“Except for a period in the 1980’s when I got sick of the whole business and went to America, riding trains like a Dustbowl hobo, I have been for the last few years an architect in the city.”
Just who is Mr Wolf? Is he an allegory? No: he is, in fact, quite real. I often see his bushy tail disappearing around a corner, a couple of streets ahead of me. Mr Wolf is always ahead.
His grandfather, J. Carruthers Wolf, Esq. got his start in business after the War and quickly found that many companies had a need for his cleverly-designed machinery. Business flourished, and his firm supplied Scotland’s shipyards and factories with equipment. He wasn’t a great believer in advertising, but enjoyed a network of personal recommendation built up as a result of fair dealing and a job well done, or, “Mr Wolf will have what you need”.
This was a late flowering of the great cities of Empire, when sophisticated technology began to supplant steam power and brute force. Progress meant we could make things faster and better; it also meant fewer of us were needed to make them. There’s a tension between these two ideas – perhaps they’re even antithetical.
Is that because the technology is now so complex that it’s beyond simple analysis, or do we resent the fact that machines even make other machines. Mr Wolf’s particular line of business was multi-axis machine tools. Until recently there were still forms that nothing else could achieve. Solid fabrication techniques have changed that, with the advent of stereo-lithography, laser sintering and direct metal laser sintering. The easiest way to explain these is 3D photocopying. Today, computers can tell a laser to trace a cross-section of the component in a vat of liquid photopolymer resin, or in a powder bed, then layer by layer the desired shape will emerge as material is fused by the heat of the laser beam.
However, Wolf’s father developed the predecessors of the 3D photocopier which machined components from a solid lump of aluminium, titanium or stainless steel. Most of his competitors were American firms, many of which grew out of the USA’s enormous military aircraft-building industry. As a result, J. Carruthers Wolf regularly crossed the Pond from Prestwick, selling Scottish machinery to the Americans.
All this industrial enterprise appealed to the junior Wolf, and his fascination with America grew as he learned about it from his grandfather and father. America was the place where much of the late 20th century emerged, and it grew in his mind until it became an obsession: it was music, books, paintings, photos, poems, dreams, bridges, street signs, trees, clouds, bodies of water, light and shadows.
Mr Wolf craved a proper adventure and after years of dreaming, he crossed the East Coast on a Laker DC10. He arrived in Chicago, which his grandfather first visited forty years before. His first impression took in the grid-iron plans of New York, Detroit and Chicago’s downtowns, then screeds of slaughterhouses and meat-packing plants, transit sheds and lumber yards. Beyond lay the tract houses which multiply like bacteria in a Petri dish.
That was Mr Wolf’s first discovery about America: the sprawling and organic form which its suburbs took when they were allowed to grow unchecked. The second arose from the novel way he crossed the continent. After the tightly-packed cities of Western Europe – between which you never really enter open countryside, but pass instead through a succession of man-made features like plantations, motorways, canals – here there were hours of wilderness between the “divisions” or wayside towns.
He figured out the practicalities of staying in touch, in the days before cellphones. Sending mail "General Delivery" to a particular city is how you got snail mail back in the day. You addressed your letters with your name, then wrote general delivery as the street, followed by city, state, zipcode. The closest Post Office to the rail yard in every town where there was a crew change was familiar with tramps and forty-milers, who came in to pick up their mail.
He saw America from the open door of a freight train, riding the rails. The trip began with a feeling of incredulity that he was finally here. But there he was, wearing a pair of Levis and a hooded sweat, with a bedroll in his pack and a camera jammed into his pocket. He had a roll of Jacksons stuffed into his sock and shot a few rolls of Kodachrome during his trip.
Precious few images, really, considering the thousands of miles he travelled, but enough to prove he had been there. In fact, whenever he has gone through tough times, he looked through the photos and drew on the strength he gained from hopping freights in America.
But before he could ride, Mr Wolf had to be patient. Trains often sat dead in the yard all day, with no sign of activity. Waiting to catch out at the side of the railroad left him ample time for reading, lying still in the brush beyond the track. His favourite book was “The Bottom of the Harbour”, which collected Joseph Mitchell’s essays from The New Yorker magazine.
Mitchell wrote using precise, spare English with no hype or sentimentality and barely any adjectives. He was Wolf’s hero, although of course Mr Wolf would never admit to holding anyone up as a hero. However, he recognised Mitchell’s genius because so many people have pressed mediocre books on him over the years, and he has slogged through them out of guilt. That kind of reading seldom works out for the best.
In late afternoon, that familiar horn blared out from a nearby locomotive. The brakes began charging up with a characteristic ticking noise; a few minutes later, the units revved up and the train eased out of the switchyard. Each train might have four or five locomotives hauling a rake of boxcars quarter of a mile long. He chose an immense train of loaded autoracks and UPS containers.
Perhaps there is a romance to hopping freights, but it’s dirty and physically-tiring work. Mr Wolf developed the strength required to run alongside the four foot, snatch a grab-iron and pull himself up into a moving train. It’s also dangerous. Each train he hopped was a now-or-never opportunity, and all the time he kept in mind the old Chicago alderman's maxim: "I seen my opportunities and I took 'em."
He wedged the toe of his boot onto the step-iron and climbed up into the fourth unit. Manufactured by General Electric, it weighed 391,000 pounds and generated 4,000 horsepower. The lead unit of the train was crewed by flannel-shirted railroaders: a driver (the engineer), a second engineer and a brakeman. Over the cab radio, he could hear the engineer and dispatcher discussing the hardships of railroading.
Mr Wolf travelled in the Fall. In summer, the heat was unbearable. In winter, tramps passed out in the boxcars with their soaking clothes hanging from their bodies and froze to death. Yet even in the Fall, it grew perishingly cold when the train went over a high pass. At night he pulled the bedroll out of his pack and drew his jacket tightly around him, then waited for dawn. He changed trains and travelled from Laurel, Montana, to Seattle, Washington, along a non-Amtrak six hundred mile route that passed through the filming locations for A River Runs Through It, then crossed the great Beartooth Pass, near the northeast entrance for Yellowstone. In the evening he slept fitfully as the train clattered over the ties at 45 miles an hour.
Eight hours later, the light was up as the train crawled up into the Blue Mountains of eastern Oregon, a land of steep fir-dotted ridges. The wildlife paraded past: herds of elk, mallards floating down the streams, pheasants surprised by the locomotive.
The Hill. That's what Jack London, A-No. 1, and several generations of other tramps called the Sierra; John Muir termed it the Range of Light. Later, he would traverse the Bitterroot Range and the Cascades. Was this the real West? It certainly felt like it, based on what Mr Wolf knew of America.
The train picked up speed on the downgrade and the sun broke out near milepost 60, dispelling the cool greyness of the Stampede crossing. Mountains give way to sagebrush desert and after he crossed the Great Divide, he was one with the fruit tramps, bums, hobos and vagabonds. His skin was seasoned with the sun and grime and his jeans were fit for the dumpster; Mr Wolf resembled nothing so much as a coyote.
You may not realise that Chuck Jones based his cartoon Wile Coyote on Mark Twain's book Roughing It, in which Twain described the coyote as "A long, slim, sick and sorry-looking skeleton," which is "A living, breathing allegory of Want. He is always hungry. He is always poor, out of luck and friendless. The meanest creatures despise him and even the flea would desert him for a velocipede.”
There were certainly thin pickings in the wayside towns, and Mr Wolf could see just how Cousin Coyote came to have his ribs sticking out. In fact, he almost expected to see DC Thomson’s Three Bears raiding Hank’s Store for grub. These railroads were built with Dundee money in the last years of the 19th century, using jute profits sunk into US railroad bonds. Railroads opened up the Oregon Trail in the 1880’s and 1890’s, during the Goldrush years. A century and a quarter later, the Scots have disinvested: Warren Buffett now owns America’s biggest railroad firm.
Finally, Mr Wolf reached the west coast. He drew out a couple of bills from his sock for a room in a motel in Ventura. He showered for the first time in two weeks, dropped his trainhopping clothes off at the laundromat, then lay on the bed. The last remnants of sunshine reflected off the windows as storm clouds moved in. He fell asleep listening to an Amtrak train rolling through town as the sun set across the Pacific.
Next morning, he treated himself to a regal spread of coffee, eggs, avocado, salsa, biscuit and a side of blueberry pancakes. Then spent the next few days walking in the footsteps of Steinbeck, from Tortilla Flats to Monterey. The places are much changed, but some of their spirit remains, despite the tourist hell of Cannery Row. Sand Dollar Bay in Big Sur lived up to its name, a stretch of sand and rock pools straight out of “Sea of Cortez”.
Many architectural visitors to California make a pilgrimage to Louis Kahn’s Salk Institute; but first Mr Wolf made a trip far up the coast to Northern California, where he finally saw Halprin's Sea Ranch with his own eyes, wreathed in coastal fog. This is also the land which Pynchon wrote about in “Vineland”. When he reached Arcata, home to the medical marijuana industry, there must have been an epidemic of some kind: the whole town was stoned. Beyond it lay giant redwoods, fern-filled gorges, pounding surf and "All that raw land that rolls in one unbelievable huge bulge over to West Coast, and all that road going."
All told, the journey was quite an adventure – the stuff of blind chance-takers, adventurers, nothing-to-lose optimists. But Mr Wolf’s greatest debt was owed to the railroad tramps he met during his travels. They didn’t know him from Adam, they had nothing to gain, and were absolutely hard up. Yet to a man they offered information about the trains and how to avoid the railroad bulls; they spared him the hardship of figuring everything out for himself. The experience left him with a deep feeling for the country and its people, which translated into praise of kind hearts and good times, and down with humbug and hypocrisy.
Postscript: Reply to Mr Wolf
Dear Sir,
I’ve read the adventures of Mr Wolf with enormous interest and enjoyment. I like them for their blunt candour, their devastating common sense and above all for the practical fashion in which they haul down to ground level issues which have been left hanging in the air. However, this piece has nothing to do with architecture, per se.
It was written to show in an extended metaphor Mr Wolf’s relationship with the world. America (in the days before Trump) was symbolic of progress, whereas Europe is the Old World. I believe the piece serves to emphasise how broadening your experience of the world may make you a more understanding and empathetic person.
Happy Christmas and a fine New Year to you all.
Yours Sincerely,
Maxwell Allison (12), Penicuik
Having a public opinion on absolutely everything is no way to live. This is a particular problem in an era of social media where, sometimes, too much is shared. “You are not compelled to form any opinion about this matter before you, nor to disturb your peace of mind at all. Things in themselves have no power to extort a verdict from you,” said Marcus Aurelius, and those are words to live by.
A few months after Dublin, I took a trip to Greece. Whereas I hadn’t been to Dublin before, my trip to Athens came on the anniversary of my first visit in 1995, which was organised as part of the Erasmus exchange programme. Erasmus enables you to study in other European cities, for a term, semester or a year; in my case, I went to the National Technical University of Athens.
I flew from Heathrow’s Terminal 4 when it was brand new and still fresh. The flight took us across Europe at night: the sky was clear and coastal cities shone like strings of bright beads. We arrived in Athens early in the morning. The sun was up but it was still cool, and I discovered there was no Metro line to the city centre. It hadn’t been built yet. There were no buses, either, because their drivers were on strike.
When I met my fellow students later that day, they were amazed I had walked from Olympikos airport into the city centre: but when the Metro is a construction site and all Athens’ bus drivers are sitting under café parasols smoking tabs, what else would you do? Certainly not give in to the taxi touts.
As the heat rose, I explored the quarter around the hotel we were staying in. It was quickly evident that Athens has an Anglophone culture – adverts, TV stations, music, announcements on the Metro. The architectural coursework was in English, too, and Athens dispelled any notion of difference. The idioms, accents and details differ but at heart all architecture students are good, bad, indifferent; committed, apathetic, and sleep-deprived.
Athens was where I first realised the goodwill which folk in the wider world feel towards Scotland. My nationality was greeted with smiles and excitement, and in return I was delighted to feel part of a greater whole. That, I guess, demonstrates the nuts and bolts of what the Erasmus programme is about.
Too quickly I said goodbye to Kathryn from Ireland, Crista from Finland, Marco from Italy and a dozen or so others – along with the Greek students we worked with – and returned home. Niki, who was so kind and obliging and Maria, who gave me a lift back to the airport. She drove an old Volvo 340 with whining variomatic transmission - but she really wanted a big enduro motorbike. She smoked Camels all the way to Departures, and told me all about motorbikes in a husky voice … my heart could have melted.
I wonder where they all are now, and what they’re doing?
I revisited Athens in 2014, looking at Athens through two lenses. Firstly weighing the perception of memories from almost two decades ago against the present reality, and secondly how external forces like the 2008 crash has changed Athens. As with Ireland, the European Project has had an impact on Greece. 
Despite the economic collapse and riots, Athens is still working and still striking too – during my second visit, the rail workers stopped work for a couple of days. There are three metro lines now, not just the one which was under construction when I studied here in 1995. Then, one of those stations was a construction site close to Syntagma Square, and a vast hole had been dug with sheet-piled sides perhaps 20 metres deep. The excavations left a palm tree stranded on a column of soil, like the sea stack known as the Old Man of Hoy.
In 2014, the metro line from the new airport carried me through miles of arid exurban land before we hit Athens proper. At Syntagma I got off the train and walked past the local Phase One dealer’s storefront. Phase One make medium-format digital cameras and software which professional photographers use – and of course they are priced to suit. 
I checked in to my hotel behind a brash Chinese-American with a broken suitcase, who complained loudly about everything – then went exploring to see what had been changed by the Riots. They were a moment, as William Hazlitt would have it, “When the heart is kindled and bursting with indignation at the revolting abuses of self-constituted power.”
Around the National Technical University of Athens, walls were still covered in graffiti. The slogans were political with Antifa and anarchist sentiments; much of the graffiti declaims the “Troika”. In addition to murals the thousands of posters, stickers and pamphlets say that Athenians care about politics in a way that we had forgotten, at least until our independence referendum of September 2014. Their violent feelings have left their mark in still-shuttered windows and the remains of arson attacks which years later are still raw wounds.
However, look beyond those and in the quiet streets around the NTUA, where ripe oranges fall to earth in thundery heat, little had changed. The newspaper vendors in little kiosks, smiling policemen carrying sidearms, scrawny strays and Crazy Frog mopeds were all as I remembered from 1994. Nearby lay the squats and rancid alleys of Exarchion and dozens of stray dogs laid out flat in the baking sun. 
Across the way, the prehensile arm of a concrete pump was delivering screed to the upper floors of the Acropole Grand Hotel. As I mentioned before, the spinning drums of truckmixers are a universal measure of how well a country’s economy is doing – and by that measure at least Athens was slowly recovering.
Near the old airport, Olympikos, was the brash suburb of Hellenikon, its avenues lined with car dealers and impex firms. Before I left for Greece, I read that Calatrava’s nearby buildings for the 2004 Olympics had been abandoned, and were overgrown with weeds. As I discovered, they aren’t derelict – but are certainly under-used. I suspect the rumour was black propaganda from our London-biased media, put about to contextualise the similarly under-utilised facilities at Stratford in London’s East End.
As with most other cities, Athens “improves” as you go higher. The gentrified Kifissia and Kolonaki areas sit above the city’s heat haze and pollution. The apartments are concrete-framed, clad in stucco and pale stone. Some have floor-to-ceiling glazing, with sliding timber shutters. At dusk, the lights come on and for a brief time you can sneak a glance at the lives of Athens’ professionals – but now the white Pentelicon marble-paved lobbies have security doors.
Go further uphill and the buildings give way to vetches, laurels, black pines and cordyline palms. Finally, you reach the top of one of the many hilltops and from there you can see tier after tier of apartments, the major roads terraced across the hillside and short steep flights of stairs stitching them together.
So what of the things that set Ireland and Western Europe apart from Greece and countries in the southern and eastern Mediterranean? There’s no difference between the underlying results of their economic trials, when you look beyond language, cuisine, and climate. Construction is a barometer of each developed country’s economy, whether politicians read Juvenal and adopt his “bread and circuses” approach to government – or let the Lords of Misrule have their way in the financial markets.
No, the things which differentiate Athens and Dublin are long-established patterns of development. Each is stratified by wealth, dividing the population along income lines. There’s the Anglo-Saxon culture of buying detached houses, against the southern European habit of renting apartments. In Athens the derelict buildings are being squatted; in Dublin they’re secured with steel sheeting and CCTV.
So I don’t have an opinion on how Athens and Dublin might be “fixed” – how could I with brief visits to two European capitals, one as a student and the other as a travelling photographer – but on reflection I realised that we sometimes need to stop. Think a little more deeply and look beyond the instant opinions on the screen. Speak to people, do some research, digest it, then form a thesis, which doesn’t necessarily have to be shared for re-tweeting…
Thanks for indulging me by reading this. It’s a journal entry which I chose to share, and I guess the chance of Maria reading this are infinitesimally small: but despite those odds, it would be great to hear that she got her wish and is riding a big Triumph Tiger. :-)
When I was a student, the regeneration of Temple Bar in Dublin was held up as a model of How To, but with the more recent delivery of “Helicopter Money” from Brussels to bail out the Irish economy, it became a model of How Not To. On visiting Dublin in 2014, everything seemed a bit too expensive, there were many empty shops and on the outskirts stood miles of unsold houses.
All the investment bank head offices along the Liffey were built during a boom founded on speculation. Since their failure, Dublin has evidently concentrated on a Guinness, James Joyce and U2-based economy: yet while I was there, several people told me that Dublin isn’t really Irish. The Paddywhackery theme pubs along the Liffey – as one native described them – are the same phenomenon as the pipers in See You Jimmy hats who haunt the Scots Wha Hae pubs on the Royal Mile in Edinburgh.
Whether they didn’t like immigration into it, or the emigration of young professionals from from it, callers to the local radio station were unhappy with Ireland in 2014. As a talk radio host on RTE said, Dublin is the gun crime capital of Europe, with one death per week. While the violence affects peripheral housing estates rather than the touristy parts, its threat hangs over the city as a whole. 
In some respects, Dublin’s history is underlain by violence: for me, Bolands Flour Mill and its place in the 1916 Rising was soundtracked by David Holmes’ “69 Police” which happened to be playing on the radio as I drove back through Dublin towards the airport. Of course, violence is a tradition in the south of Italy, in the Balkans and in Scottish cities too… and civil society has existed despite and alongside it.
One of the motives to visit Dublin was to meet up again with an Irish architecture student, Kathryn, who I met while on an Erasmus exchange in Athens in 1995. Young professionals in today’s Ireland was met in the person of a serious, moon-faced young man on the DART coming in from Malahide to UCD. He wore a cream linen jacket, loafers and distressed jeans and was absorbed in reading an article about sustainable housing (Accordia and all that) on his iPad. What future for him? 
Will he be forced to emigrate, like previous generations were, only this time to escape the Ponzi scheme of a housing bubble funded by a financial pyramid, fuelled in turn by bank lending secured on ever-rising land values? Or perhaps it was a carousel fraud, with finance houses cross-collateralising and propping each other up until the money-go-round finally ground to a halt. Once that happened, many developers failed, most notably the company behind the regeneration of Battersea Power Station in London which was led by the flamboyant tycoon Johnny Ronan and his business partner Richard Barrett.
Their £5.5bn plan to revamp Battersea collapsed into administration at the end of 2011, when their main lenders – Lloyds Banking Group and Ireland's state "bad bank", the National Asset Management Agency (Nama) – lost patience and put the developers’ holding company into administration. Once Irish developers began to struggle, Irish contractors began looking greedily across the North Channel to find work in the UK.
If the city of Dublin raised the spectre of a failed economic boom, beyond the city lay the cheerful cynics of the Health Service Executive at Portrane who allowed me to shoot photos in a Georgian asylum; and the softly-spoken girl with pale skin and dark hair at the wayside strawberry trailer. In certain parts of Belgium, there are little frites stalls at the roadside, painted bright yellow: in Eire there are roadside strawberry vendors, including one with a kiosk in the form of a giant fibreglass fruit. This was Robert Venturi’s “Duck” put to work in Co. Dublin.
The Irish countryside around Kildare, Cork and Waterford prompted another question. In rural Ireland there are countless bungalows strung out in ribbon developments: it’s no different to Highland Scotland, which it resembles in so many ways. For Irish natives, the mixture of language, culture, landscape and economy makes up their own Internal Landscape and the new bungalows enable them to stay on their patch of soil, which is surely a good thing considering the economic exodus from Ireland.
Yet why do planners hate ribbon development so much? Is it because we were educated in cities – where medium and high-density developments are driven by land prices as well as a tradition of living in tenements – and are unsympathetic to the aspirations of folk in the country? If people want to live in their own detached houses, which is a traditional aspiration in British Isles, is it for us to sneer at them? Is it inverted snobbery, or the French concept of “deformation professionel”?
Arguably there’s no right answer, because adequate housing requires both land reform and bank reform. The supply of sites and the supply of mortgage finance largely dictates the supply of houses. Both of those are political issues, and people will vote for the government which looks like giving them what they want. 
Some would have no development – usually those who already own property and do not care for others to share their good fortune. Urban Realm’s visit to Nairn a few years ago was a clear example of that. Others are keen to see development at all costs – and Ireland’s ill-fated developers perhaps fell into that trap.
Perhaps the most telling thing is that I only saw a couple of truckmixers all the time I was there; the truckmixer, as I’ve written before, is the construction industry’s barometer, bellwether and its green light at the end of the dock all rolled into one.
The second part of this piece will cover a trip to Athens, and try to find common ground between the state of the western fringe of Europe and its eastern edge.
The village pub lies on a quiet road, a long way from anywhere else. You might expect it to be busy on a Sunday lunchtime, but today there’s only one patron.
Outside, the air is sharp and the trees are turning – but Mr Wolf sits in the lounge bar of the Admiral Rodney, his nostrils full of the smell of defeat and disappointment. Things aren’t going well. He’s preoccupied by the troubled project he’s working on, his girlfriend’s complicated life, and the fact that another year has passed swiftly by.
Having cleared a plate of scampi and chips, he returns to a book - Escape from Evil - written by Ernest Becker. Becker was a cultural anthropologist who spent the latter part of his career examining man's fear of death, and his struggle to overcome it through heroism and symbolism. He believed that our culture is fundamentally contrived: "Each society is a hero system which promises victory over evil and death."
And so we engage in Immortality Projects.
In Becker’s world, the creation of a building is a struggle of will, the individual’s triumph over all the other architects. Its continuing existence is a reminder that you persist, and its demolition is the abnegation of self, and proof of mortality. The book is doing nothing to cheer Mr Wolf up, but it has provoked him to think.
Becker’s thesis is one reason why the “Rubble Club” is so poignant, and why an architect who Mr Wolf used to work with bitterly regretted the disappearance of one of the first things he designed, a shopfront in a seaside town. The shop sold shoes, and in the 1970’s its frontage was remodelled to resemble a giant glass shoe.
Had Scotland been Northern Italy, the shoe-fronted shop would have been called architecture parlante. If the shop had been in Nevada, Robert Venturi would have circled it making quacking noises … but when the premises were refurbished in the 2000’s, the shoe was replaced by a big sheet of Armourplate and the shop began selling sandwiches.
“This shouldn’t happen; it makes you realise that you’re getting old,” the architect complained, although he really meant “mortal”. Not even the combined efforts of DIY SOS, John Harvey-Jones and The A-Team could disprove the fact that buildings are just buildings, dispensable, and we’re only mortal.
Perhaps the driver of architecture isn’t the egotism of a designer who believes they have more insight, talent or genius than others do. Nor is it the avarice of a speculator who wants to make money from it, nor even an expression of the client’s taste. Perhaps the pursuit of architecture really is an Immortality Project.
Some leave behind statues, books or belief systems - but buildings are concrete proof of what we achieved. Perhaps writing about them through the filter of anthropology tells us something about folk whose practices have failed, been taken over by corporates, or gave up their identities in mergers. It helps to explain why they fought so hard for what they’ve lost.
The work they created was more than a creative outlet or a business – it was their legacy. Beyond that, Becker goes on to explain why some people drive a larger Saab, Audi or Alfa Romeo than their colleagues.
"The ideology of modern commercialism has unleashed a life of invidious comparison unprecedented in history ... modern man cannot endure economic equality because he has no faith in self-transcendent, otherworldly immortality symbols; visible physical worth is the only thing he has to give him eternal life. No wonder that people segregate themselves with such consuming dedication, that specialness is so much a fight to the death ... He dies when his little symbols of specialness die."
Humans, Becker writes, will always have “a need for a ‘beyond’ on which to base the meaning of their lives.” His conclusion is that people live to ensure they have a legacy, and this is why we work so hard to prove ourselves our whole lives. In the process of doing that — especially if we're power hungry or in desperate situations — we do things which make other peoples’ lot immeasurably worse.
Becker suggests that we are not evil because we have an instinct to be, but because we're the only animal on this planet which knows it's going to die. "But evil is not banal as Arendt claimed: evil rests on the passionate person motive to perpetuate oneself, and for each individual this is literally a life-and-death matter for which any sacrifice is not too great..."
Albert Speer’s work in the 1930’s and 40’s during the so-called Thousand Year Reich is an extreme example of an Immortality Project, and arguably the methods used in pursuit of the aim lie at the crux of Becker’s book. Immortality Projects throw us right back to Thomas Hobbes - the battle of every man against every man. Life can be nasty, brutal and short and sometimes architecture does nothing to mediate that.
How can this be overcome, when society has progressed more slowly and modestly than advocated by Rousseau and Marx? Becker didn’t have an easy answer, but sometimes we need to get our heads up, release ourselves from the grip of immortality and absorb ourselves in the now.
With that weight lifted from his shoulders, Mr Wolf closed the book and wandered out into the wan autumnal sunshine.
Several years ago, the motoring writer James Ruppert coined a phrase which neatly encapsulates how to own and run a car cheaply and efficiently. Bangernomics. Tradition has it that old cars have high running costs: they burn more fuel and oil than they should; they rot; they break down. However, new cars suffer from savage depreciation. Either way, cheap motoring is a fallacy.
By contrast, the theory of Bangernomics attempts to both the capital and running costs of cars: you buy old vehicles which are in reasonable condition, but worth next to nothing. You run them for a few months, then when they break down or fail their M.o.T., you scrap them then repeat the process.
An old Rover or Audi might cost £350 from the small ad’s – but even if it only lasts for six months, the previous owner has paid for all its road tax, servicing and depreciation costs, providing you with cheap motoring and a cash rebate when you drive it (push it) into the scrappie’s yard. In many cases, the car will be perfectly reliable in the meantime, and more than adequate as your “daily driver.”
More applicable than ever during the recent climate of austerity and crunchy credit, Bangernomics is a transferrable concept – so lets try to apply it to buildings, shall we?
By the time they’re committed up to their oxters in a building contract, clients are resigned to spiralling costs and a lack of ultimate control. Building things has always been perceived as expensive: but did anyone point out an alternative? This is the crux, because it exposes a conflict of interest between the client and his hired gun, the architect.
Architects like to build things, because that earns them fees. They don’t mind converting old things, because that can earn them more fees than building new things. Yet what would happen if the feasibility study suggested that the client’s existing building was perfectly suitable – that all he needed to do was re-organise the demountables and the furniture?
Or buy the building next door and move in straight away (perhaps re-painting the front door on the way in)? That would earn the architect nothing, except a token sum and the eternal gratitude of the client, who has saved a small fortune.
Your business banking manager never warned you about this eventuality, nor did the lecturers at architecture school. Yet if you exercised “professionalism” (whatever *that* means in these straitened times), you’d be obliged to offer this option to your client. You can guess just how many consultants have actually done so – and that illustrates why the Victorian concept of the professional person may be obsolete.
As with the architect’s quasi-judicial role when considering a claim for extensions of time (if she allows them, the architect often admits her own guilt in delaying the contractor), this concept of an impartial person of integrity, with no ulterior self-interest, is a fallacy. In reality, the only way to save the client money is to align the professionals’ interests with his own.
Now that fear has taken charge of the financial markets again (24th August 2015 … China Crisis?), as it did on Black Monday in 1987, and during the Wall Street Crash, the grim arithmetic of economic recession has been recalled. The result is an admonitory tale of capitalism’s downside. Ten years ago, the property market took off, detached itself from the real economy like Gulliver’s flying island of “Laputa”, and buildings ended up over-valued by 30 or 40%, or sometimes more. The underlying land doubled or tripled in value.
Things have turned around now, though, and as a result, clients are forced to question the “givens”, such as the maxim that land values will always continue to increase because land is the only thing they aren’t making any more of; rentals will always move northwards … and U-values will always improve.
Since energy conservation had become an over-riding factor in design, it could be made simple. The aims of economics and sustainability coincide, just as they do in Bangernomics. The most sustainable way to develop property for a client is to re-use and adapt the existing, not to build a new building from scratch. If everything else is equal, refurbishment usually works out cheaper than newbuild.
Extending the amortisation period of a building, just like running a car into the ground, saves money by spreading the cost over a longer period. It also maximises the use of its embodied energy. The latter idea may win you sexy eco points; but the client’s accountant will get turned on by the former. Do as little as you need to: save yourself money and energy. In fact, taking this to its logical conclusion, we could talk ourselves out of work.
For example, a few years ago we had a client who took a pragmatic view. The company owns a large 1940’s era range of north-lit workshops. They were built as a wartime munitions factory for making artillery shells – which afterwards was taken on by Consolidated Pneumatic Tools, who made equipment for the quarrying and mining industries.
Under a series of sawtooth roofs, held up by delicate fabricated steel trusses, the spaces have ample natural light and are high enough to house pillar and gantry cranes. When the roof began to leak, the refurbishment costs quoted were epic. A bulldoze-and-rebuild-from-new option was studied, but the price for that turned out to be even steeper.
There’s nothing fundamentally wrong with the building – and a new portal frame shed would be less generous, and far darker, needing artificial light during the daytime. Accordingly, the plan was to apply a magical coating to seal the failed asphalt joints, then make local repairs to the rooflights. Five years on, that seems to have worked fine.
Work with what you find. Re-use it, minimise your outlay. Bangernomics.
Carrying on the theme of Tayside’s shrinking construction industry from my previous article about the demise of Muirfields, I thought it would be worth recording another sector which has virtually disappeared: construction plant manufacturing.
I grew up a mile from Low’s Foundry in Monifieth, a long-established engineering firm which occupied the block between High Street, Reform Street, South Street and Union Street. After at least a century of manufacturing textile machinery, James F Low (Engineers) Ltd sought to benefit from the post-War building boom, so their trajectory changed around 1955, and they diversified into “Rob Roy” construction plant.
Photo courtesy of Plant wiki
The small amount of information published about the firm concentrates on their textile heritage. Monifieth Foundry was established by James Low and Robert Fairweather before 1800, and the firm became internationally known for machinery to prepare and finish coarse textiles such as jute, hemp and flax. At one time Low’s exported to 30 countries and their foundry spread over 15 acres. Until the 1950’s they made machinery for the many jute mills in Tayside, and were eventually taken over by a company on the Indian sub-continent where much of their machinery was latterly sold and from which raw jute is imported.
While giant yellow bulldozers and full-slew excavators grab the attention, small plant is often overlooked. Rob Roy’s range was at the lighter end of the spectrum and included site dumper trucks, forklifts, concrete mixers, concrete pumps and vibrating pokers. Through the post-War years they developed a range along the lines of what the Winget company produces nowadays, and many of their machines were powered by Lister or Petter 2-cylinder diesel engines. The “Rob Roy” of its name has little or nothing to do with Clan MacGregor but is part of the undercurrent of Walter Scotticism which lasts in Scotland, even to this day. I guess its use in this context is intended to suggest the same ruggedness as with Albion Motors’ “Claymore”, “Reiver” and “Clydesdale” lorries.
Speaking to folk who worked in the local construction industry during the ‘60’s and ‘70’s, Rob Roy concrete pumps were prone to break down at the critical moment (“they were buggers of things to choke up”) but otherwise their 4/3 and 5/3 concrete mixers were sturdy and reliable, and their 1/2 yard and 1 yard site dumpers were basic but tough pieces of kit. As I was growing up, I remember the thumpity-thump of a two-stroke Lister diesel as the Rob Roy dumper trundled around a building site.
However, as with the much larger Vickers conglomerate which I wrote about previously, Rob Roy’s construction plant business proved less profitable than hoped. While Vickers retreated back to their natural territory, the defence industry, Rob Roy disappeared around 1984 when James F Low went into liquidation. The site was sold and partly cleared: William Low’s (no relation) built a supermarket on the northern part of the foundry, then a few years later sheltered housing and spec-built villas emerged on the southern side.
With the exception of JCB, which is gradually catching Caterpillar in the battle to become the world’s largest construction plant manufacturer, Britain’s retreat from heavy plant began in the 1980’s and has continued ever since. Somewhere in the wilds of Lanarkshire are warehouses full of obsolete plant parts bearing names such as Liner, Mortimer, Hymac, Whitlock, Priestman and Massey Ferguson – which are now of value to collectors of classic machinery but little use to the men who use and hire out plant to earn a living.
Priestman were bought over by the owners of Acrow and all their clever design innovations, such as the variable-counterbalance excavator, were lost. For over 70 years Benford was a leading manufacturer of dumpers, mixers, rollers and compactor plates; they were taken over by Terex in 1999 and the name was dropped. Ruston Bucyrus became RB Cranes, changed hands, and Langley Holdings eventually closed them down after they succumbed to the 2008 recession. Barford has similarly disappeared in the past few years.
In Scotland, Hydrocon Cranes of Coatbridge were a major manufacturer of off-road mobile cranes.
As their name suggests, they pioneered hydraulic cranes but their former factory is now part of the industrial museum at Summerlee. As another example, while I was researching the brick industry for an article a couple of years ago, I discovered that Mitchell Engineering of Cambuslang were once in the major league of brick-making machinery manufacturers, but they went out of that business as the Scottish brickmaking industry shrank. It continued to shrink, until as it stands today there’s only one active brickworks, and a handful of abandoned sites.
Before you reach for the whisky and raise a toast entitled, “Sympathy for the Construction Industry”, there are some heavy plant success stories in Scotland. McPhee Brothers of Blantyre build concrete truckmixers and Albion Motors still exists too, in the form of Albion Automotive who build lorry transmissions in South Street, Glasgow.
As for Rob Roy, it’s unlikely that any of their machines have been preserved in museums, but some are still to be found lurking in the overgrown yards of small contractors. A rusty Rob Roy 1/2 yard dumper lay, unused and unloved, in the flood plain of the Gowrie Burn until recently, when a small developer began building a clutch of houses on the site. Presumably the dumper went off to the great scrapyard in the sky, perhaps via one of Morris Leslie’s epic autojumble auctions at Errol.
If anyone has any promotional material, brochures, photos or memories of James F Low and Rob Roy, please get in touch.
It’s the battle at the heart of every social science going: the individual against the mass. The distance between “me” and the rest of the world lies at the very core of the human condition. Despite the fact that we are social animals, biologically and psychically we're separate and apart from other creatures. Each of us is essentially alone. We can’t know what another person feels or thinks, nor can they experience our feelings and thoughts.
This separation has powered several of the great novels, like Hunger by Knut Hamsun, Dr Zhivago by Boris Pasternak, and The Outsider by Albert Camus. We can change, we can renounce the things we believed in, but we can never leave the human race – at best, we set ourselves apart from other people and try to live outside their society.
Many of us go through a phase of teenage rebellion, but the truest sense of splitting apart from the mass of humanity only comes later in your 20’s or 30’s, once you have experienced many years’ worth of what Anthony Burgess described as the formicating crowds of big cities. You begin to feel dissociated from the milling strangers, and grow tired of the social codes we live by. You become disenfranchised by them, and wish for something else.
Some people – artists, poets, novelists – are able to use this experience to feed their work; others disengage completely and withdraw from the world. What the French call anomie, the feeling of being tired with and unsatisfied by life, may either cause you to chuck it all in … or grow more determined to find your own way in the world. Architects try to serve society, so they aim for the latter.
Respect and big props are due to those who plough their own furrow – in this context, the architects who neither teach, lecture or write articles. Reading the story of the Barbican development in London, I was struck by the fact that Chamberlin, Powell & Bon kept their own counsel – not through lack of self-confidence in their approach or opinions, but perhaps through a recognition of the ugly truth, that a good deal of architectural journalism is blatantly self-promotional, yet pretends to critical objectivity.
If you take articles written by “big name” designers, they invariably flesh out their thesis using their own work I guess that it takes a large measure of humility not to do that. There is also the suspicion that the “big names” seek a column in a journal, or a publishing deal, as an outlet for their ego. Given that, you could argue that Outside is the safest place to be, since you are forced to think for yourself and evaluate places and situations.
This piece isn’t intended to be didactic or preaching, but I think this lesson is widely applicable – it ranges from the need to question critical theories in architecture books, to the screaming necessity of avoiding trouble in life. Why does anyone study architecture? Not because they foresee that one day they’ll work for Practice X, producing window schedules by rote. Instead, they have their own hopes and aspirations to pursue. They want to fulfil their own destiny. In that, architects differ from most other walks of professional life.
Setting up your own practice is not only about making more money, or having your name above the door – it’s the ability to build your own designs rather than someone else’s. The Outsiders are just a more extreme version of this imperative.
I’ve talked in previous pieces about practices such as Shearer and Annand, and Bowen Dann Davies, who didn’t court publicity – but the second type of outsiders are those whose work falls entirely outwith the canon, rather than those who simply adopt a low key approach to practice. Designers such as Rudolph Steiner (Goetheaneum); Constant (New Babylon), and Frederick Kiesler (Endless House) produced work which falls outwith any critical category. These are rare examples of architecture which is “ab initio” – thought out from first principles, and without reference to anything else.
Some of these designers were propagandists, who put forward their own manifestoes – Constant was part of the Situationist International for a time, and his designs were part of a greater scheme to reshape the whole world, changing the way we’re governed, as well as the way we build. Rudolph Steiner developed educational theories into which he tied in an approach to architecture. You could call this move to the outside a manifesto in itself, or perhaps an escape from manifesto-waving activists.
Regardless of the “position” they choose to take, it’s a pleasure to be offered a fresh view of the world by these designers – and it contrasts with the conventional histories of modern architecture, where you read about the same buildings and the same architects time and time again. Those books are really just the products of an intellectual conspiracy, since their authors are academic rivals, who compete with each other, yet quote each others’ work in their own footnotes.
They are the true insiders, and they work a little like a mutual back-scratching society. If someone comes along with a completely different set of reference points, then that threatens the world view of their academic gang … and they don’t like it up them, as the saying goes. For the outsiders, these petty intrigues are irrelevant, because they choose not to play the game.
As Dieter Rams wrote, “A designer … does not need to give impressive lectures about it. He does not need to formulate explicit theories. After all, he is a designer and not a sociologist, psychologist, historian or philosopher.” Alvar Aalto backs him up, “The Creator created paper for drawing on. Everything else is, at least for my part, to misuse paper.” Perhaps that has something to do with Aalto’s early life – just before starting his architectural studies, Aalto was a trainee in Toivo Salervo’s office. Said Salervo to Aalto – “You’ll never be an architect, but aim for a career in journalism”. Maybe that created a lifelong aversion to written communication …
Chamberlin, Powell & Bon neither lectured, tutored nor wrote articles in the specialist press: that made them appear enigmatic, perhaps, but they were interested in practice and saw that the best way to win work was to get on with it. New commissions arose from existing ones, and they were able to largely side-step the critical debate about the Barbican which ran in magazines of the time.
Of course, the flip-side of keeping your own counsel is that others may talk on your behalf – but a waspish review in a magazine will be forgotten within the year, whereas the building will stand for a couple of generations. In these media-obsessed times, that’s worth remembering.
Architecture students beware – it’s a jungle out there.
In the next few weeks, young monkeys will leave the protective bosom of the troop, and make their way into the jungle. So far during their sheltered upbringing, they have learned about the world indirectly, and their responses have been carefully conditioned. They can distinguish “good” from “bad”; they can discern, and they can declaim pastiche … all thanks to the jungle elders who taught them to admire the chest-beating antics of the mighty silverbacks.
As Rudyard Kipling knew, every jungle has its king, and the particular megafauna in charge of this stretch of upland forest are loud, aggressive characters who like to impose themselves on those further down the food chain. Sure, there are other threats – sleek silent predators with gleaming teeth, and unspeakable things which lurk in the mangroves – but the bellowing of the Great Apes makes a lasting impression on the young monkeys. Something with so much presence must be important – right?
All that chest-beating and branch-shaking must have a purpose. They make so much noise and fuss, they must be in charge, isn’t that so? These are the beasts at the top of the tree, after all …
One youngster harboured a desire to work for one of the greatest apes. The latter’s name was Maximillian. He was greater than the other apes in many ways – he had his own private jet, for example. His wife dressed only in Prada. He rose into the tree canopy using his own private elevator. The young monkey was hugely impressed when she met Maximillian, overpowered by his musk of charisma and his “presence” – hence she was delighted when she found a place waiting for her after the interview.
In fact, she found it disarmingly easy to join the troop, and apart from a close circle of confidants around Maxi, the youngster found herself surrounded by young primates just like herself. All fresh-faced, keen and looking for direction. So keen in fact, that they approached the Great Ape with deference and worked gratis, or for next to nothing. Strangely, that earned them his disdain rather than respect.
Once she had her start, the youngster was dismayed to find that Maximillian wasn’t good to be around. Being alpha male meant that he had to spend part of each day beating his chest, because his life was a constant struggle to maintain status in the jungle hierarchy. He scanned the papers, earwigged the gossip and tuned in to the jungle telegraph to find out when he was mentioned, and with how much deference, compared to the other silverbacks. If he appeared to be slipping, he grew tetchy. For example, the youngster learned that she couldn’t discuss other Great Apes within his earshot: if anyone did, he bared his teeth and roared at the youngsters, occasionally sweeping several of them off a branch in a fit of pique. They didn’t try to climb back up.
At other times, Maximillian was quiet and sly, creeping around to find out what the monkeys said about him in private, behind his back. Yet even she knew not to listen to the chimps’ idle chatter. She had imagined that Maxi would be far too busy, and too thick-skinned, to worry about trivia like this, but apparently not so. The youngster had hoped that she would benefit from, and be enriched by, working with Maximillian, but it turned out to be a one-way transaction.
The troop worked on into the night, when everything in the jungle apart from the bats and night-crawlers roosted and slept. The hiss of carbide lamps, and the circling of great dark moths, grew to be familiar experiences to her. When the sun came up the next day, they were all shattered, but providing Maximillian was off travelling the continent in his private jet, work ground to a halt and they caught up with sleep. Everyone knew it wasn’t a good way to operate: it sapped their will as much as their energy, yet it was perpetuated by Maximillian.
The same unreality extended to the detail of the work they did. Maxi had a licence from his clients to do whatever he liked – the lions, tigers and bears of this world don’t curtail his budget, and never restricted his ability to decide on their behalf what they should have. So he specified Carrara marble (the most expensive kind) on every surface, and always used lights made by iGibboni (sorry!), the famously expensive makers of mangrove chandeliers.
This is not a true reflection of how the world works, as all the other monkeys out there are on a budget. Maximillian seemed to be happy, provided everything specified was suitably expensive, and that drawings and models were ready on time. Trouble erupted when he jumped off his jet just hours before the next big meeting, and reviewed the work they had produced for it. If he didn’t like it – and often he picked on something he himself had decided on weeks ago – then there was a chorus of screaming, bellowing and rending. Pack up your things and go, he roared after whichever CAD monkey took the blame.
This year, more than before, things are tough in the jungle. For each position, there are countless jostling cybergibbons – all of them prepared to work for peanuts. Having grown used to peanuts, it may take years for them to raise their sights – even when things improve. Meantime, Maximillian lives up to his name (he maks a million in fee income alone, nevermind the personal appearances at lectures, and product design endorsements) – whilst letting go of troupes at the edge of his empire. Hopefully the chattering of macaques will drown out the bad P.R. Nevertheless, there are fewer beasts at the top of the pyramid prepared to let him crave their indulgence. Has he changed his approach? What do you think?
Why does he act the way he does? asked our youngster after a few weeks in Maximillian’s employ. ”Because he gets away with it,” replied one of the monkeys who had worked for him a little longer. You see, Maximillian travels the world, courting every other species for work, giving lectures, gaining professorships, honours and other bays – but he doesn’t look after his own.
The young ones who arrive each summer are part-formed: he was once just like them, but he’s long ago forgotten that. They rely on him to show them how the jungle really works, to take on a pastoral role while they find their feet and gain confidence, but he shows them only himself. The strong ones who demonstrate character end up fighting him, and are ejected from the troop. The weaker ones are cowed, and eventually limp away having lost enthusiasm and motivation. Yet each time a monkey leaves, it takes a little of the troop with it, and so the collective memory of “how we do things” is lost. Maximillian chooses to ignore that.
This youngster was smart enough to discover that although she normally lived on the lower branches, she could still climb to the top of the tree occasionally, to see how the primates live. More importantly, she knew she could climb back down again, leaving them to it.
Hugh Ferriss is best known as the illustrator of New York’s skyscrapers. He’s also the spiritual father of Lebbeus Woods, who I previously wrote about; both were visionary architect-artists who drew other people’s buildings then went on to create their own imaginary worlds.
Ferriss trained as an architect – but according to Daniel Okrent, author of “Great Fortune”, he built little or nothing of his own. Instead, he was employed by large commercial practices in New York to create presentation drawings. Soon, Ferriss became a professional renderer and in parallel he developed as an architectural theorist – also, and probably not coincidentally, Lebbeus Woods’ career path.
The 1929 book, The “Metropolis of Tomorrow”, lays out Hugh Ferriss’s ideas for Art Deco mega-cities of the future. I also have a copy of “Power in Building” acquired from Powell’s bookstore in Portland, Oregon … when it turned out that William Stout’s in San Francisco only had a modern facsimile rather than the original edition. The power of the internet …
Ferriss used dramatic, almost violent perspective, which combined dynamic angles with strong light and shadow. His renderings of the “Zoning Law”-era skyscrapers which were built during the period between the end of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s Gilded Age, through the Great Depression, to the start of World War Two made him famous. 
“Metropolis of Tomorrow” grew from Hugh Ferriss’s experience illustrating the Chicago Tribune Tower, Rockefeller Centre, Empire State and Chrysler Buildings. He also portrayed pre-war proposals for the United Nations headquarters, then the Perisphere and Trylon from the New York 1939 World's Fair. Further afield he drew Frank Lloyd Wright's Taliesin West in Arizona, as well as the Red Rocks Amphitheatre in Denver.
When war intervened after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbour, Ferriss drew the process of aircraft production at Lockheed’s aircraft factory, bomb shelters, and the construction of the Shasta Dam in California – but I recently came across his wartime drawings for the United States Pipe & Foundry Co. which I hadn’t seen before.
Ferris’s reputation rests on those two books “Metropolis of Tomorrow” and “Power in Building” plus a few exhibitions such as the 1986 show at the Whitney Museum in New York … but the pipe foundry drawings don’t appear to feature in any of them, which is a shame, because they show another complementary facet of his work.
These adverts are industrial propaganda, and their imagery is powerful because Ferriss’s style is ideally suited to his subject. Compared to the social realism of other wartime adverts – which seem strangely Soviet in their portrayal of the triumph of organised labour – Ferriss captures the scale, drama and theatricality of the pipe mill and iron foundry. He hints at the Fordist approach of mass production, with huge production halls and endless rows of components awaiting shipment.
I guess this irony was lost on his patrons: while industry in America became more and more mechanistic and increasingly automated, it relied upon charcoal and crayon renderings made by a highly individual hand. The Adverts for Tomorrow were anything but Fordist in execution.
We discovered that Muirfields were in trouble one Wednesday morning, when a colleague’s wife texted him to say that folk were standing around outside their offices in Dryburgh, Dundee – seemingly locked out by the management.
Rumours had been circulating during the preceding week … but we were lucky, in the sense that Muirfield Contracts had just finished dealing with the defects period on a local project I worked on. Several hundred workers were less lucky, and it must be heartbreaking for Maurice McKay, who left Charles Gray (Builders) Ltd. at the end of the 1980’s to start Muirfields, then spent the next 25 years building it into one of Scotland’s biggest privately-held contractors.
He sold the business to Azure Investments, a private equity firm, about 18 months ago; a day after the gates were locked, the Dundee Courier stated that over 400 employees’ jobs were at risk. What went wrong?
Muirfields were the last of the big, Dundee-headquartered contractors … for now at least … and the environment they worked in appears to have changed. In the past few years, they built many care homes for Balhousie Group - whose period of rapid expansion is perhaps at an end. Muirfield's specialist rendering division was very successful at winning local authority housing contracts, although I imagine that much local housing stock has been upgraded now. Muirfields built several schools over the past few years, but changes in procurement when the East of Scotland Hubco framework was won by Robertsons must have had an effect.
As an aside, the Hubs, just like PFI before them, have served to reduce choice and drive out competition, which will eventually push prices up … the opposite of what was intended.
As for the catalyst of Muirfield’s demise, we can only speculate. According to reporting in The Courier, the firm’s managing director left after a few months in post, then the finance director quit a month before they went into administration – that’s always a bad sign. In other cases where a contractor has plenty of work and a decent “pipeline”, as Muirfields appeared to have, yet still went into administration, two factors are often blamed.
Poor cashflow caused by difficulty getting the money in, or a lack of working capital from the firm’s backers, eventually strangles the firm. Both of these financial throttles lead to delays in paying suppliers, sub-contractors and finally their employees … as a result, the firm's credit rating drops, their accounts with the merchants are put on “stop”, and the firm struggles to get completion bonds. Business becomes unsustainable when the rumours spread to the extent that workers walk off site.
As I say, we can only speculate. However, if you know about construction, you’ll know that firms regularly go bust, so that over the course of a decade or two you end up dealing with the same folk, in the same capacity, but working for a different firm each time. If you think about it, each contract won comes at a price. By winning a tender, you’ve come in below everyone else and by definition that means either your estimators have missed something, your margin is vanishingly slim, or worst of all you’re having to “buy” work merely to keep the business turning over.
If you know about investment … you’ll be aware that building contractors aren’t a good punt. In fact they’ve been trying to turn themselves into “property services” or “facilities management” companies for years – because the margins are thin, the return on capital is poor, and the risks are high for general contractors. The people who invest in them seem to underestimate the challenge of funding contracting firms, with their endless appetite for working capital. Short term, you can use a contractor’s turnover to draw capital out of a business – longer term, money has to be ploughed back in if it’s going to survive.
Balfour Beatty, the largest civils and building contractor in Britain, has performed poorly for years by various measures, including that of its share price against the stock market index. You’d be much safer to invest your pension in a drug company, a car manufacturer, or an inventor of widgets. Probably best to avoid the banking sector, though. ;-)
A couple of years ago, I wrote that W.H. Brown Construction had gone into administration: it joined a list of large Dundee contractors who have gone bust in the past few years. Before that I mentioned Charles Gray (Builders) Ltd., who were the biggest contractor in Dundee and one of the largest in Scotland at that time, employing many hundreds of people. They went down in 1994, during my Year Out, and that came as a shock because Grays were turning over more at 1994 prices, from memory around £40m, than Muirfields’ turnover of £48m at today’s prices … if you adjust for inflation Grays were two or three times as large as Muirfields.
In between Gray’s and W.H. Brown’s failures, Taycon, Torith, Forman and several others have gone, too. Now Muirfield Contracts joins the unhappy list.
The irony of Dundee’s ailing contracting sector is that the city is in the midst of a multi-billion pound growth spurt. It’s the first since the glorious decade from the mid-1960’s to the mid-1970’s, when Dundee was practically rebuilt. During that period, the Overgate was re-developed, the Tay Road Bridge constructed, Dundee University expanded all the way back to the New Hawkhill, the Wellgate Centre was built, along with countless new schools, many tower blocks built, and Ninewells Hospital, the largest teaching hospital in Europe, was created. Dundee’s contractors boomed: Grays, J.B. Hay, and John McConnachie’s firms all benefitted and grew with the city.
In the 2010’s, the Central Waterfront is being redeveloped – only this time none of those firms are around to contribute, nor are there any Muirfields, Browns, or Toriths. That leaves the next tier of contractors such as George Martin Builders, Marshall Construction of Perth, and Shepherds of Forfar – plus incoming firms whose interest in the city will pass once the glamour jobs are finished. So far Interserve have converted the Tay Hotel into a Malmaison, McAlpines are working on the Waterfront’s infrastructure, and BAM have just begun on the V&A’s groundworks.
Other business failures have changed the shape of the construction industry in Tayside. For example, there are lots of laminate and furniture firms in the River Tay corridor – both fabricators and merchants – and for years I wondered why that was. Shore Laminates in Perth, Lam-Art in Dundee, Tayfirth Laminates in Dundee, and the largest of them, JTC Furniture Group who occupy the former Timex factory on Harrison Road in Dundee.
I discovered that all of these firms (and several others) were the direct or indirect offspring of Tay Valley Joinery, the furniture firm built up by James Chalmers, a distant relation. TVJ was set up in 1971, and from the old bleachworks at Claverhouse they grew to have two factories in Dundee and one in Perth until 1984, when “a catalogue of unusual business events coincided to bring about its demise”. Those who served their time with TVJ went on to start their own firms, and James Chalmers went on to start JTC, so at least their collective knowledge wasn’t lost to the area.
Perhaps that’s how it goes with building contractors – their existence is tenuous, even when they appear to be well established. Look at the recent influx of firms such as Graham Construction and Lagan Construction from Northern Ireland – their home market has dried up, many domestic competitors have gone bust, and now they’re searching for work in Scotland. Look also at what happened to one of the longest-established Edinburgh contractors, Melville Dundas.
I clearly recall when Melville Dundas, who were a large, well-known 200-year old contractor, went bust at the end of the 1990's. I also recall trying to discover what happened to them. There was little information to be had, so I began a staircase of phonecalls towards the heart of the business, explaining that this was a press enquiry, and trying to resist the requests to speak to the administrator. Eventually I reached a P.A. who promised someone would ring me back. No-one ever did.
For whatever reason, it always proves difficult to discover much about building contractors, and soon after that Melville Dundas ceased to exist, and both their assets and staff were spread to the winds.
The list of dead contractors goes on … but perhaps only John Stodart, the chairman of Azure Investments, knows what went wrong at Muirfields. He bought the contractor 18 months ago, and has presided over its failure. Graham Huband at The Courier is carrying out an ongoing piece of investigative journalism into Stodart's affairs, such the other Dundee firms which he took over and which have since gone into administration…
As an aside, you would think that with the construction industry forming around 7-8% of the economy and the workforce, the rise and progress of its companies would be recorded somewhere. You’d be wrong. Only a handful of the biggest contractors bother to record themselves (I can think of books on John Laing, Balfour Beatty and Edmund Nuttalls) whereas all the others are lost to history. Perhaps the Abertay Historical Society should collect the histories of firms such as Charlie Grays, J.B. Hay, McConnachie’s, W.H. Brown, Taycon, Torith, Forman and Muirfields – along with housebuilders like Bett Brothers – before they pass out of memory, like their predecessors have. As an aside, you can read my piece about Dorran Construction and Dye Builders here - link.