwash.
That notwithstanding, Happy New Year. :-)
Over time, you lose track of most people you’ve ever known. If you’re lucky, you might keep up with some colleagues from previous jobs, a few from architecture school, a handful from secondary school, and perhaps one from primary school. Friendships which go back that far are scarce, and it came as a jarring blow to discover that Mhairi was no longer around.
I remember her at this time of year, when I make Christmas cards, and whenever I hear The Eurythmics on the radio. At primary school she stood out thanks to her auburn hair: but Mhairi was bright, articulate and radiated personality. That stood out more. Her childhood was split between Dundee and Aberdeen, which was something we had in common, then her parents relocated again and she went to secondary school in St Andrews, followed by Ellon Academy.
As an adult she threw herself wholeheartedly into everything she did. After university in Aberdeen she made a successful life in London, between work and supporting the London Scottish rugby club, before moving back to Scotland. She jokingly referred to herself as a “rugby meer”, and we reconnected thanks to Friends Reunited: pretty much the only time that social media has fulfilled its promise to be useful.
That link went back to childhood, to Mrs Ramsay and Japanese larch trees and Adrians, to Rotork pens and The Secret Garden and bathroom doors with keyholes. Even though it can feel strange to pick up a friendship again after a gap, discovering the adult version of a person you remember as a child, then reconciling it to impressions formed when you were also a child, is a gift which we’re given only a handful of times over the course of life.
Similarly, memories of people we knew sometimes become conflicted due to things they did or said; but not with Mhairi. Her life ended at 44 years old, and its unfulfilled potential brings to mind the line from Philip Larkin, “There swelled/ a sense of falling, like an arrow-shower/ sent out of sight, somewhere becoming rain.” Larkin saw that the course of a life is like the flight of an arrow, fired at birth towards an unknown destination. It follows a random walk of chance: nothing is fixed, nothing is forever.
The end of the year is for remembering, as well as celebrating. Happy Christmas, Mhairi Gillanders, wherever you are now.
Compared to its dysfunctional cousin south of the Border, the Building Control system in Scotland is more stringent. You’ve never been able to build high rise blocks with only one means of escape in Scotland, and our Building Warrant process wasn’t hived off to the private sector by Thatcher.
In my experience, Building Standards departments communicate well with architects: those I’ve dealt with recently in Aberdeenshire, the City of Aberdeen and City of Dundee organise updates and seminars for architects, explaining changes to the regulations and asking for our feedback. We attended an update session a few weeks ago, when the Team Leader at Building Standards ran through upcoming revisions to the Technical Standards.
Three things stuck out: the reversal of the wood-fired stoves fiasco, the long-term implications of the Grenfell Tower fire, and the need to remove politicians from the room when procurement and construction are discussed.
Firstly, fitting wood-fired stoves in new builds is no longer banned. I could go into a political rant (at the risk of death by boredom) about the misguided impulse behind the proposed ban, but just like scrapping the target to reduce greenhouse gas emissions by 75% by 2030, it demonstrates that the folk who come up with these policies aren’t talking to those who have to implement them. Between them lies a yawning gap between declarative statements and practical action – a gap traditionally occupied by politicians.
In this case, while policy-makers thought they’d found a clever way to penalise rich folk who build fancy houses, most of us saw the ban as a first step towards the eventual banning of solid fuel stoves, back boilers, and open fires. The reality is that solid-fuel stoves and open fires are used by many people in the overlooked 95% of Scotland’s landmass – the part beyond the big cities which is called the countryside. People there have to be pragmatic about how they heat their houses, because you still get deep snow up the glens and in the Highlands: sometimes the LPG tanker, or coal lorry, or oil tanker, or even the heat pump repair man, can’t get through. So you need to have a back-up, such as solar panels, or open fires, or a solid fuel stove.
The only experience I have of solid fuel was at my grandparents' house in an Aberdeenshire village. There were fireplaces in several rooms, but I only remember a couple downstairs being lit in winter – you can imagine that the house was a bit chilly, but my grandparents were hardy and didn't seem to notice. They had a shed for coal, and another shed for logs, but no central heating – the village had no mains gas. They heated their house the way several generations of Essons had done before them.
Secondly, Building Standards introduced us to a new role, the CPM or Compliance Plan Manager – a new acronym, confusingly similar to but distinct from CDM or CPD. Unlike the earlier Planning Supervisor, CDM Coordinator and Principal Designer roles, this one carries heavy consequences for getting it wrong: likely up to a £50,000 fine and two years imprisonment. After the presentation, I asked the Team Leader whether the Scottish Government foresaw that architects could fulfil the CPM role. He believed yes we could, but we both agreed that the liabilities and hence the professional indemnity insurance premiums could be off-putting.
Is the CPM another opportunity for architects to retain part of their traditional role, which has gradually been chipped away by project managers, Planning Supervisors and CDM Coordinators? Or is it a poisoned chalice, which will see CPM’s in the dock when something tragic happens on site or years later when the building is in use? Time will tell.
Finally, the repercussions of the Grenfell Tower Report were discussed at length. While the report heaps criticism on the architect, Building Control, K&C Council, the contractors and suppliers such as Kingspan, Arconic and Celotex – it’s also notable for not tackling the political and legislative failures which resulted in Grenfell Tower being designed and built the way it was.
For example, who allowed English tower blocks to be built with a single means of escape? In Scotland, all tower blocks have two separate means of escape. Architects and contractors can only follow the rulebook they’ve been given. Who allowed plastic foam insulation to be used in over-cladding tower blocks? Surely any insulation used in construction, especially on mid-rise and high-rise buildings, should be Class A1, in other words completely non-flammable? Shouldn’t plastic foam insulation be blacklisted, like RAAC and the structural use of woodwool slabs were?
Most of all, who allowed the public sector to procure construction work using Design & Build contracts? Most people I’ve spoken to feel that’s a fundamental problem, the root cause of dangerous buildings. The client asks for a safe building, the architect designs a safe building, but once he or she is novated to the contractor, cost rather than quality and safety becomes the driver. Whether or not an architect is “reasonably competent” or “suitably experienced” or whichever description the construction lawyers select – once they’re working for the contractor, architects can only argue so many times about quality and specification before they’re slapped down.
To make matters worse, in many cases the D&B contractor’s cost savings don’t benefit the client – due the way that the contracts work, unless there’s an explicit clawback mechanism which shares the value engineering savings between client and contractor, they go straight onto the contractor’s margin.
Government is in charge of legislating on Building Standards – so perhaps they should shoulder some blame for allowing English tower blocks to be built with a single means of escape. Government is in charge of legislating on building materials testing and classification across the UK – so they should shoulder some blame for plastic foam insulation being used. And most of all, government is in charge of public sector procurement – surely they must shoulder blame for allowing Design & Build contracts to be used on tower block refurbishments?
We may not work south of the border, and we might not be working on tower blocks (although I’ve done both at different stages of my career) but the shockwaves of Grenfell Tower are being felt across Scotland’s Building Standards system, too. For what it’s worth, I think we should be listening to the advocates of Fabric First, and rapidly upgrading as much of the existing building stock as we can, using much non-flammable insulation and improved airtightness. That way, the heating loads of buildings will shrink to the point where their CO2 emissions are less of an issue than they are now, and people’s energy bills will shrink, too.
As to fixing political meddling in the construction industry – good luck with that.
With today’s news that The Donald has become the 47th president of the US, I had a dig through the archives for something topical, then remembered that I wrote a piece for The Lighthouse website (scottisharchitecture.com) in December 2006. Interesting to see whether my writing has aged any better than America’s new, 80 year-old president. He was a mere 62 years old at that point, a previously-bankrupt property developer and a TV host with little promise of what was to come.
So Donald Trump hopes to build a golf course on the Menie estate at Balmedie, just north of Aberdeen. The boy from Sheepshead Bay, Brooklyn will face obstacles, and perhaps some will prove to be insurmountable. The scheme has already stalled once. Part of the area is a nature reserve, and Balmedie is close to the Ythan estuary which is an area of world importance for migratory birds. The Ythan also gets a world record amount of haar. It's on the wrong (north) side of Aberdeen – have you ever tried to get from the city centre, through the Brig o’ Don then up past Blackdog, during the rush hour? Trump’s director of golf, Ashley Cooper, calls Balmedie a “beachhead” in Europe.
"The £300 million project – his first golfing venture in a cool climate – will feature a five-star Victorian-style hotel," trumpeted an early press release. You can well imagine that a mock-Baronial clubhouse will take shape on the windswept coast, along with dreich fake-granite houses and wind-blasted trees, although Mr Trump’s aspirations may stretch to something grander. He already has a string of holding companies which own casinos, restaurants, a university, and of course other golf clubs. The Trump website boasts of Los Angeles, Bedminster, Westchester, West Palm Beach and Canouan Island – but Trump International Golf Links will be his first course outside continental America. By November 2006, the scheme’s development value had inflated to £1 billion.
Although Trump’s supporters may compare the two men, Trump isn't a latter-day Andrew Carnegie. He may not be welcomed to Scotland with open arms, like Carnegie was to Skibo. Despite his claim to Scots blood on his mother’s side, he isn’t a native Scot like Carnegie. Trump may have made money, but he’s far short of being the richest man in the world. It’s more likely that he will be regarded along the same lines as the Texas oilmen in Bill Forsyth’s film, “Local Hero”, of which film-maker Bill Forsyth said –
“I saw it along the lines of a Scottish Beverly Hillbillies – what would happen to a small community when it suddenly becomes very rich – that was the germ of the idea, and the story built itself from there. It seemed to contain a similar theme to Brigadoon, which also involved some Americans coming to Scotland, becoming part of a small community, being changed by the experience and affecting the place in their own way.”
Architecturally, the images released so far depict a 450-bedroom hotel and palatial clubhouse which are rather like a dilute Disney vision of Cape Cod, with timber verandahs, corner towers and festive bunting. Trump’s architects haven’t even taken the obvious cliché source, Scots Baronial, and built a rugged great castle from granite and slate. After all, Slains Castle is nearby, but seems that the architects haven’t yet been affected by the place. Rather than Cape Cod or Baronial, the site’s bleakness is actually more suited to low clusters of buildings with enwrapping courtyards, and shelter belts of pine trees – not a bluff, six-storey frontage facing out to the grey sea.
The more serious point is, do we really need yet another golf course? Didn't the National Golf Centre at Drumoig (outside St Andrews) go bust just a year or two ago? Drumoig was a financial disaster for its developers, Torith. It was intended as the directors' "pension plan", but during its last year, it reportedly haemorrhaged money. Of course someone stepped in and took it over when they ran out of cash – after all, land is still an asset with a value. But that isn't the same as it being a roaring success. Isn’t the future of the Carnoustie Golf Hotel, brainchild of developer Michael Johnston, also currently in jeopardy? The Royal and Ancient is one thing, perhaps, but establishing a new course where once there was nothing?
I'll always remember watching a Concorde fly in to RAF Leuchars during the Open Championship in St Andrews a few years ago. An hour later, it set off on its take-off run and after a pause at the holding point, the captain opened up the four Olympus turbojets to full reheat. You saw the irises at the ends of the jet pipes dilating, the engines spooled up, and the sound of 144,000 horsepower was indescribable. Concorde accelerated like a rocket. The point of this excursus is that the aircraft was the draw for me, not its self-loading cargo of middle-aged "sportsmen" in ill-coordinated knitwear. Golfers and football casuals are the only people to wear Pringle diamond sweaters with Burberry checked scarves. What does that say about their fashion sense?
More importantly, what does the golfers’ ability to charter the fastest aircraft in the world say about the nature of golf? It’s just a money racket. That is its attraction for Trump, because the golf course is intended as an enabling development for housing. It’s also worth noting that the power of inward investment can indirectly enable Planning approvals to be bought, in the interests of injecting cash into the local economy. So much for democracy, and due process. I won't build here unless you let me do what I will: that's Trump's threat, and that seems tantamount to bribery.
Mr Trump should also remember that just up the coast from Balmedie there was a Victorian golf resort at Cruden Bay, built by the GNSR railway company as a holiday resort – but it disappeared, hotel gone, tramway taken up. As the Trump website says, “Up to the Second World War, Cruden Bay was a favoured holiday destination of the wealthy from the south, journeying up by train to a luxury hotel near the course which has since been demolished.” Looking through the archives, the same claims made by Cruden Bay’s backers are repeated by the Trump Organisation – Magnificent Views, Splendidly Equipped, World Class Facilities and so on.
Beyond that, there is also the worry about Scotland’s coastline becoming a monoculture. Golf courses, even those built on coastal links, are an un-natural land use. They’re man-made. The ecology of sand dunes is shifting, and dunes wander inland, choking grass and killing it. That won’t be popular with the green-keepers. Just like industrial farming, golf curtails diversity by controlling which species are allowed to grow, and controlling access to the land itself.
At the moment, Trump’s plans are in for planning permission, and everything seems to be going fine – just like the protagonists of Local Hero, until they discover that the rights to the beach belong to an old beachcomber (played by Fulton Mackay, the prisoner governor in “Porridge”), who is determined not to sell them. His tumbledown beach hut becomes the stumbling block which causes the Americans to think again. Perhaps those who don’t understand the mistakes of history are condemned to repeat them.
2024 footnote:
I was wrong: Trump doesn’t appear to have been changed at all by the experience of developing Menie. Instead he pressed on in typical Trumpist fashion, devoting a lot of hype and hot air to the project, then turned away to his political ambitions when the hard work had barely begun. Menie is only half-developed – although considering what Trump might have done there, perhaps that’s a good thing.
A few months ago, I spotted the earthly remains of an Artemide uplighter listed for sale on an online auction site. I enjoy tinkering and assembling things from bits – on a smaller scale but in the same way that folk with acres of land buy old bulldozers, saving them from the scrapheap and then restoring them to running order.
I already had the components of roughly one-and-a-half uplighters, including three glass shades which were different colours. In theory, this was an opportunity to put together two complete lamps, because the listing noted that the vendor had bought a new glass shade from Artemide but never got around to fitting it to the lamp. The new one matched one of the three I already owned, and parts of another uplighter were chucked in for good measure.
Ebay and other online auction sites such as Vinterior and Etsy are a good source of second-hand furniture and fittings – but the latter two are awash with dealers, plus amateurs with greedily optimistic expectations of what things are worth. Ebay has some of those, too, but there are also lots of folk simply trying to clear out their loft or garage. Their prices are much more realistic, but Caveat Emptor still applies.
After some haggling, I bought the lamps and arranged to collect them a few days later. The address was a large house in the leafy western suburbs of Edinburgh, and a cheerful chap in jumbo cords and cardigan met me at the door with a box of lamp components. He apologised that some were a wee bit rusty, after having lain abandoned in the garage for a few years.
It wasn’t difficult to read between the lines. The glass shade had broken and he’d decided to buy a replacement, without checking first how to fit it. Perhaps it came with instructions, but those had been lost along the way. Perhaps husband or wife were practical folk who are good with their hands – but on the evidence I saw, that seems unlikely.
Maybe they’re just clumsy, a throwback to our pre-historic Neanderthal ancestors who lacked the ability to use tools. We all know folk who trip over their feet and slice their fingertips while chopping onions. An alternative is that they’re giant-brained people who have evolved beyond Homo Faber, and have since lost the ability to use tools. Perhaps you can blame genes, upbringing, or the class system for the fact that some professional people don’t value practical skills, and worse still, they transmit this disinterest to their children.
So the folks in Cramond may have evolved to become more interested in reading highbrow novels about a shape-shifting petty criminal in Georgian London, or attending chamber music recitals in the Queens Hall, or become pre-occupied with the configurator on Range Rover’s website, trying to decide which combination of colour, trim and accessories they’d prefer when the time comes to replace their spaniel-scented Volvo estate. Regardless, it seems they have no manual dexterity when it comes to domestic repairs.
Once I got home, I unpacked the lamps from the box and disgorged a Sainsburys-bag-for-life, which was full of seemingly random grub screws, washers and nuts. I scrutinised the partly-dismantled uplighter body to see what needed fixing. Someone had already loosened the nuts which located the terminals for the linear halogen lamp, and in order to free the little casting the terminals were mounted on, they’d also loosened the large nut which holds the shade by clamping together a sandwich of glass, silicon gaskets and aluminium.
But then they’d evidently got stuck. The wires which feed the terminals have crimped connectors on the end which didn’t quite fit through the central hole. So they’d just chopped the connectors off! Fortunately, I already had a complete shade: using a pair of Lindström needle-nosed pliers, I gently compressed the metal tangs which held the crimps within the connector, then released the wires and guided them through the hole. I was able to swap the wiring and connectors between the uplighter bodies. Using the right tool, the job took five minutes.
Fixing the uplighter gave me a moment of intense satisfaction, as I’d probably saved it from the skip.
A few weeks later, a spring on the loft ladder gave up with a loud bang. I’d been running up and downstairs with rolls of Knauf Loft Roll 44, as I try to bring the house up to current day insulation standards. So far, I’ve laid 350mm of glasswool quilt behind the uprights of the roof structure where it tapers out to the eaves, and 150mm in the depth of the first floor joists along the centre. I had to lift about 60 square metres of chipboard deck before I could insulate that central part of the floor, though.
The loft ladder was made about 50 years ago by Ramsay Ladders in Forfar. In Scotland, the Ramsay Ladder has become synonymous with loft ladder: it’s a metonym, in the same way that “Hoover” and “vacuum cleaner” were once interchangeable. I drove up to Forfar and bought a pair of new springs, and the helpful maintenance chap at Ramsay Ladders explained how to fit them: I needed to loosen some fixings whilst keeping my knee on the end of the radius arm, otherwise the one with the good spring would rebound and break my wrist.
He asked if I’d replaced springs on a ladder before, then narrowed his eyes when I explained that I was an architect. I thought I’d reassured him that I knew how things went together; but his experience was that architects know more in theory than they do in practice. He shared his thesis that architects should spend a few months working on site during their training. They should spend time working with an electrician, then a joiner, then a bricklayer, and so on.
It’s a fair point. If you know how a building fits together in practice, it’s bound to improve how you design and detail. But that’s partly why the Year Out exists, so that students get some practical experience and also a feel for what the reality of building things is like. The flip side of that is that the Year Out can ruthlessly expose student architects who have no practical aptitude, and little interest in actually building things. At this point, they may realise that an academic career might be more suitable – and there’s no shame in that.
Thankfully, just like the little needle-nosed pliers in my tool box, I also have a set of Whitworth combination spanners, so replacing the Ramsay Ladder springs was straightforward. For a second time, I was pleased with myself – until I dropped the big plastic drawer which holds frozen loaves in the bottom of the freezer. The polycarbonate panel smashed, so I ended up having to buy a new one. That’ll teach me to be judgmental about other folks’ lack of dexterity, because it proves that I’m a ham-fisted blockhead, too.
Neither does it bode well for my next task, which is to insulate the solum. But since the house was constructed with a gas-fired warm air heating system and underfloor ducts, I’ve got some hard labour ahead, because I've discovered that the ductwork is still in place in the solum crawlspace. You can imagine how much fun it will be to cut up the ductwork using a hacksaw, while lying on your side on a bed of bitumen and furnace ashes…
I really wanted to like it. I wanted to take it to heart. After all, it was hosted this year in a former factory which I visited on a school trip around 1990, whilst it was still operating as a tyre factory. But 2024’s Dundee Design Festival reinforces the impression I took from its previous iterations that “design” is a clique controlled by a handful of gatekeepers.
Dundee Design Festival suffers from many of the same issues that the V&A Tartan exhibition did, and which magazines like The Skinny buy into, too. Their view is that “design” is primarily the production of craft objects by recent graduates from the Scottish art schools. “Designers” are a self-selecting group who work individually, or in tiny collectives, producing quirky one-offs. Somehow, airliners, cans of beans, cars, computer software, vacuum cleaners, mobile phones and buildings aren’t “designed” in a way those gatekeepers can acknowledge.
There’s no interactive software or UX design, no architecture, no computer games, no sound design, no vehicles, and nothing mass-produced or popular at the Dundee Design Festival. Some of what’s on show here is bad art rather than design, and there’s a powerful emphasis on the identity and individuality of the designer, rather than the needs of end users. That’s the wrong way round. I counted several dozen mentions of “self expression” – but only one or two about ergonomics or functionality or user needs.
Dundee Design Festival in 2024 is a glaring lost opportunity. Within a few miles of here, you could have visited several computer games companies such as Tag Games or Rockstar North. NCR employ 500 people in Dundee, many of whom are working on interface design for sophisticated electronics. Rautomead design high-tech continuous metal casting machines. Wemyss Textiles and Strathmore Woollens design textiles. OSD-IMT are naval architects who design ships. Design is integral to them all, as it was to Michelin, which once designed and manufactured car tyres in Dundee.
What’s on show at the DDF isn't inclusive, either. I didn’t see any design for people with physical disabilities, hearing or sight impairments. Similarly, given the prevalence of autism, dementia and other conditions, it would have been great to see how designers carried out research then worked with people who live with those conditions to improve their lives. That would have helped to demonstrate how design is crucial, how it can change lives for the better, and how it plays an integral part in creating a more equal and fairer society. Inclusivity is something architects and interior designers deal with every day.
Ironically, the Dundee Design Festival isn’t good on Dundee, either. Other than an A5 flyer, the festival doesn't acknowledge the history of its venue, the former Michelin plant at Baldovie which employed 1000 people until the start of the 2020’s. While local textile firms Halley Stevensons and Scott & Fyfe are mentioned in passing, we don’t discover anything about their design process, nor their products or production methods. Did you know that Halley Stevensons make all the waxed cotton for Barbour jackets? I knew that already, but there was nothing more to learn about it here. Nor was there anything about Dundee’s long history of furniture design and manufacturing, which included Thomas Justice, Francis East & Co., and East Brothers. The tradition continues today with firms such as JTC, Dovetail Industries and LamArt.
At the entrance to the festival, there was a display of “cassies” made from stone supplied by Denfind Stone at Monikie – but cassie setts were made from Aberdeenshire granite or Cunmont whinstone – so if outsiders are going to try to speak the Dundee vernacular, please ask a local to translate for you. Not me, because I'm no expert, but I do know that the so-called cassies here are actually the much larger “plennies” or slabs hewn from the Carmyllie flagstone beds which Denfind Stone has begun quarrying again. They join a rich vocabulary of Scots and Dundonian terms including the "pavey" or pavement, immortalised by Michael Marra's song, The Word on the Pavey. Then you have "cassies" or causeway paviors, "cundies" or road drains which derive from "conduit", "plennies" or stone paving slabs planed by the world's first stone planing machines which were invented at Carmyllie, and "pletties" or tenement landing slabs which derive from "platforms". Another missed opportunity to connect with local folk, by speaking their language.
A more universal issue is that the Dundee Design Festival concentrates on designer-makers, but largely ignores small, medium and large commercial companies based in Scotland which employ hundreds of design graduates from Scottish universities each year. I don’t understand why they’ve been ignored. Is this an expression of anti-capitalism, given the references to Marxist-feminist design in some for the exhibits? Is it a reaction against consumerism, against the mass-produced things that we all buy and use, because we can’t afford to fill our house with hand-crafted one-offs, even if we wanted to? Or this simply another example of the Scottish Cultural Cringe?
Rather than leaving on a total downer, I tried to be positive: Morton Young and Borland’s cascading lace sheers at the very back of the second hall were a subtly understated play on light. Ploterre (Rebecca Kaye) displayed an intriguing data-driven screenprint. Among the exhibits from other UNESCO Design Cities such as Osaka were genuinely good pieces of design, while Muirhead Leather's airliner seats were beautifully finished, and it was fascinating to discover the record-pressing plant which Jack White (of The White Stripes) has built in Detroit.
So it troubles me to write a negative review, because this festival should have been something positive for Scottish designers and architects. It should have been about the renaissance of manufacturing in Dundee, given the many millions of pounds spent trying to regenerate the Michelin site. It should have made an effort to connect with the place it's in. Instead, the Dundee Design Festival is not about design in Dundee. It has a completely different agenda which ignores most of what Dundee, and Scotland, designs and makes.
I wonder whether anyone will stand up to challenge the approach which the V&A Dundee and Dundee Design Festival have decided to take? They may be in Dundee, but they’re certainly not of Dundee.
The architectural manifesto falls out of fashion from time to time, and one of those times is now. At the moment, everything seems more important than developing architectural ideas using an architectural language. It may come back into fashion once folk tire of campaigning about things they don’t like, arguing on social media about small differences – or when architects have the intellectual courage to break their thrall to social philosophy.
The architectural manifesto has a long pedigree and its time will come around again. The prototype for everything that followed was Vitruvius’s De Architectura, published as Ten Books on Architecture. De Architectura is the source of the idiom “firmitas, utilitas, venustas” which we were told translates as firmness, commodity and delight; however, the phrase apparently derives from an 18th century mis-translation of the Latin for beauty (venustas) as delight. My schoolboy Latin wasn’t good enough to pick that up.
Vitruvius was followed by a seven-volume treatise by the Italian Renaissance theorist Sebastiano Serlio, Seven Books of Architecture, which cover everything from housing to the classical orders – followed by an excellently named bonus volume, “The Extraordinary Book of Doors”! On its heels came Serlio’s The Five Books of Architecture, first published in an English Edition of 1611. You can see that there are diminishing returns in multi-volume manifestos, as we’ve gone from ten to seven to five, and no doubt a good editor would press for them to be boiled down further into a single book.
The Victorian Style Wars were rife with manifestos, and William Morris is one of the guiltiest parties, writing The Ideal Book (1883), The Manifesto of The Socialist League (1885), The Arts and Crafts of Today (1889) and with Philip Webb, The Society for the Protection of Ancient Buildings Manifesto (1877). Similarly, the early days of the Modern Movement were a fertile time for manifesto writers, including Adolf Loos, Le Corbusier, and Mies van der Rohe, who first came to notice for their manifestos published in newspapers, journals, and little magazines – years before they built anything.
Ornament and Crime is Adolf Loos’s best-known manifesto, written in 1908 and intended to shock the Establishment into rejecting decorative patterns and ornaments. His aesthetic purism was a reaction to Art Nouveau and the Deutsche Werkbund, which he viewed as anathema in the struggle to develop a new style fit for the 20th century. Loos was a zealot, and that’s borne out by the closing paragraph of Ornament and Crime, “Freedom from ornament is a sign of spiritual strength.” From that you can deduce that he believed ornamentation is a sign of degeneracy.
When it was completed in 1904, Charles Rennie Mackintosh handed over the Hill House in Helensburgh to his client Walter Blackie with the words: “Here is the house. It is not an Italian Villa, an English Mansion House, a Swiss Chalet, or a Scotch Castle. It is a Dwelling house.” In a way, that articulates the six page manifesto of Adolf Loos in a couple of lines.
Le Corbusier's Vers une Architecture of 1923 had a lasting effect on the profession, after it had been translated into English in 1927 as Towards a New Architecture. It became the New Testament for a generation of architects, and a focus for the hatred for others. As the dustwrap’s blurb says: “Le Corbusier brought great passion and intelligence to these essays, which present his ideas in a concise, pithy style studded with epigrammatic, often provocative, observations.”
Walter Gropius's Scope of Total Architecture was published in 1956, and it covers the nature and archaeology of architecture, its historical context, and its role in the industrial society of the time during which the book was written. “Since my early youth I have been acutely aware of the chaotic ugliness of our modem man-made environment when compared to the unity and beauty of old, preindustrial towns. In the course of my life I became more and more convinced that the usual practice of architects to relieve the dominating disjointed pattern here and there by a beautiful building is most inadequate and that we must find, instead, a new set of values….”
As the 1950’s progressed, architectural history gradually shifted from objective writing which analysed the form of buildings and cities – to studying the social context of architectural production, which relates more to culture, philosophy and the history of ideas. One example was Steen Eiler Rasmussen's 1959 book Experiencing Architecture, which was more concise and poetic than what came before, and took more heed of the findings of phenomenology, a field which was in its infancy when Rasmussen was writing.
Whether Rasmussen is to blame for architectural ideas being infiltrated by social philosophy, or whether he just recognised which was the tide was flowing, writing about the history of architectural ideas can sometime become like the academic game called Humiliation in David Lodge’s novel Changing Places in which you score points if you haven’t read a canonical text. The more famous the book you haven’t read, such as Moby Dick or Hamlet, the higher the score.
All the famous architectural manifestos win high scores, and one or two count as a bullseye. For example, Ricardo Bofill wrote an rhetorical manifesto in the early 1970’s:
Architecture no longer exists.
Only impersonal cities, without description and without style which nobody has ever dreamed of, or desired.
Against these clear and facile modern towns, we launch monuments which single out space, destroying it and investing it.
Plan the Revolt
Against the thousands of identically repeated, stupid, lined-up houses.
Against the rational and schematic ordination of territory.
Against the importation of prefabricated, Nordic cities.
Against architecture…
Architecture no longer exists? Although Bofill had built some grandiose post-Modern housing schemes based on giant Classical orders by that point, as Geoffrey Broadbent noted in the Architectural Review of November 1973, manifestos of this sort usually come from people who have thought a lot about what is going wrong with architecture, but have not built anything much themselves to reverse the process.
My favourite manifesto was written by Dieter Rams, the architecturally-trained designer of Braun gadgets and Vitsoe shelving:
1. Good design is innovative
2. Good design makes a product useful
3. Good design is aesthetic
4. Good design makes a product understandable
5. Good design is unobtrusive
6. Good design is honest
7. Good design is long-lasting
8. Good design is thorough down to the last detail
9. Good design is environmentally-friendly
10. Good design is as little design as possible.
Rams’s sign-off line, “Back to purity, back to simplicity” is immeasurably better, more rigorous and principled than the anti-boring manifesto contained in Thomas Heatherwick’s banal book, “The Seven Characteristics of a Boring Building”. Boring, like nice or pretty, is a non-word with no place in a manifesto – but Heatherwick didn’t train as an architect, and his practice has long been a masquerade since he can’t call himself one.
Today, contemporary architects express their personal philosophy using small, well-crafted books which are well regarded within the profession, but ignored by those outside it. That’s mainly because they’re written by architects for other architects, and published by small presses which typically carry out little promotion beyond the circle of people at the architecture school where the authors teach.
Some fairly recent manifestos (along with their reception) include Architecture, Craft and Culture by John Tuomey. “All in all a great little book jammed with culture, life, and on-the-job experiences,” said the reviewer on Amazon. Published by Gandon Editions, a terrific but low-key Irish publisher with a good architecture and design list. But no website, only a homepage which is perennially under construction.
Peter Zumthor is seen as the architect’s architect, and his manifesto Thinking Architecture is now on its third edition. But not everyone enjoyed it. Another reviewer on Amazon found it was, “A rambling, totally unsatisfying jumble of thoughts with no obvious outcome.” Och, surely no! Perhaps in his efforts to maintain his persona, Thinking Architecture is 65 pages thin, and full of epigrams such as, “The sense that I try to instil into materials is beyond all rules of composition and their tangibility, smell and acoustic qualities are merely elements of the language that we are obliged to use.”
Similarly, John Pawson is the minimalist’s minimalist. Published 25 years ago, “Minimum is an extended visual essay exploring the idea of simplicity in architecture, art and design across a variety of historical and cultural contexts.” I won’t quote the Amazon reviewers again, because Mr Bezos is rich enough already and doesn’t need my encouragement to make any more money.
Yet these architectural architecture books are still a rarity. Many writers who consider themselves serious and intellectual feel the need to bolster their architectural arguments by leaning on the writing of Continental philosophers. During the 1980’s and 90’s, the favourites were the philosopher Gilles Deleuze and the psychoanalyst and activist Félix Guattari, who together framed some of the key concepts behind Post-Modernism. Masters dissertations of a certain era are littered with references to Deleuze & Guattari, with the occasional reference to Lacan.
Today, the political theorist Hannah Arendt is in fashion. She was interned by the Vichy regime in France during the early stages of WW2, and later coined the phrase “the banality of evil” following the war crimes trial of Adolf Eichmann. While her political writings about totalitarianism strike a chord today considering what’s happening in Ukraine and Palestine, they speak about the human condition rather than about architecture. It goes without saying that people – whether architects or not – should reject authoritarianism and totalitarianism if they see it, and shouldn’t work for brutal regimes, plutocrats or dictators.
A smart diploma student could do worse than draw up a proposal for encouraging the production of new architectural manifestos; a meta-manifesto, if you like. Hopefully this piece is a good starting point; you can measure your success by counting how many tutors have their bluff called if you write a serious study on the history of architectural ideas, rather than a work of pseudo-philosophy.
Of course, depending on your professor, that may prove to be academic suicide – but perhaps better to die a martyr than to drink the Kool-Aid…
The comedian Ben Elton was interviewed recently on Radio 4, and pointed out that when Morecambe & Wise appeared on TV at Christmas during the late 1970’s, they got an audience of 28 million people. Although I barely remember the late 70’s, I know there were only three television channels, and Elton’s point was that everyone sat down to watch the same programme at the same time, making the Morecambe & Wise Christmas Show into a unifying experience.
That doesn’t happen any more: broadcast media has atomised, there are hundreds of cable and satellite channels, plus online gaming, and the panoply of the internet to choose from. But one advantage of atomisation is the ability to find niche content. For the past while, I’ve been researching an American corporation which a distant relative founded a century-and-a-half ago. Postings on forums, personal websites and clips on YouTube have been priceless; in the late 1970’s, finding that content would have been impossible.
For example, without an enthusiast shooting a video on his iPhone, I would never have seen a mechanic working in a lumber yard somewhere in Oregon or Washington State on the west coast of the US. The Allis-Chalmers HD-21 bulldozer had sat idle, he speculated, for 15 or 20 years. He clambered onto its orange hulk, with saplings growing up through the tracks and idlers, and started tinkering.
A brand new HD-21 outside Allis-Chalmers’s earthmover factory in Springfield, Illinois.
In the 1960’s, the HD-21 was the world’s most powerful bulldozer. It’s 100% Allis-Chalmers, unlike earlier machines which were fitted with Waukesha or General Motors engines. The AC 21000 turbo-diesel fitted to the HD-21 had a reputation for being being easy to start, but what followed seemed miraculous.
The mechanic had fitted new 24V batteries beforehand, then barred the engine over by hand to make sure it wasn't seized. He cranked the starter for 30 seconds or so, with the fuel cut-off pulled out, in order to get oil flowing through the engine’s galleries again. He then took a break to let the batteries recover, pushed the excess fuel plunger in and pressed the starter button again.
If you listen intently you can hear the whirring of the pinion on the starter ring of the flywheel as the 21000 cranked a few times, and this time the mechanic sprayed Aerostart into the intake. There was a wisp of ether and unburnt fuel from the exhaust, then it caught on two or three cylinders, coughing and spluttering into life. The HD-21 took a couple of seconds to clear its throat, and that was followed by a fusillade of noise as it fired on all six.
The re-awakened 21000 kicked an enormous cloud of black smoke into the air from its stack, followed by all the years’ worth of dirt and crud that had scaled off inside the exhaust manifolds. By now the mechanic was no longer conscious of his mate with the iPhone; he was focussed on the oil pressure and temperature gauges, watching the needles creep round towards the green arc as the machine warmed up for the first time in a couple of decades. As the bulldozer's engine settled into a steady rumbling idle, I reflected that it was like Lazarus: a 30 ton bulldozer raised from the dead.
Although Ben Elton saw TV comedies like Morecambe & Wise as a way to unite people, the message of that YouTube video is that accomplishing something tangible is powerful. It’s already had several hundred thousands views on YouTube, which demonstrates how closely folk in the US Midwest still identify with Allis-Chalmers, and incidentally they snap up its merchandise too. Rather like Taylor Swift fans, they have literally been there and bought the t-shirt – plus the baseball cap, the coffee mug, and the bumper sticker too.
If it’s true that society, just like broadcast media, is becoming atomised then it’s more important than ever to ask the question, “What is it like to be you?” The video helps to answer that. For architects, it’s especially important to gain an insight into other peoples’ lives, since we can’t expect to design anything if we don’t understand how it will be used, and discover something about the folk who’ll use it. The bulldozer resurrection video is a rare example of social media with redeeming features, in an era when platforms are controlled by unhinged billionaires such as Leon Skum, who recently took over Twitter.
A few weeks ago, I went along to a Pre-Application Consultation. It was fascinating to be on the receiving end for once, rather than the delivery end. This PAC dealt with the forthcoming National Application for a piece of infrastructure called the Emmock 400kV substation, which is planned to become a key part of the National Grid in eastern Scotland.
Having recently written about the 80th anniversary of the North of Scotland Hydro-Electricity Board in Urban Realm, then about the final days of the coal-fired West Burton A power station for another magazine, it was interesting to see how the electricity industry handles new developments.
Emmock lies just north of Dundee, and will form a node where lines from Kintore, Westfield, Seagreen and Alyth converge beside a 1950’s substation which was built on a World War 2 airfield, which lies in the valley between the Emmock ridge and the Sidlaw Hills. The old substation handles 275,000 volt power lines, but the new one will carry 400,000 volts, and it’s crucial to add capacity to the Grid for new windfarms and hydro power stations.
The consultation was held in the village hall at Inveraldie, which was originally the recreation hall for RAF Tealing. Inveraldie is a deceptive place. From the Dundee–Aberdeen dual carriageway it looks like a handful of cottages, but come off the road and you find a giant three-storey deck access block which stretches away along the edge of a turnip field, looking like something from East Germany during the Cold War era.
The consultation had begun before I arrived, and the car park was already full of muddy 4x4 pickups and Land Rovers, along with hatchbacks and SUV’s. Other than the occasional Forfar bus, there’s no public transport to Inveraldie. Inside, the hall was packed, with around a dozen SSE staff and perhaps 30 locals milling around, plus a photographer from The Courier. That proved something was going on – as did the lone protestor waiting outside.
Powerlines seem to attract controversy and argument. Years ago, I came across an angry man who lived at the northern end of the Beauly–Denny powerline. He was vehemently opposed to its upgrading. It was difficult to have a rational conversation with him about powerlines, but I gathered that he’d come to the Beauly area about 20 years earlier, then taken on the mantle of an environmental champion who would (perversely) try to block renewable energy projects.
The thing is, hydro power came to Beauly 40 years before he did, and that begs an obvious question. Should you give consideration to other people? Should there be a balance between your personal interests, and what affects Scotland as a whole? As I mentioned recently, too often policies seem to be influenced by those with the loudest voices amplified by social media megaphones: vested interests, extremists, pressure groups, lobbyists, activists and campaigners. Mr Beauly seemed to be the very definition of a NIMBY, or perhaps Pull Up The Ladder Jack, I’m Alright.
That’s one reason why the HS2 railway line will stop at Birmingham, rather than reaching Manchester and Leeds, then eventually the Border. NIMBY’s in Tory constituencies forced the railway line into miles of tunnel through the Chilterns – adding billions to its cost. You could say that’s democracy in action, the power of the little man and woman: or you could consider it your civic duty to consider society as a whole, rather than always placing your own interests and prejudices first.
What will achieve the best outcome for as many people as possible? That philosophy is known as Utilitarianism, a philosophy coined by Jeremy Bentham in what he called "the greatest happiness principle" or "the principle of utility", a term he pinched from David Hume. At its crux is the notion that we should do that which produces the greatest good for the greatest number of people. Enabling more renewable energy to be generated and transmitted seems to fall into that category.
Bentham had a wider influence over British politics: the Reform Act of 1832 and the secret ballot both reflected his concerns and his influence spread to some unexpected places. George Kinloch, the Reform candidate for the Dundee constituency, marked his friendship with Bentham in a unique way. In the village of Ardler, at the very heart of Strathmore, is Bentham Street, one of the shortest streets in Scotland, which was Kinloch’s tribute to his friend - see photo above. (Incidentally, the Reform Party of 1832 has nothing to do with Nigel Farage’s latest political vehicle).
When I come across people trying to stop renewable power projects, and hear about protestors trying to disrupt traffic on motorways, I’m increasingly on the Utilitarian side. Achieving the best outcome for a majority of people was one of the things which Socialism once represented for the Labour party, and “One Nation Conservatism” alike for the Tories. Both seem to have been lost in recent times.
Meantime, back at Inveraldie, SSE were helpful, the protestor wasn’t disruptive, and all going to plan the Emmock 400kV substation will be energised in 2029. A few years after that, the infrastructure will start to disappear into the landscape, just like the compressor stations along the Forties Pipeline have done. Forty years after they were built, they lie almost unnoticed on country roads between Peterhead and Grangemouth.
Perhaps some things should be above politics: after all, its been said that there is no left wing or right wing way to empty a dustbin. The bin needs to be emptied by the binmen, regardless of which party controls the council. Powerlines are no different.
Things change, places are re-shaped, old certainties are defeated. As a graduate, the only glass manufacturer I dealt with was Pilkingtons: the Lancashire firm which invented the float glass process. Pilks provided us with pocket-sized handbooks which were indispensable in the days of dial-up internet. They’d swallowed up their last British rival, Chance Glass of Birmingham, several decades earlier, and even in the 90’s and early 00’s, architects still specified British products: Pilkingtons for glass, Corus for steel and BPB for plasterboard.
No longer. A few months ago when I was specifying a curtain walling system, I asked the technical rep for a spec to suit what are relatively large units on the southerly and east-facing elevations. We had to consider the solar transmission coefficient for overheating, the strength of toughened & laminated glass for barrier loadings, as well as the usual R-values. When the proposed IGU spec came back, with Saint Gobain inner and outer panes, I raised a metaphorical eyebrow. He explained that Pilkingtons were no longer the dominant force they once were.
That came as a surprise, and I became curious about what had happened to Pilkingtons. After their takeover by a Japanese firm, NSG Group, the rep felt that Pilks' profile had diminished. And perhaps their French competitor used more aggressive marketing…
On a recent trip down south I spent a couple of days in Rossendale, looking at a combination of good and poor adaptive re-use projects, which had taken redundant cotton mills in the Colne and Irwell valleys and converted them into flats. The best example is Ilex Mill in Rawtenstall, which still towers over the little town just as the Lancashire cotton magnate who built it intended. After I’d finished with the mills, I headed across Lancashire to St Helens, a town dominated by glass manufacturing, just as many towns in East Lancashire were dominated by cotton.
The smoking chimneys and distant roar of furnaces in central St Helens tell you that Pilks are still very much in the glassmaking business, but their former head office complex in Alexandra Park closed a few years ago. The buildings are in limbo, with new owners who have carried out a soft strip and asbestos remediation, then inexplicably stopped. The building I was particularly interested in was the Pilkington works canteen, which is a relative rarity in Britain: a building by Fry & Drew that you can visit (after a fashion).
Maxwell Fry and Jane Drew were in the vanguard of British Modernism. Fry was a local boy, born in Cheshire to a Canadian chemical manufacturer who ran the Liverpool Borax Company. He studied at Liverpool School of Architecture under Charles Reilly, when Liverpool was seen as the best school in Britain. Fry began professional life as a reluctant neo-Classicist who converted to Modernism in the 1930’s, and got heavily involved with the MARS and CIAM groups. He built some of the earliest Modernist buildings in Britain.
Meanwhile, just like Fry, Jane Drew's career combined the roles of architect, town planner, author and academic. She trained at the AA in London, and rumour has it that she was recruited as an MI6 operative during the War. Drew later curated exhibitions, taught at MIT and Harvard, and did a good deal of interior design work. Perversely, she’s now better known for the prize named after her, than for her buildings.
Reading the profile which Alan Powers wrote a few years ago, Fry and Drew were well-off bohemians with utopian socialist leanings. In the late 1930’s, Fry designed the Kensal House flats in Ladbroke Grove, London, then the Impington College campus – both with Walter Gropius, before the latter headed off to the US. After Fry met Drew, the two married then went into practice together, designing the Tanys Dell and Chantry housing estates in Harlow New Town, then working on several projects in the tropics during the 1950's including housing in Ghana and Chandigarh in Northern India where they worked as associates of Le Corbusier.
The idealism of their early social housing schemes was gradually set aside when they returned to the UK and designed a series of corporate offices. The Pilkington HQ in St Helens is probably Fry & Drew’s most important work in Britain, and it was completed in the mid-1960’s, quite late in their architectural careers. The Alexandra Park complex sits close to Pilkington’s Watson Street and Greengate glass factories, and consists of a landmark office tower, a slab block under it, an ornamental lake, and a canteen building.
The canteen is a long, low flat-roofed block which appears to float over the water and acts as a vista stop to the lake. The lower, entrance floor is brought down almost to eye level of the ducks and geese on the lake. It’s a single aspect building, with a glazed facade to the south, towards the office tower, and a blank face to the north. The floorplate has been punched through with a series of lightwells which illuminate and bring greenery into the depth of the plan.
Despite Fry & Drew’s socialist beliefs and the Pilkington brothers’ credo as a paternalistic employer, the building was planned hierarchically with a 620 seat capacity canteen for office staff on the upper floor, a 500 capacity canteen for glassworkers on the lower floor – and separate dining rooms for managers, visitors and senior staff. Even in the 1960’s, Britain’s most enlightened companies were still trapped in a class system which emphasised an employee’s place in the pecking order. Researching another company for a recent article, I discovered their canteen was also split into four: separate rooms for directors, managers, white collar and blue collar staff. At that point, I realised that the famous "Class" sketch from a 1966 episode of the Frost Report (with John Cleese looking down on Ronnie Barker, who looked down in turn on Ronnie Corbett) was social realism rather than satire.
Ironically for a glass manufacturer, most of the canteen’s windows have been smashed, and many of the glazed ceramic tiles, too. As well as a glassmaker, until a few years ago Pilks were also a tile manufacturer, with a giant tilery at Swinton on the outskirts of Manchester. The canteen had once been a product showcase for the company, but the combination of remediation and vandalism makes it tricky to see the original design intent. The large format glazed tiles on the serveries have gone, but the structural columns are still lined with marble-effect tesserae.
Although the ceiling soffits were originally lined with slatted hardwood, in their stripped condition the coffers of the concrete waffle slab make the spaces incredibly photogenic as each soffit picks up reflected light from the lake in front of the building. Arguably, the building in its present condition, with timber flooring and soffits removed, is far closer to the Brutalism which is currently undergoing a fashionable revival, than the more polished Modernism which Fry and Drew practised. In fact, we're in danger of overlooking the work of architects like Fry & Drew, along with Basil Spence and Robert Matthew, simply because they used hardwood and stone cladding rather than visual concrete everywhere.
The complex is listed Grade II and miraculously, the Victor Pasmore mural is still there, although slightly vandalised – see second last photo. As I stood there, I reflected on how Pasmore might have received his commission. Fry and Drew mixed socially with Henry Moore, Alvar Aalto, Barbara Hepworth, Ove Arup, Herbert Read, Hugh Casson and Eduardo Paolozzi. Pasmore was part of the same milieu; in other words, you can’t help but feel that he got work through the old-boys-and-old-girls network. Again, the artists and architects may have had a Modernist ethos, but theirs was still an old-fashioned society where the strictures of class ruled, and true meritocracy was rare.
Visiting the canteen was a curious experience: I arrived early in the morning and discovered a strong smell of smoke hanging in the air. Someone had burnt a hole through part of the hoarding, but all was quiet, so I wandered inside. After an hour or so, a wee guy in a blue nylon cagoule turned up, gabbling away in a strong dialect. Once he figured out that I wasn’t from the local newspaper, and wasn't a security guard, he disappeared downstairs to rummage through the rubbish.
I shot a set of photos using a digital camera, then switched to medium format and fed some film into my Mamiya 645. Later on, I watched from a first floor window as a battered Fiat Punto reversed at speed up to the hole in the hoarding. The wee guy jumped in and they drove off towards Prescot Road with a series of crashed gearchanges. I’m not sure what he’d discovered amongst the debris at Pilkington’s canteen, but he clearly felt it was precious.
