Mark Chalmers

Preface: I wrote this piece in November 2011, when the winning proposal was revealed after the conclusion of a design competition.  As it explains the back story behind the Gardens fiasco in my previous piece, I thought it worth uploading here.

The current proposals for Union Terrace Gardens in Aberdeen are a perfect demonstration of Mark Twain’s belief that, “History doesn't repeat itself - at best it sometimes rhymes.”  They are the latest in a long line of unbuilt, and unbuildable, schemes which chime down the decades.

Lying to the north side of Union Bridge, there have been many proposals to gentrify Denburn Park and the Gardens.   At the moment, they look similar to Princes Street Gardens in Edinburgh: a linear park with mature trees, grass and flower beds, part of which is shaped like an amphitheatre.  In both cases the gardens lie in the city centre where the higher edge is a busy city street, and the lower edge a railway line.  The grassy slopes are well used on sunny summer afternoons, although at night they tend to be deserted other than by a few dossers and drinkers.

Most previous schemes relied on roofing over the Aberdeen-Inverness railway line and Denburn by-pass: the top level becomes a park raised up to the same level as Union Terrace to make access easier; part of the gardens remained sunken, with the railway running under that; and finally the suppressed Denburn flowing in a culvert beneath it all.  As it happens, these proposals have been rejected several times, just like the original idea by Tom Scott Sutherland was before the war.

The first modern-era scheme came from Gordon Cullen, the well-known urban designer who came to Aberdeen in 1985 when the Scottish Development Agency invited his consultancy, Price & Cullen, to undertake a study of the city centre.  The brief was to examine Union Terrace Gardens, with a view to roofing over the railway line and the Denburn Link road, as well as increasing the size of the city’s “green lung”, and remaking connections across the valley of the Denburn.  Cullen’s recommendations were rejected, but his ideas were seized upon by Ian Wood.

In fact, re-shaping this area has become something of an idée fixee for Ian Wood, a local businessman.  His first attempt to transform the Gardens came in 1987 under the guise of the Aberdeen Beyond 2000 campaign, where a committee of local business and civic interests attempted to masterplan the city centre to promote economic growth.  Wood was chairman of the group, but Aberdeen Beyond 2000 failed to gain much traction, so nothing was built.

Gordon Cullen’s and Aberdeen Beyond 2000’s failures were followed by the Aberdeen City Centre Partnership’s unsuccessful 1991 “Heart of Aberdeen” scheme, promoted by a mixture of business and public figures.  A few years later came the £30 million Millennium Square project of 1997, which once again proposed to irrevocably alter the Gardens – but a Lottery bid for funds to create a giant glass-roofed winter garden alongside Union Terrace came to nothing. 

By now you can tell that a pattern is developing … yet Wood’s preoccupation wasn’t forgotten.  He was interviewed by Jeremy Cresswell for the book “North Sea Oil Moguls” in 2005, and spoke about his ambition, a massive collective enterprise to improve the city – “When I was chairing Grampian Enterprise, I saw the revamp of Union Terrace Gardens as one thing that might have a huge impact.  It’s that scale of enterprise that’s lacking.  It might still come.”

The latest iteration of the “City Garden Project”, known until recently as the “City Square Project”, was launched by Ian Wood at a press conference in November 2008.  He pledged £50 million towards the new scheme to redevelop the Gardens, although that only meets part of the anticipated cost.  In fact, on the City Garden group’s own figures, the project will cost £140 million.  Much of that will come from “Tax Incremental Financing”, which means that increased business rates will pay for it.  That must raise anxieties amongst Aberdeen’s hard-pressed businesses.

The project has taken three years to reach this point, where a design competition has yielded six schemes.  Now, the extent of the proposed transformation is clear.  There is the serious matter of destroying the city centre’s only green lung, and chopping down many handsome trees: each of the six schemes reduces the extent of greenery in order to form large areas of hard landscaping.

In several schemes, the gardens become more like Castle Terrace in Edinburgh, creating a “plaza” on top where farmers’ markets, carnival jugglers and political rallies can do their respective piece.  Yet the north-easterly aspect of Union Terrace is ill-suited to public gatherings, and creating a vast open space will open the Terrace up to the biting wind which howls in from the North Sea.  The sunken form of the current gardens provides very necessary shelter.

If you’re dead set on creating a City Square, you should first consider that Aberdeen already has a large urban plaza, at the knuckle of Union Street and King Street, and it was the hub of the city’s life for hundreds of years: the Castlegate.  The City Garden scheme aims to create “a civic space for major outdoor events, gatherings, festivals and concerts”.  Perhaps the Castlegate could be better utilised?

Creating a “cosmopolitan city centre café quarter” is another aim of the City Garden Project, yet nearby Belmont Street has innumerable coffee shops.  The proposal also aims to create “an inspirational building to house art and artists, sculptures and sculptors, dance and dancers, music and musicians.”  Yet just across the road from Union Terrace Gardens lie His Majesty’s Theatre, plus the city’s art galleries. 

It is also telling that Peacock Visual Arts had a scheme to build a new gallery in the Gardens: it had received full planning permission, secured £9.5 million of funding and was scheduled to break ground late November 2009… before being rejected by the city councillors once Ian Wood’s proposals broke cover.  It seems that a realistic prospect was sacrificed for an unbuildable vision.

The City Garden scheme certainly doesn’t have broad support - a majority voted “no” in the public consultation exercise - yet at the launch of the project in 2008, First Minister Alex Salmond said: “I cannot emphasise more strongly that for anything like this to happen and to be able to harness public funds it has to have the support of folk in the North-east, and Aberdonians in particular.”

Perhaps the final word should go to Professor Robin Webster, whose students looked at the Union Terrace Gardens “problem” many times.  Webster wrote a letter to the P&J, “The schemes propose an all or nothing approach, whereas some more modest links across the road and railway, along with redesigned graded access from the perimeter, could resolve the problems without sacrificing the gardens themselves.”  Judging by other letters to the local papers, it seems that many Aberdonians hope that this proposal will go the way of previous schemes…

Postscript:  And so it came to pass.  On 22nd August 2012, Aberdeen City Council rejected the Ian Wood scheme by 22 votes to 20, and the day after, Wood retracted his offer of £50m.  You can be sure, though, that the scheme will resurface some day, in another form…

It’s summertime on the east coast of Scotland.  The weather is close and muggy, yet with nothing on TV but repeats of Reg Vardy’s “Genocide on the Buses”; the cinemas screening a Disnae film featuring a grumpy Connolly Rex and three miniature ginger John Gordon Sinclairs; and the capital full of a desire for comedy - but empty of streetcars - it’s time once again to look north of the Central Belt.  That's where the real news is breaking…

I’ve written before about the awkward relationship between Dundee and Aberdeen: with experience of both, I can’t help but compare them.  Comparisons are invidious and all that... but the two share the same rivalry as Edinburgh and Glasgow, and despite only 60 miles’ worth of Scotland lying between them, their advocates believe they are a world apart.  Experience teaches that they’re not, yet today’s developments in the Union Terrace Gardens fiasco have shown up the gulf between their ambitions.

An industrial bypass
A recent trip along the North Deeside Road at Peterculter, in the city’s western suburbs, revealed that the former International School is still standing empty, having been decanted to make way for the Aberdeen Western Peripheral Route.  Despite many expensively-won compulsory purchases, and despite the glittering prize of Mr Trump’s “best golf course in the world” as a destination just beyond the planned new Don crossing north of the city, the AWPR is no further forward.

It’s ironic that the International School, with a terrific range of modern facilities, and sitting on a beautiful wooded site in the Dee Valley, lies empty while nothing happens on the by-pass – whilst inner city state schools crumble.

I have an ongoing project which relates to the Modernist factories strung along Dundee’s Kingsway, and the recent demolition of NCR’s former cash machine plant at Gourdie was another waypoint along that journey.  The bypass itself is working fine, but the empty factories which have been demolished over the past few years (two NCR plants, Low & Bonar’s head office, Valentine's greetings cards factory, Bonar Long transformers), and the empty units which still stand (William Lows’ former HQ, William Halleys) tell their own story. 

The city still needs industrial regeneration, to balance the arts, cultural and educational work which is going on: the newest hope is that wind turbine manufacturing will take root in the docks.

Retail
Both the Overgate in Dundee, and Union Square in Aberdeen, appear to be doing OK, despite the double dip recession... but while the Murraygate and High Street in Dundee have been pedestrianised and prettified, the granite mile of Union Street in Aberdeen is still sorely in need of regeneration.  Over the past few years, retailers such as Jaeger, Mothercare, Bruce Millars’ music store, and E&M’s department store have shut down or moved out.  Charity shops and estate agents have taken up some units, but there are many rental voids... which leads you to suspect that the focus in Aberdeen is wrong.  Perhaps folk have been distracted by Union Terrace Gardens.

By contrast, folk are starting to accept that the efforts of Mike Galloway, the city development director in Dundee, are improving the waterfront.  Acceptance is grudging, because the city centre has been in chaos for months as the approach roads to the road bridge are realigned, and Tayside House is demolished.  However, setting aside those grudges and the agendas of provincial politics – I reckon that eventually Galloway will be mentioned in the same breath as Mackison (who laid out the Whitehall Crescent area) and Thomson (who built the City Square and eastern suburbs Taybank and Craigie).  All three prove that you need someone wearing a big hat named “city architect, planner, engineer or development director”... if you want cohesion in urban design.

Culture
The DCA - Dundee Contemporary Arts centre - emerged when Seagate Printmakers’ Workshop outgrew its premises, and various agencies clubbed together to build a set of galleries, studios, cinemas and a restaurant on the Nethergate.  When Aberdeen’s Peacock Printmakers tried to do the same thing, commissioning a new gallery in the “Trainie Park” on Union Terrace, their plans were derailed by Ian Wood.  The ongoing circus surrounding Union Terrace Gardens does Aberdeen no favours at all, and in fact the decision taken todayby the city’s councillors to finally kill the scheme (which was what prompted this article) took far long to happen.

Similarly, while Dundee’s McManus Galleries recently re-opened after a thorough revamp by Page & Park, Aberdeen’s Art Galleries on Schoolhill are tired and badly in need of refurbishment – but plans seem to have stalled, once again lacking funding.  As with Peacock, there is a lack of money but perhaps underlying that is a lack of will to make things happen.  Finally there is the V&A, and despite scepticism in the city at the marketing campaign which has wiped out the “Beanotown”-style marketing of Dundee in an attempt to market the city to the more sophisticated international art clique, the project has gained some traction. 

Its real test may be to attract revenue once it’s been open for a few years.

Energy
I wrote elsewhere about Conran Roche’s 1989 scheme for a North Sea oil visitor attraction in Aberdeen: called Bravo, it was intended to be built off Beach Boulevarde, but fell victim to all the usual funding problems, and a downturn in the oil industry.  The private sector were reluctant to foot the entire bill, far less seed capital, but the council didn't have the means to kickstart the project.  Now it seems that Son of Bravo, the Aberdeen Energy Futures Centre – designed by RMJM, is heading the same way for the same reasons.

The fear must be that when the oil industry winds down, it will leave nothing of value or merit in Aberdeen – apart from the Piper Alpha memorial.  Here is a scenario worth considering: when natives crow about how well the city has done over the past 35 years, Aberdeen’s detractors usually scoff and ask what will happen when the oil runs out?  The truth is that new fields continue to be discovered, so the oil may last for another 35 years; yet it’s possible that demand will fade before the oil does.  The world has shifted against carbon, after all, and all the new hydrogen fuel cell, wave power and solar PV technology hasn't been developed to no avail.

Against that background, moves to invest in alternative energy through fabrication plants at Dundee and Methil seem prescient.

Media
Although no-one would have expected it even ten years ago, the newspapers in both cities are now owned by Dundee’s DC Thomson, the famously patriarchal yet anti-union publishing company.  They attract fierce loyalty among their employees perhaps because, as George Rosie wrote, sentimentality lies at the heart of their appeal.  To their credit, Thomsons rescued Aberdeen Journals from a lingering death of falling circulation and plummeting standards of journalism – and perhaps it’s better to have a Scottish-owned media rather than relying on the Murdoch press.  Thomsons are in the process of retrenching, having closed their West Ward printworks in Dundee: it isn’t inconceivable that their facilities in Aberdeen will also reduce.

Contractors
W.H. Brown Construction went into administration a couple of days ago: it joins a list of large Dundee contractors who have gone bust in the past few years.  A previous article mentioned Charles Gray, and since their demise Taycon, Torith and several others have gone, too.  This tells its own story about the state of the construction industry, although other far older firms such as Melville Dundas failed during the “good times”… as did firms in the land between the two cities, Burness of Montrose being the most notable example.

In Aberdeen, you only have the choice between three large contractors: Morrisons, Robertsons and Mansells (formerly Hall & Tawse).  One is technically an Inverness firm, another from Elgin, and Mansells have recently closed down much of their operations in the city, including the well-regarded Hall & Tawse joinery shops.  Thankfully, the smaller contractors in the area, such as Bancon and CHAP appear to be weathering the storm better.

Envoi
The four best-known development proposals of the past decade have all been vigorously opposed: the by-pass (Aberdeen Western Peripheral Route); the Peacock-sponsored Arts Centre; the various Union Terrace “City Gardens” schemes; and Trump’s golf course at Menie.  Another contentious scheme is Stewart Milne’s move to relocate Aberdeen Football Club from Pittodrie to a new stadium at Westhill – which has failed more than once to gain planning approval and stumbled again this week.

All this perhaps hints at a deeper psycho-social issue, not unique to Aberdonians, but part of the Scots mindset: the self-fulfilling “doomed to failure” prophecy.  So many things are dismissed as “just a load of shite” ... now, make it thus.  Perhaps allied to that, the opposition to each scheme has a nasty habit of resorting to ad hominem criticism: witness the personal attacks on Donald Trump, Stewart Milne and Ian Wood from the respective “anti” campaigns, and more recently the online petition by the “pro” side to unseat the council leader Barney Crockett because his administration voted against the City Gardens.  They have gone beyond criticisms of policy into claims of incompetence.

The point I make is that in Dundee, the V&A gained lots of public support and while there were critical voices, no-one that I’m aware of tried to block it or petition against it.  Similarly, the Waterfront regeneration hasn’t been subject to planning appeals or court injunctions.  Yet (for the sake of balance) Dundonians are just as thrawn, and given the chance will drive potential investment away from the city before it evens arrives – such as the Ford motor parts factory which hadn’t even been built when the unions began arguing about working practices.  The men from Dearborn, Michigan were perturbed, and if I recall correctly, the factory was built instead at Bridgend in Wales.

The central paradox in considering Dundee and Aberdeen appears to lie in the relationship between wealth and action: while there are many wealthy individuals in Aberdeen, the city council appears to be too broke to make things happen.  It has closed down swimming baths, ice rinks and libraries, and doesn’t have the cash to build grand projects such as Union Terrace Gardens, far less doing the essentials.  Seemingly unrelated to that, property and land prices in the city seem to be holding up well.

Dundee, on the other hand, is looked down upon by some as being a poor place (“you’ve only got one shoe”, being a favourite jibe of football crowds).  Yet redevelopment goes ahead, regardless of the fact that property and land prices haven’t held up that well.  Perhaps, despite the fond belief of Aberdeen’s capitalists that the American model of success based on extraction and consumption still holds, a city also needs belief in its own capacity for reinvention.  Stewart Milne appeared on TV tonight bemoaning the fact that the council lacked vision: in fact, it lacks money and underlying that is a deeper lack of self-belief.

In case you’re wondering, the dragon and the leopard are Dundee’s and Aberdeen’s respective crest bearers on their civic coats of arms.  If it came down to a square go, I suspect the dragon would “take” the leopard.  While comparisons may be invidious, they’re easier to resist than civic stereotypes…

Last time I wrote about how architects think, I chose a metaphor coined by Isaiah Berlin - but when the piece was published in Prospect (the forerunner of Urban Realm) I discovered that someone else had used the same turn of phrase in the same issue!

There’s a subtle irony in that, because I’d illustrated the differences between generalists and specialists using Isaiah Berlin’s Hedgehog and Fox metaphor – where the fox knows many small things, but the hedgehog knows one big thing.  In other words, to survive, the fox has to be a scavenger and omnivore (a master of many trades), whereas the hedgehog has specialised by eating worms and defending itself using its spines.

Arguably, only another “hedgehog” would know that metaphor and choose to apply it to architecture... so this time, I’ll begin instead with one of the many small things I know. The German term, fachidiot, or “discipline fool” is the opposite of a polymath.  It neatly describes someone who knows their own specialisation, but is wholly ignorant about everything else in the world.

Just how narrow our view is was thrown into sharp relief a few days ago, when I dumped my internet supplier after suffering weeks of glacial download speeds.  While they told me the problem spread right across Scotland, another provider suggested that their competitor’s main internet node had failed somewhere in the Central Belt.  In the process of swearing at Richard Branson, cursing BT’s noisy twisted pair cable, and trying to decode jargon, I discovered that internet companies employ fachidiots, almost exclusively.

Beyond the realms of ADSL Max and ping tests, lies a physical map of Dundee carved up into familiar-sounding but unknown districts by telecoms hedgehogs.  At the centre of each one sits a physical node – such as Baxter, Claverhouse, Fairmuir, Park and Steeple.  They’re superimposed onto the Bartholomew streetmap of the city and clash with postcode districts, electoral wards, power grids.  Not at all well known, the cobwebs of copper form a network we stare past each day, yet don’t recognise.

Dundee’s internet nodes sit within telephone exchanges, many built during the 1950’s and 1960’s when Post Office Telephones greatly expanded the system.  The large floorplates required for the Strowger mechanical exchanges are now empty in many cases, as the System X cabinets which replaced them are much smaller, faster, and digital.  The technology is also hidden inside grey metal cabinets.  Similarly, while the Property Services Agency’s architects once celebrated the development of telecoms - witness the Post Office Tower in London - latterly other parts of the system have gone undercover. 

Many buildings hide in plain sight – Terry Farrell’s MI6 building on the South Bank in London, and Telehouse in the Royal Docks, are good examples.  However, while we have an impression of what the spies and spymasters might do, the function of the big black box at Telehouse is less obvious.  According to various accounts, Telehouse is the main internet node for the UK; whereas BT’s satellite earth station at Goonhilly on the very tip of the Lizard in Cornwall with its many huge satellite dishes, looks very like a place where masses of data is channelled, the node in the Docklands is discrete and sub rosa.

Similarly, Craigowl sits on the ridge of the Sidlaw Hills behind Dundee and to the layman, the masts on its summit could be TV, radio or cellphone.  In reality, they carry air traffic control and military communications relays: investigative journalist Duncan Campbell revealed that the mass of aerials on Craigowl formed the northern end of Backbone, a microwave communications network which would come into its own during wartime.  There are many electronic antlers on top of Craigowl, but you wouldn’t know exactly what each one is for unless you interrogate the fachidiots, as Campbell did.

Telehouse and Craigowl are part of a trend towards anonymity, and the guiding impulse of the fachidiot to make things ever more opaque.  Years ago, British Telecom came in the shape of a bright yellow cartoon bird called Busby, and hundreds of those chubby yellow Dodge vans which were stabled at a depot in the Longtown industrial estate.  During the 1980’s, it was relatively easy to identify parts of the BT network – most of which dated back to GPO telephones days – thanks to the Busby-yellow vans parked outside their buildings.  I don’t know when they started disappearing, but one day BT’s livery changed and the vans were around no longer. 

While the Post Office Tower is a good example of public works architecture, arguably Telehouse, Craigowl and the workings of the BT network were conceived by fachidiots.  They ignore the self-evident truth that everything which isn’t private becomes public.  Everything built by the state or corporations is public, (although they might argue against that), since the taxpayer and the shareholder paid for it.  We are the beneficial owners.  A vanishingly small proportion of each of these secret places belong to each one of us, through our income tax, or pension scheme.

The blank facade, the anonymous box and the fenced compound are the antithesis of an architecture parlante, and while these places provide fodder for conspiracy theorists, they also provide a hidden dimension to the city.  Finding out their purpose isn’t so much hard work, as finding a way past the fachidiots to perceive a Dundee streetmap which has been redrawn.

The motor car has almost completed its journey.  It started off as a means of transportation, then become a social signifier, and gradually an extension of your personality.  Soon, it might become little more than white goods on wheels, a commodity plugged in each night and recharged like an electric toothbrush.  Having taken the train to work for several years, I appreciate the contrast between personal and public transport and also realise – ignoring the cost of fuel, the bane of traffic congestion, and punitive road tolling – that mass-produced design is still a magical thing.

I recall that Manchester architect Ian Simpson was Alfa Romeo’s first customer for the new “8C” a few years ago, and that prompted me to speculate not so much on which cars designers drive, but the subtle forces which inform their decisions.  There are the personal associations we make with certain types of car, and then there is the role of the ad men, those pluggers, promoters and hucksters who push things in our direction.  Years ago, a book called The Hidden Persuaders was written about them, and if anything their influence has become ever more pervasive.

A Herald Vitesse, from an era before lifestyle was codified

Where driving was once celebrated for its own sake, advertisers have shifted their emphasis towards pushing “lifestyle”, that cliché which is a greatly debased version of Alfred Adler’s original concept which encapsulated how we approach living in general.  Interestingly, Adler is better known for coining the term “inferiority complex”, which is something else the ad men play on when trying to shift tin boxes…  As originally conceived, lifestyle was a holistic term, whereas it now means appealing to our materialist side by fitting cars with aircon, MP3 players and Satnav by integrating them into our emotional gestalt – then emphasising those features over handling and road-holding.

Designers, on the other hand, are a superficial breed and it should be easy to market cars to them on the basis of appearance.  Right?

Well, it worked for Audi.  The Audi “TT” was launched over a decade ago, and immediately reached out to those who like to think they appreciate good design.  Efforts were made to align the TT with the Bauhaus, yet arguably Audi didn't use Bauhaus design principles to design a car which ended up looking like the TT, because the purity of its aerodynamics was compromised (ironically) in the effort to make it resemble the Porsche 356 or a pre-war Auto Union racing car.  They tied themselves in unreasoning knots.  That the Bauhaus was mentioned repeatedly in press releases was down to the advertising men: Round One to the Hidden Persuaders.

The issue becomes ever more interesting when you realise that the Porsche 356 *was* designed, or perhaps more accurately, engineered, in accordance with the principles of the Bauhaus.  It held with the Form follows Function credo, and arose from a strict economy of means plus a close study of the nature of the materials.  It’s said that the Bauhaus invented industrial design as a discipline, but as far as I’m aware, no production cars were created there. 

Group B rally Quattro

Porsche isn’t Audi, either, yet the Audi company had a recent archetype which certainly did follow Bauhaus precepts: the original Quattro (which motoring journalists amusingly refer to as the Ur-Quattro), penned by British designer Martin Smith.  Whereas the TT apes the curves of Ferry Porsche’s 356, and the VW Beetle before that – the Quattro is a far better approximation of the “severe, geometric, undecorated” form which the Bauhaus proposed.  It was also built to do a job: win the World Rally Championship, so those big intakes and blistered arches naturally followed its function.  It’s ironic, then, that non-car designers (and hairdressers, apparently) prefer the TT…

I’ve known several architects who drove Scandinavian cars.  One owned a classic Saab 99 which had covered an interplanetary mileage and whose flanks were scabbed with rust, making the car look as if it had been strafed.  Saab, which went out of business last year, was known for its idiosyncratic designs: the ignition lock was set into the transmission tunnel, the wraparound windscreen follows a tighter radius than other cars’, and the long overhangs with a very short wheelbase made their cars unlike anything else on the road.  The firm began as an aircraft company, and during the ‘80’s and ‘90’s it was particularly good at marketing its cars as aerodynamic, bred from its Viggen jet fighter.

A classic Saab 99 with Minilites…

As with Audi, it had a great heritage in rallying, but instead the Hidden Persuaders latched on to the dual sheep/ wolf mentality of designers – and architects are no different in that regard.  Whilst you may need to stand out, as a lone wolf who markets himself as a designer with recognisably individual solutions, you don’t want to stand out too much, otherwise you’ll part company with the design flock.  In comparison to Audi’s Bauhaus spiel, Saab’s appeal perhaps lay in its predictable idisyncracy: just different enough to the norm to satisfy the conformal individualist.

Old-school Citroëns once attracted the same clientele.  I recall attending a Dundee Motor Show in the early 1980’s, when it was held in Douglasfield Works, an enormous spinning mill built by Jute Industries in the late 1950’s, then abandoned and demolished around 1985.  Edward & Stewart, the local Citroën dealers, had a stand, and under the white banners with italicised red Helvetica branding, there were pocket-sized brochures with moody photography in lush colours.  I later found out that Sarah Moon had worked for Citroën, from the “SM” onwards, and her high art/ fashion pedigree showed.  It had emotional appeal, rather than the colder, mechanistic design of the Saab.

Anyhow, if the beautifully-marketed cars were one facet of the company’s appeal, the cars themselves offered many things.  The landmark model was the DS, which brutalist architect Alison Smithson even wrote a book about, and it was followed by the CX and latterly the XM.  Each had a little less Citroën magic about it – but with distinctive styling, a low ride height achieved with fiendishly complex pneumatic suspension, and headlights which swivelled as you steered, many big Citroëns were bought by the architectural faction, from the Smithsons to Jonathan Meades who travelled around Britain in an XM.  Like the Audi, or the Saab, they were a statement car.

Citroën SM promo photo

However, the country whose cars have real design allure is Italy.  Given exotics like Ferrari, Lamborghini and Maserati to work with, the ad men have an easy job to convince you on style, flair and formal innovation.  Other marques interpret Italian design differently – but the trick is to allude to supercars whilst shifting larger volumes.  Lancia and Alfa Romeo succeeded partly thanks to something unique to the Italian car industry, the styling carrozeria such as Pininfarina, Ital Design and Bertone.  While they built show cars and prototypes on aluminium spaceframes, they had to engineer production cars using the monocoque structure which 99% of cars are pressed from.  The invisible rift which grew up between the Italians’ detail and structural designers is worth exploring.

It’s said that there are only seven stories in the world – each one we tell is a variation on one or other of them.  Similarly, people are often characterised as belonging to one of a handful of archetypes, which have fuelled psychological theories for the past century and a bit.  Designers are likewise typecast as having a head either for structure, or for detail.  While product designers like Alessi and Memphis are biased towards the details, we may believe the carrozeria have to concentrate on structure: as with couturiers, the cut and hang of the garment is all…

Alfa Romeo Brera

Anyone who sets up this proposition is asking for it to be demolished.  Cars are complex, and none can exist exclusively in the realm of either detail or structure – we need to experience both the micro scale, and to understand the overarching macro arrangement.  Likewise, in order to write a piece like this, I need to be talk about detail, yet become steeped in structure.  All this mucking around with concepts, facts and opinions needs to be organised within a logical framework.  A formal structure is the obvious way to do that.  So should I eat, drink and breathe structure, like a Doozer?

No.  Wrong.  Bad.  Mistake.

The proof of this misconception lies in the most detailed of detail things – the car key.  Alfa Romeo “do” car keys particularly well, because they realise that the things which you come into contact with most (door handles, steering wheel, gear knob) are crucial in shaping your opinion of the car as a whole.  The material and tactile details of the key, transponder and fob tell you all about the quality of the product.  The Hidden Designers realise that selling cars to the design-conscious sometimes hinges on little more than making them feel good, using leather, chrome and enamel.

Aston Martin Bulldog, a one-off designed by William Towns

Of course, car designers themselves still dream of creating a modern Tatra – a wide, sleek saloon with a rear-mounted V8.  Peugeot created a 908 RC concept car which excited fellow car designers, but would have sold in tiny numbers had it gone into production.  Or perhaps they hope to be given the unique chance which William Towns was given, when he designed the Bulldog for Aston Martin – the most uncompromising car to emerge for decades, and most likely the utter polar opposite of what a Bauhaus designer would have come up with…

My next piece for the printed edition of Urban Realm will be contribution to the debate on Scottish identity … and after that perhaps a sidelong glance at the architecture of our car-making industry.

Cumnock and the Doon Valley badly need a new impetus.  If you can leave the M74 motorway for the A70, you soon pass through Glespin, with its wall of grim sheds which lie derelict after use by Ramages as a distribution centre.  Next comes Muirkirk, its boarded-up shops with empty lots between are book-ended by dereliction: and at 5pm on a March Saturday, the main street is patrolled by wee neds, who are friendly enough but wander across the road with blithe indifference to the coal trucks that hammer up and down it.  Many miles later, Cumnock has a number of local government buildings, which contribute a higher than average amount to the local economy, the story of so many post-industrial communities.

Yet there is tremendous mineral wealth here still: the road passes several large opencast coal mines.  They feed a railhead at Killoch, on the site of a deep mine which Thatcher’s government shut down; nearby is the site of the Barony Colliery, another superpit of the 1950’s which was closed prematurely, and stripped of everything bar its “A” frame headstock.  It is a token left in a wasteland.  After Killoch, you can leave the A70 and turn southwards at Drongan, and head towards Dalmellington, passing the gates of yet another opencast.

You quickly leave what civilisation there is behind … the scruffy houses on the edge of town give way to fields of sheep with grubby coats, then a few miles later, the Dalmellington road climbs into the uplands, and evidence of former coal mining activity is everywhere.  This is not the couthy Burns country of Valentines’ postcards, but one of the poorest and most run-down areas in Britain.  Where I’m headed lies in the dead heart of East Ayrshire, and would surely be a stopping-off point on a modern version of Edwin Muir’s “Scottish Journey”.  This area certainly fits Muir’s characterisation of a country becoming lost to history: East Ayrshire takes in some of the oldest industrial landscapes in the world, yet today most are derelict.

A few miles further, and you reach Patna.  Looking south-eastwards along the main road from the bank of the River Doon, you spot an old furnace clinker bing and a couple of tall chimney stacks.  These remind you why people settled at Patna: it’s located on the very edge of the Ayrshire coalfield, and coal, fireclay, iron ore and limestone all lay nearby.  Coal mining thrived in this area, and brought in its wake ironworks and brickworks: the Dalmellington Iron Company built Dunsakin – a few miles south of Patna – as an ironworks in 1848, and in due course it became part of Bairds & Dalmellington, in 1885.  In Patna itself, its cluster of Victorian buildings sit on the river, and beyond lie streets of inter-war maisonettes, built for the miners and ironworkers who once worked for Bairds & Dalmellington. 

The ironworks at Dunaskin had three good decades, but by 1921 demand had dropped due to competition from Lanarkshire, and this was compounded by the fact that the iron smelters at Dunaskin were old-fashioned and in need of serious investment.  A strike put the “tin hat” on matters, and the ironworks shut.  The furnaces were demolished in 1927-8, then a few years later, the site was redeveloped as a brickworks.   The nearby Dunaskin Washery was retained to serve nearby collieries, and other ironworks buildings were adapted, such as the iron furnaces’ blowing house, a handsome Georgian affair which became the location for the brickmaking machinery: a conveyor fed ground clay from the mills at the back of the site.  The brickmakers built a transverse-arch kiln in 1928, then added a 24 chamber Belgian Kiln, built in 1935 by William Cleghorn of Newmains. 

The brickworks became part of Scottish Brick Corporation around the same time that the coal industry was nationalised, but by 1976, the brickworks had suffered the same fate as the ironworks, and two-and-a-half million bricks lay stockpiled, unsold, before the works shut down.   A decade on, plans were laid for an industrial museum: ten years later again, a heritage centre was developed to tell the story of the industries in the Doon Valley using the remaining structures on the site.  It suffered from its remoteness, and in 2005 the museum failed after the local council withdrew its funding.  Patna is a remote place, so low visitor numbers should have come as no surprise.

Apparently Scottish Coal still have a right of reversion, and the site could end up being developed for opencast: meantime, the buildings lie abandoned and have decayed dramatically.  Nearby Patna has nothing to live for, either.  As an exercise, I tried and failed to find accommodation here: the hotels in Patna lie boarded up, there are hardly any B&B’s within a 20 mile radius, and those which I phoned weren’t interested in opening.  They merely gave me the number for someone else, who then did the same.  It’s clear that tourism is not the answer: yet rather than hold these places up as examples of blight, candidates for the next Carbuncles, or have government officials refer slyly to areas of high SIMD (the Scottish Index of Multiple Deprivations, the latest euphemism for poverty), something radical could be done.

These worn-out towns and villages should be bulldozed.  They’ve served their purpose.  They were built to serve the ironworks and deep mines of the Ayrshire coalfield, but those have gone, so folk should be resettled where the work is today.  Scottish Coal have several vast opencasts in this part of Ayrshire, so perhaps a new energy-based town could be created, becoming a centre of excellence for clean coal and biomass technology.  Coal comes in by rail, as do trees from economic forestry in Galloway: power is generated, raw materials are processed, research jobs are created, a cluster of companies builds machinery to capitalise on the results.  Anderson Strathclyde disappeared when the deep coal industry died; but Terex succeeds because surface mining needs earthmovers, and so forth.

Alongside renewables like wind and wave power (which have many detractors thanks to their inefficiency and visual impact); Scotland has hydro power (although development came to a halt in the 1960’s when the vested interests of landowners took over from the interests of all); nuclear stations (again, heavily criticised for their environmental impact); biomass and coal provide a fourth leg (both decried as dirty power, mind you).  There is no such thing as a perfect source of energy – every method we have can be attacked for its impact, so it makes sense to spend money and create jobs in trying to improve the efficiency and reduce the impact of each one.  Perhaps carbon capture and storage, alongside desulphurisation and ground remediation, could be further developed here?

A new town would have a powerful reason to exist, whereas at the moment, money is spent in trying to improve old housing, schools and facilities in dying communities.  The Coalfields Regeneration Trust has granted cash to East Ayrshire in the past, but you might never fully solve the environmental, educational and health problems in these towns unless you catalyse new jobs.   Yet playing Devil’s advocate – surely moving entire communities smacks of Statism, and the failed socialist planning of the Fifties and Sixties?  No, because firstly Scotland’s government has pinned its hopes on energy sector jobs – offshore oil service jobs in Aberdeen, platforms and wind energy in Dundee and Methil, putative attempts at carbon capture at Longannet in Fife.

Secondly, there is no long term future here as things stand, because the small towns of East Ayrshire only exist historically thanks to the coal and iron companies which sponsored them.  All these communities are in some sense “artificial”, and it would be the most natural thing to the men who built them to see them wax and wane as we draw on the resources of the land which lies around them.  Building a new town which lived synergistically with new jobs might be the stimulus East Ayrshire needs.  Meantime, Dunaskin is slowly rotting away, one of few relics left of the Scottish ironmaking, and Scottish brickmaking, industries.

All photos copyright Mark Chalmers.

I usually write articles, and review books, whilst I’m travelling on trains. Often I scribble in the journal I’ve kept, on and off, over the years since I left architecture school. That’s particularly useful to record an interesting conversation with a stranger, or as an impression strikes you. So to see in the New Year of 2012 (five weeks late … the hangover of a spontaneous trip to Yorkshire, freelance work with raw files, and a squatter of old mills, carried itself through Burns Night into February) here are some anecdotes picked up sur la route.

I - Summer 2005
For a spell in 2005, I travelled up and down the meandering railway from Aberdeen to Inverness each week, working on a project to refurbish a biotechnology firm’s laboratories. It’s true that things subtly change the further north you go, and my eyes were opened by how they do business in the Highlands. The journeys were also thought-provoking, in as much as I had plenty of time to think as the elderly Sprinter train trundled through a landscape of fields slowly enough that you could wave “hello” to the sheep as you passed.

One particular day, with a site pre-start meeting to attend, I boareded in Aberdeen and sat down opposite an older chap who told me he had served a couple of decades on the rigs, and whose time offshore was coming to a close. He was affable enough, and once he established what I did for a living, he expressed an interest in using his savings to buy cranes to hire out to construction firms. Although the memory of the man has begun to fade, the conversation sticks in my mind. 

With the certainty of someone who has convinced himself that all businesses work the same way, he told me all about the beast of an NCK Eiger crawler crane which he would hire out on a tremendous day rate to steel erectors, who were presently extending Inverness upwards. I mentioned that there were already several firms hiring out mobile cranes to contractors, and in fact one in Inverness itself called Weldex with a large fleet of giant crawlers who may well have cornered the market in construction hire.

At that he eyed me a little suspiciously, decided that I didn’t have an entrepreneurial spirit, then changed the subject onto how slowly the train was travelling through the sheep-filled fields. His impression was correct in one sense – over the next couple of years, my reading told me that trouble was coming to the construction industry, because property prices were too high (houses at an all-time high multiple of salaries) and the canny Scottish investment trusts like Alliance and Personal Asset, were already holding more cash.  Now wasn’t the time to spend your life savings on a crane so large it needed three low loaders to move it around between conjectural building sites.

Thoughts of crane haulage fell away during a pre-start meeting where it transpired (to no-one’s surprise but my own) that everyone else knew everyone else, had worked with each other many times, and that circumvented the need for an agenda, rules of engagement or perhaps even the pre-start meeting itself. The return journey was just as interesting: a couple of young lads embarked in Elgin, and set down a carrier bag on the table. At least one had come ashore off a fishing boat in Lossiemouth, and he set to work on the bag’s contents – a bottle of cola and a companion volume of Jack Daniels. 

He measured it out generously, one for his pal, one for himself, then held a plastic cup out towards me. I told him thanks anyway and shook my head.  Despite his penchant for sour malt, he wasn’t a fisherman in the heroic Hemingway mould, but rather a character from Cannery Row. He shucked off his battered leather jacket, rubbed his hand over his arms, eyes and crew cut, then described in vivid detail how run-down the boat he sailed on was. By the time we reached Aberdeen both bottles were empty, and the fisherman looked decidedly derelict, too.

II - Spring 2006
The sun flashed over the wet sand at Lunan Bay, then a few moments later the train slowed for the viaduct over the South Esk, and the train clickety-clacked into the station at Montrose. The tide was out, and the exposed mudflats were pungent. My fellow travellers during that time of terrorism, pandemics and avian influenza were concerned: did contagious wildfowl fly in from Turkey, and did they land in the Montrose Basin, like Violet Jacob’s wild geese decades before?

H5N1 was in the news every day, and each morning I saw Glaxo’s pharmacologists on the train. They surely came from Central Casting – one balding egghead please, with overbearing opinions; plus one mad professor with a fluting voice and ZZ Top beard. Certainly, we have some model release forms right here. Thanks man, they fit the bill. Glaxo had recently been given a Government contract to develop a vaccine against the H5N1 strain, so I assume that was what these two were working on; certainly the big complex near the town’s harbour was slated for closure until GSK won that contract, now it was booming again.

Egg rode a touring bike with giant saddle bags; the Prof rode one of those comical Moulton bikes with little wheels, like Reyner Banham used. They may have known little about it, but could not escape from the tentacles of the construction industry: they talked about the new buildings erected on Cobden Street to house new production processes, and knowingly tapped out messages on the keyboards of their cheap black plastic Thinkpads. Were these secret formulae, DNA strings – or perhaps grumbles about programme delays caused by a shortage of specialist vaccine plant contractors…

I’ll never know, because some time later, Egg and Prof stopped getting that train: perhaps they were laid off when H5N1 became an unfounded scare, rather than a pandemic. Shortly before, it had seemed that it was spreading globally and mankind would succumb, apart perhaps from two pharmacologists who would pedal off into the sunset, with a goose stuffed under each arm.

I wonder what Glaxo are doing with their shiny new buildings now?

III - Autumn 2006
The slab boy, John Byrne, probably travelled undetected by most other passengers – but for several weeks late in 2006, I noticed a tall man with a close resemblance travelling northwards. The train horn honked like a sick goose, then it pulled out of the station: the sun glinted off the metal-sculpted eiders frozen in flight at Montrose on departure. Half an hour on, that same sun illuminated the filth on Aberdeen’s streets.  It may offend native Aberdonians, but the route from the railway station up to the city’s main street is desperate – a strip club, the Triads’ takeaway, a porn monger, and a pavement spattered with vomit after the weekend’s excesses.

By way of contrast, John Patrick Byrne cut an impressive figure – the hawkish profile, the salt-and-pepper moustache, the long legs taking long strides. He wore a green hacking jacket, jeans, Chelsea boots. He had a khaki piece bag slung over his shoulder, and a rollie-up pressed to his lip, once freed from the fag restrictions of train and station. All the while he was the observer rather than observed, perhaps jotting his thoughts into a notebook en route to the stage door.

He went striding up the stinking ravine of Bridge Street in Aberdeen each morning, but we diverged once we came to the top of Bridge Street: he carried on along Union Terrace, past the big bronze of Burns with his hairpiece of seagull shit, towards His Majesty’s. The pieces clicked into place: a production of “Tutti Frutti” was being staged at the theatre, and because Byrne lived at Newport-on-Tay at that time, he had to travel northwards for rehearsals. 

I headed up Union Street, past the run-down charity shops and empty units, wondering what Byrne made of the dirty streets of his destination, against the douce avenues of Newport – often described as Dundee’s Rive Gauche.  A few months later, work began on rebuilding the area around Aberdeen station. Dripping, rusting girder trusses – boiler-plated iron, marked with stalactites of lime and calcite streaming from the stonework; rubbish piled on the broken areas behind the platforms; crazed glass in the pedestrian bridges above the Inverness line.

IV - Winter 2010
Changed days, travelling southwards through the Howe of Fife and beyond. The longest rail journey I’ve made in this country – having traversed Germany on an ICE train a couple of years before – led me from Dundee down to Bristol. The train crossed from east to west, taking the line Carstairs line through unpopulated border country then Carlisle, Oxenholme and Preston. By then, I’d changed onto a Voyager, and my backside was numb, tired of sitting no matter how comfortable the seat. 

We won brief glimpses of canal in the winter sun on the way into Birmingham and its grim cavern at New Street.  Two long hours later, Bristol Temple Meads was a revelation: but not in a positive way. You disembark at Brunel’s grand western terminus and within a couple of minutes, you pass the gaunt, burnt-out shell of the Parcelforce building. Inner city dereliction on this scale, and abandonments which have stayed abandoned this long, seem to be a rarity now in Scotland, but Bristol has its own ecosystem. 

That was reinforced when we came through an underpass where a homeless man was pushing a shopping trolley with all his possessions inside it. It’s a scene familiar from documentaries on the Bronx in the 1970’s, but it was jarring in today’s supposedly Big Society Britain.

Yet … half a mile away is a grand Georgian square, a regenerated harbour front with upmarket shops, and the Arnolfini Gallery. Beyond that lies a monster shopping centre, Cabot Circus, which cost a nine figure sum to build. Head a mile in the opposite direction, though, and a derelict old chocolate factory sits rotting, and streets climb up the hill behind it lined with squats and terraces of peeling stucco, rainbow-painted VW Microbuses pulled into the kerb. The site of an old furniture factory had become a self-builders’ enclave, with all the crazy variety of an urban Findhorn. 

You soon realise this is perhaps the least egalitarian city of all, aside from the Great Wen of London, and that society’s extremes flourish in a cheek-by-jowl way you don’t generally see further north. Bristol is chastening because during my three days there, I gained the impression that the architects, lawyers, environmental charities and so forth who inhabit the docklands are the real ghetto-dwellers, and their efforts haven’t made a real difference to anyone’s lives but their own.

The purpose of travel, they say, is to open your own mind as much as to learn more about the world. It is whatever you take from it… in this case a broadened and lowered perspective of this country… perhaps the last years of Britain, before the country itself regenerates.  The motive is the same as the reason why I take photos of human landscapes.

Speaking of which, the next post will hopefully be a photo essay about one of Scotland’s great old names, and its ultimate fate.

Design – or at least the business of externalising and explaining it – works by analogy, and just as they say the brain has only so much room for memories, so it only has so much capacity for innovation.  Perhaps that’s why the Beech Starship, an aircraft from the future, was forgotten over a decade ago.

In fact, from the perspective of the handful of hours I’ve flown in a flying school Cessna, the Starship comes from the far distant future.  The Cessna 152, its door pull a length of string, its R/T jacks crackling, its pitot head bent out of shape, is a product of 1940’s technology.  When the Beechcraft company became a Starship builder, it took a decade leap in design, materials and manufacturing from the late 1970’s straight into the 1990’s.

Aircraft design has gone through several revolutions, and each was driven by materials science.  From the timber frames clad in doped fabric of early biplanes, through the development of plywood to build the de Havilland Mosquito, we reached stressed-skin aluminium less than forty years after the Wright brothers first took off.  The Mosquito was one of the least resource-hungry aircraft to build, as it pioneered the use of composite construction, with plywood used in preference to carbonfibre, of course, since the latter hadn’t been invented at that time.

If you think the two are worlds apart from each other, consider that a matrix of wood cellulose fibres laid up in resorcinol resin isn't too far removed from a matrix of carbon fibres laid up in epoxy resin.  In both cases, the composite is tailored, since the fibres can be orientated to best resist the forces which an aircraft encounters: both static and dynamic.  In between the Mosquito and the Starship came the laid glassfibre construction of sailplanes, but the Starship went one step further than GRP, proposing filament-wound carbon composites as a construction process for aircraft fuselages.  The choice of such a futuristic material was a philosophical as much as a commercial one.

Many architects don’t have a deep philosophy – what they do is instinctive, and the thread of continuity running through their work is often a stylistic tic rather than a line of intellectual inquiry.  Think about sliding glazed screens, “structural tree” columns, randomised chequerboards of coloured cladding.  Burt Rutan, who designed and helped to develop the Starship, first came to notice with his dragonfly-proportioned sailplanes: the projects which followed made it abundantly clear that he was following his own path.  His philosophy was to attempt the impossible… and with the Starship, Rutan tackled three things simultaneously: How it flies, how you control it, and how it’s made.  With those three came a fourth: how to measure your expectation of what an aircraft looks like. 

The connection between Beechcraft and Rutan is at least as important as the connections which both made with the outside world.  Since 1950, Beech had been run by its founder Walter Beech’s much younger widow, Olive Ann.  Through the post-war decades, it sounds like an enlightened, almost matriarchal company: a 1980's magazine article noted that Mrs. Beech would put yellow “happy face” stickers on the office doors of executives, and she organised company picnics for the workers.  However, a few years before, Olive Beech and her husband did business with Buckminster Fuller – in 1946, Beech planned to use their wartime production lines to make Dymaxion houses.  They projected quarter of a million rolling out of the Beechcraft factory in Wichita each year … reputedly, in the end, only two were built.  Fuller’s zeal was undiminished, but Beech’s approach for the next thirty years was more conservative – until Burt Rutan appeared.

If Martin Pawley believed that Fuller was a “Twenty-first century man”, Rutan perhaps comes from the 25th, like Buck Rogers.  Early in his career, Rutan developed a microlight for Colin Chapman, the man behind Lotus Cars.  That was the first indication that Rutan’s philosophy was worth something beyond the closeted world of aircraft design.  Chapman, after all, specialised in building sports cars using glassfibre composites for light weight and rigidity, in pursuit of excellent handling.  Rutan was just as uncompromising as Chapman, and his guiding philosophy was – if half the people at his firm, Scaled Composites, don’t believe a project is impossible, we don’t take it on.  Rutan came to specialise in lightweight composite aircraft with canard foreplanes and pusher propellors.

Starship development began in 1979, continued with a brief break when Raytheon bought Beechcraft in 1982.  A year later, Rutan produced a proof-of-concept aircraft which looked like a prototype, and convinced observers that production was close.  However, as Max Bleck, the former President of Beechcraft later recounted – “Not only was the development not very far along, but Beech Aircraft had virtually no experience with the materials or the manufacturing techniques required to build it. We had never built anything out of composites, and we did not have any data on the properties of resins, fibers, adhesives, composite honeycombs or sealants necessary to design it.”  Five years’ further work was needed before the aircraft was ready for manufacture, and that included building one of the world’s largest autoclaves (pictured above) to cure the composite fuselage within.

What was the point of developing the Starship?  On the simplest level, Beechcraft's product line was ageing, and in order to compete it needed to develop a new aircraft which would see the company into the 21st century, replacing the Queen Air and King Air turboprops.  Modern engines, better aerodynamics and a lighter, composite structure meant that the aircraft would cruise faster and be more fuel efficient – which works on an economic as well as a sustainability level.  Starship also converted Beech to computer-aided design, and a major portion of the work was done on a system called “CATIA”, which provides a three-dimensional design environment and interfaces with tooling.  CATIA – before it was co-opted by Frank Gehry for his baroque ornaments – was developed by Dassualt of France to design aircraft with.

Both in economy of materials, and efficiency of design, the new aircraft was designed to be more sustainable than its predecessor, the King Air.  Even in the 1970's, sustainability was an issue.  As happens when there's a surfeit of lions on African savannah, we're consuming more than is sustainable.  Unlike the lions, we don't suffer from a population crash when we've eaten all the gazelles, although raw material prices may increase to the point where they're uneconomic.  Some advocate stopping human progress in its tracks, but a better solution is to look for alternative ways of doing things.  After all, we were a drain on the environment even when we were hunter-gatherers, and barring some terrible Malthusian event, humans will continue to sit at the top of their food chain whilst they invent more efficient ways of travelling around.

Like Fuller’s Dymaxion House, and despite its revolutionary character, the Starship wasn’t a commercial success.  Perhaps it was ahead of its time, the usual apologetic qualification given to futuristic machines which don’t catch on.  Yet aside from glib lessons about the dangers of being the first company to harness a new technology, or using military spending to lower the barriers to entry (several other aerospace firms benefitted from stealth aircraft contracts, subsidising the development of carbon composites), the Starship is regarded as a historical curiosity.  It’s stuck in that fascinating dead end called “the past’s view of the future” and occupies a similar position to 1950’s science fiction about space travel, or 1980’s cyberpunk fiction about the internet.  Nothing ages as rapidly as predictions about the cutting edge of technology.

Perhaps there’s an application for Beechcraft's principles in 2011, though.  Olive Beech had the vision to work with Buckminster Fuller in an early example of “technology transfer”.  In Britain, the Vickers company had a similar relationship with Barnes Wallis (the father of the bouncing bomb, Wallis also pioneered geodesic construction and is one of the godfathers of the space frame).  Even though there is no direct connection between them, it’s worth noting that Barnes Wallis developed the geodesic construction which Fuller later put to use, and he also pioneered asymmetrical aircraft, which Rutan later tried his hand in designing.  All three went in search of the elusive "economy of means", using modern materials in new forms.

Fuller’s Dymaxion insight was that light weight may not be a huge advantage during the erection of buildings, but it makes a huge difference in raw material costs, and in getting the house to site.  Similarly each extra kilo which an aircraft hauls into the air decreases its range, and increases its running costs.  In an era when we are finally creeping towards systemised prefabrication – prefab toilet pods are well understood; piped and wired services are pre-hung on five metre boards, pre-connected and tested before arriving on site; and curtain walling on larger projects is unitised rather than being “stick built” – prefabricated assemblies travel from all over Europe to reach our building sites.  The time, cost and fuel consumption entailed in getting them to site are a growing issue.  As a result, it’s only a matter of time until carbon composites are incorporated into buildings – a larger gain might be realised by minimising weight.

So we might yet create a “low carbon economy”… by using carbon construction… oh the irony.

Photos copyright Beech Aircraft (Raytheon Corporation)

Over the past decade or so, the Carbuncles have captured the popular imagination.  Community activists quickly grasped that publicity in the anti-awards gave them leverage – and for that reason, politicians resent them.  Folk don’t like their deficiencies being pointed out, and which town or city couldn’t bear some improvement?

Yet perhaps a more apt question is where you set the Carbuncle baseline.  It’s the same judgement which the Scottish Government makes when regeneration takes place in areas which score highly on their “index of multiple deprivations”.  Not everyone agrees with using that yardstick, though, and the key issue is egalitarian – to each according to need, or fair shares for all?  As a result, some of this year’s nominations come from towns like Nairn, a douce Royal Burgh on the “Scottish Riviera”.  It doesn’t seem like natural Carbuncle material, so we went to investigate.

Nairn’s economy is a mixture of retirement village, golfing resort and dormitory suburb for Inverness – but compared to the out-of-town retail deserts of the latter, Nairn’s High Street is affluent and bustling with people.  We visited the Inshes area of Inverness last year and concluded it was a car park with big sheds attached – yet the centre of Nairn has many independent shops housed in characterful buildings.  Beyond the High Street lie a couple of derelict buildings, one of which is scaffolded, and an abandoned petrol station.  Dereliction should be accepted, grudgingly, because we know towns have to evolve – the issue is its extent, and how long it lingers for.

Nairn is split by the busy A96 trunk road, and it has exactly the same issue with through traffic as nearby Elgin.  Its many sets of traffic lights are an irritation to drivers, yet the crossings help to stitch the town together for pedestrians.  As in Elgin, the need for a by-pass conflicts with the hope for passing trade; the development of the town fights against the flow through its main artery.  The government’s plans to upgrade the trunk road are there, in the background: it’s difficult to say what the impact will be although Huntly, further down the A96, is probably a guide.

Nairn consists of three parts – the old fishertown with its couthy little streets; a Victorian core with grand tenements and hotels; and modern bungalows around the edges.  The approaches to the town have quite different characters: from the west you travel through a landscape of Victorian villas, from the east you pass some industrial units and a new supermarket.  The latter seems like a grudging concession to progress, and one comment we heard was that the small Sainsbury’s store was preferable to a huge Tesco, as was the case in Huntly. 

As we walked through Nairn, we were struck by the lack of typical Carbuncle cues - such as sink estates, abandoned factories or decaying concrete monsters.  If you consider it against the coastal towns further east, such as Buckie and Fraserburgh, you realise that Nairn’s issues with dereliction and traffic are transient, whereas the fishing ports have deep-seated structural problems with employment and communications.  Instead, Nairn is closer in character to Elgin and Fochabers, where the social and economic baseline is relatively high.

Until recently, Fraserburgh’s waterfront consisted of a series of mouldering fish factories; Buckie’s coastline is dominated by derelict boatyards.  By contrast, Nairn’s small harbour is now a tidy little marina – with none of the fog-bank of dereliction which hangs over the dying North Sea fishing ports further along the coast.  Perhaps because fishing historically made up a small part of the town’s economy – its championship golf course, and grand seaside hotels are more prominent – Nairn was hit less hard by its collapse.

The recent defence cuts which effectively closed the airfield at Kinloss as an RAF station, and raised a question about Lossiemouth’s future – for now Leuchars in Fife looks set to lose out to Lossie as an interceptor base – may hit Nairn to an extent, but that could be balanced by the promise of renewables contracts.  Local fabrication yards, including the site at Ardersier which sat in mothballs for many years, are now earmarked for wind turbine manufacturing. 

Perhaps the underlying concern which prompted the town’s nomination is a fear for the future: the threat of housing developments on the town’s edge.  That unease often manifests itself in a series of ciphers – the call for lower speed limits really means cutting out non-resident traffic; higher quality development translates into exclusivity; and conservation equates to preservation of the status quo.  After all, the current population has a vested interest in maintaining quiet roads, uninterrupted views, property prices and manageable school rolls.

Regardless, Nairn has none of the anti-charisma which hangs about Carbuncle towns, so whilst some things could certainly improve, there are communities elsewhere with far greater challenges to surmount.

Two things characterise Scottish industry in the 21st century: the richness of its heritage, and the dismaying speed with which parts have been wound down.  This process, often called de-industrialisation, has become a recurrent theme, devastating coal and steel, shipbuilding, truck manufacture and even food production.  It has touched every aspect of Scottish life, from our politics, economy, architecture, to our literature – Archie Hind’s “Dear Green Place” features the relict industrial landscape around Clydebridge, and Jeff Torrington’s “The Devil’s Carousel” describes the demise of the Rootes factory at Linwood.  Each slash of destruction cuts deeply into our identity, and our sense of ourselves.  It also harms the 250 year heritage of industrial buildings which those industries built around them.

Heavy industries from the first wave of the Industrial Revolution were also the first to be devastated.  Deep coal mining ended in this country several years ago, and all traces of the last of the fireclay companies disappeared before that.  Yet Scotland had some of the largest and most modern pits in Europe, such as Seafield and Longannet; and companies like Glenboig Union Fireclay and Stein Refractories were world-leading enterprises in the 20th century.  Almost all traces of them have disappeared, as if their legacy was deliberately erased: but that means the legacy their architecture has also been thrown away.  The dramatic concrete winding towers designed by Egon Riss for the National Coal Board have virtually all gone.  Giant northlight sheds which once held dozens of tunnel kilns have been levelled.  Other industries have been similarly affected.  Their loss hits Scotland on every level, and that makes the case for a Scottish industrial museum all the more compelling.

That museum’s role should be to save not only ephemera from these moribund companies (things such as ledgers, letterheads and catalogues which sit easily on the shelves of archives) but also a representative selection of the machinery they used, which is more difficult to accommodate; and also the buildings which housed them, without which it’s almost impossible to appreciate their context.  Properly conserving our industrial heritage means looking after them all.  In some cases that means retaining buildings intact, in others campaigning to have them listed, or sensitively converted to another use.  At the very least, it means photographing the factory, mill or works both inside and out before it is altered or destroyed.  The rate of change today means that the window of opportunity is often brief.

RCAHMS has already recorded a range of industrial premises, but these buildings make up a small part of Scotland’s industrial heritage, and the need to conserve extends far beyond them.  Our industrial patrimony includes some unique buildings, from the ground-breaking North British Diesel Works at Whiteinch, one of the very first Modern Movement buildings – to Paton’s Mill in Johnstone, claimed to be the world’s first machine factory.  Whilst historic complexes like New Lanark and Stanley Mills have been saved for posterity, Paton’s Mill wasn’t so fortunate.  After closure, it was allowed to decay irretrievably – and that neglect emphasises how important the work of recording is.

Of course, some sectors of Scotland’s industrial sector have succeeded, and ironically an ongoing record of their achievements is also necessary, because success means unremitting change and development.  As much can be lost in a restructuring as a closure, and architecture is often the first thing to disappear, as in the re-construction of shipyards and papermills in the 1960’s and 1970’s.  For example, BAE Systems’ two shipyards at Govan and Yarrows are still in business, but building ships in radically different ways to their predecessors 50 years ago.  That means the old fabrication halls and sail lofts have gone, replaced by covered building bays which are simple, steel-clad sheds.    Similarly, at the Carrongrove papermill at Denny, modern machine houses were constructed over the ruins of the old – although both ancient and modern alike have now been demolished.

So industrial preservation has to cover the spectrum, trying to preserve a disparate range of activities housed in a diverse cross-section of architecture.  From the triple-expansion steam engines pioneered by firms like David Rowan, to the armaments of William Beardmores; from Alfred Nobel’s huge dynamite factory in Ayrshire, to the electric motors built by Bruce Peebles of Edinburgh, or Barr & Stroud’s precision optics: each one generated its own peculiar and unique buildings.  Sometimes they are monumental stone-built workshops from the dawn of the Industrial Revolution, sometimes strange metal-buttressed hills as at Ardeer, where Nobel perfected his explosives.  Even though the architectures are radically different, the aims of industrial preservation are the same.

Accordingly, we need to rescue things which would otherwise be destroyed; to preserve unique and important aspects from each industry; to conserve artefacts where they have begun to decay; to interpret those relics so that their purpose is clear; and to spread knowledge about the importance of preservation.  The “bricks-and-mortar” museum is important, since it provides a container for what has been saved already, and a springboard for the work of saving what remains.

Hopefully this piece explains some of the motives behind previous blog articles, and will help make sense of the things which follow…

To follow on from an article I wrote elsewhere about community design, I thought it would be worth explaining where some of the ideas behind shared space stem from, since the two concepts seem complementary.  Following the logic through also throws up an unexpected conclusion…

“Radburn Crescent” began life as a traditional street, in the sense of a strip of tarmac 5.5 metres wide, with pavements roughly 1.5 metres wide on each side.  The transition between the two is a line of precast concrete bullnose kerbing, which is complemented each evening by an unbroken line of parked cars.  It’s a piece of traffic engineering.  Speeds in Radburn Crescent are high, at up to 30mph, considering it leads nowhere other than past folks’ houses.  In some ways the changes needed to make it more like a woonerf, a kerb-less street first introduced in the Netherlands in the 1970s, are slight but significant.

A woonerf is usually residential, and translated literally from the Dutch it means a “living yard”; rather than having separate roadway and pavements, everyone shares one surface.  For the woonerf to succeed, speeds have to be low – perhaps even lower than the 20mph speed limit which is gradually being brought in for housing estates across the country.  The implicit idea is that if a street is suitable for children to play on, it will be safe enough for adult pedestrians, too.

Most people associate the idea of the shared surface or shared space with Holland, but arguably its roots lie in a report published in Britain by the Ministry of Transport in the early 1960’s.  Colin Buchanan, who was an architect as well as a roads engineer, was tasked with investigating what could be done to reduce congestion and acknowledge the impact of the car.  Even in the Sixties, there was a burgeoning conflict between cars and towns.  Buchanan’s team came up with a technique for rejigging urban road systems by creating zones which they called “urban rooms”.

These rooms would acknowledge issues like noise, pollution, social activity, pedestrian routes and aesthetics.  Depending on the prevailing requirements, some would segregate traffic and pedestrians completely, whilst others would allow pedestrians and vehicles to mix in the street.  It was a seemingly obvious yet subtly revolutionary – though ironically the “Traffic in Towns” report had a much greater impact in continental Europe than it did in Britain.  German and Dutch planners enthusiastically adopted the idea, and many still refer to Buchanan as the father of traffic calming.

A few years later, in 1976, the first Woonerfen were built following a new set of guidelines – “Pedestrians may use the full width of the highway within an area defined as a woonerf; playing on the roadway is also permitted.  Drivers within a woonerf may not drive faster than at a walking pace. They must make allowance for the possible presence of pedestrians, including children at play, unmarked objects and irregularities in the road surface, and the alignment of the roadway.”

In due course, the woonerf spread from Holland to Denmark, Sweden, Germany and eventually back to Britain – in this country it’s often called a Homezone, which equates to a Wohnstraße in German-speaking countries.  I recently passed through Holland on a road trip, and woonerfen were quite evident in Eindhoven – although on busier roads traffic was still segregated, even to the point where pavements were divided into a cycle lane and a pedestrian lane.  Beware of the cycle lanes, though: the Dutch allow folk to ride motor scooters along them, and as we stood admiring an old Philips factory, we were nearly mown down by mini-Mods on a Vespa…

Travelling further back in time to seek the roots of the Woonerf, and of Colin Buchanan’s report, many streets in the north-west of England, around Salford, Wigan and Liverpool were designated as “Play Streets” in the years after the war.  No cars were allowed to drive down them between 8am and dusk, hence effectively “traffic calming” them, and without the need for speed humps, either.  That posits the question about quality of place: is it just about the lack of cars?  In a moment of lucidity, I realised that traffic speeds and volumes ultimately work their way back to the pivotal factor of density.

High density inner cities were the grail of urban designers for many years, and even yet many look to create medium density, low rise cities.  They seem very “sustainable”, given the aim of creating walkable neighbourhoods with schools, shops, parks and public transport within a ten minute walk.  By that token, the very low density landscape of crofts that you find in rural Angus or Aberdeenshire is desperately unsustainable.  After all, it appears you have to drive everywhere – for shops, for school, even for work – because crofts are strung out along valleys, on winding tracks that lead off equally winding B-roads.  So far, so what, because the answers for urbanists lie in urban design.

The size of settlements usually relates to the provision of services: a series of clusters might be populous enough to support a primary school.   Population thresholds for the viability of local services are always under attack – schools, libraries, banks and post offices are still being closed down by an unsympathetic government and its agencies – it seems the natural thing to do is to increase population density until it supports those services.  That also pushes up land values, and helps to generate the margin needed to build things.

Turn again, Dick Whittington.  The answer might lie instead in rural design.  We already have thousands of small communities which are sustainable to an extent because they’ve dealt with the issues of density.  Shopping can still be bought thanks to travelling shops, schools are reached using school buses, and work is integrated thanks to many villages being truly “mixed-use” clusters of dwellings and workshops.  More importantly for the shared space thesis, there’s no need for any intervention on the single track leading up to a croft house – the narrow roadway is implicitly shared, by tractors, bikes, sheep and children.  


Rough metalling, hedges, bends and potholes combine to foster low speeds, so there’s no need to artificially traffic calm them with the much-hated speed humps.  Land values may not support the kind of traffic engineering you find in cities – blacktop with drainage, winter gritting, road markings retro-reflective signs, and cats’ eyes are expensive – but perhaps much of that is overkill.  If urban streets were de-engineered, simplified and greened, speeds would naturally reduce.  They might also have a resonance for hard-pressed city dwellers tired of deterministic design – whether from urbanists or traffic engineers.

Perhaps Colin Buchanan’s urban room and the woonerf’s living yard have a future in the countryside.