Happy New Year. Twelve months ago, Mr Wolf made a guest appearance with his upbeat message. A year on, having gorged on mincemeat over the festive break, he’s indisposed: so this time you will get a gloomy dyspeptic burp.
A dreadful holiday period – school massacre, fiscal cliff, Russian crash – left Mr Wolf searching for an uplifting piece on the television news during the fallow spell between Boxing Day and Hogmanay. He searched, he failed: there wasn’t one. Instead he contented himself with repeats of costume dramas. Downturn Abbey, a portrait of England in the 21st century, appeals to Mr Wolf’s venal side almost as much as the shortbread tin image of Scotland depicted in Monarch of the Glum. They’re both heritage, of a sort, and although they lack authenticity they certainly make money.
Terry Pratchett, in Johnny and the Dead, speaks about somewhere – in this case a graveyard slated for redevelopment – being the wrong kind of heritage. In essence, it wasn’t grand enough, and wasn’t in London, so there was no chance it would be saved for the nation, or money being spent to protect it. Stately homes and baronial houses née castles are different: they don’t necessarily need state help, because they have an irresistible attraction for property developers, although paradoxically they are often the thing which makes them over-reach. In fact, Mr Wolf knows of a couple of developers who have wrestled with tumbledown castles.
One bought a castle near the coast, which is gothic in atmosphere rather than necessarily in style. The previous owners had fallen on hard times. Their distant ancestor had travelled widely and incurred the wrath of the natives, hence falling under a curse, borne out when the Swedish Match Company was extinguished in the 1920’s, and much of the family fortune disappeared. The last laird’s father was reputedly a sot and toper, with an appetite for louche living and loose women. Keeping fast company, he went through the remaining money like water. In the hard years that followed, many unthinkable things happened. After selling off the family silver, the fixtures and fittings of the castle were stripped out and auctioned, then land was sold, and finally the castle was hollowed out and used as a grain store.
When Mr Wolf visited for cream cakes and afternoon tea, the current owner was very helpful; too helpful in fact, when it came to juicy reminiscences about the previous laird and his ancestors. As it turned out, the castle’s shell was sold under the duress of liquidation, and that duress generated friction between the old and new owners, which has continued and keeps two sets of lawyers busy. When Mr Wolf recounted this tale of decline in print, his publisher was served with legal papers: but what the previous laird didn’t realise is that you can only libel living people, not the dead. More importantly, you can’t sue someone for repeating what was published previously.
Nothing more was heard from the lawyers, the article has become a chip wrapper, and the new owner continued to restore the castle at the pace of a sloth on Mogadon. Just enough work to the facades that no-one can claim he’s abandoned it, but not enough to arrest its gradual slide into ruination. There have been rumours of a housing development in the grounds, to help pay to stabilise the castle. The last scion of its former owners looks on in anguish, and bristles each time anything appears in the Press.
Another would-be high roller bought a castle near the mountains. It once belonged to a great political family, which again had fallen on hard times: while they clung on to their grouse moors and tenanted farms, the Big Hoose had to go. It was on the market for a long time. Several prospective buyers came and went, all struggling to make it stack up in practice, because the planners were emphatic that it couldn’t be subdivided. The enfilade of rooms inside would have to be maintained; but most prospective developers were keen to split it into apartments.
During the castle’s empty spell, Mr Wolf took a look inside. The market was stagnant and loans were hard to come by: but the asking price remained high, and no realistic offers were forthcoming. The castle had an air of stillness and melancholy which is what you expect of these places; but it was discovered that the topmost storey was riddled with dry rot, which would require enormous amounts of money to rectify. In due course, Mr Wolf wrote a short history, expressing hope that the castle would be rescued, and wondering how the estate would pay for that, given the likely costs of restoration on top of a large asking price.
A few months later, the article appeared in print. This time it was the new owner who took exception: as it turned out, the castle had been sold during the period between writing the article and its publication. The new owner’s indignant letter to the editor was exceedingly righteous: he was saving the castle for the nation, the article was out of date, it didn’t portray the reality. He was at pains to extol the investment which would follow, revitalising the estate, the jobs created, the weddings hosted… To support that impression, he had orchestrated the publicity for his new venture, including a photoshoot in the style of Country Life with glamorous wife, adoring children and sprawling hounds arrayed around him in the drawing room. He had evidently watched Monarch of the Glum, or was at least conversant with Compton MacKenzie’s novels: tartan wallpaper, decanters of malt, log fire roaring in the grate and so forth.
As a result, Mr Wolf was surprised to discover, a year or two later, that his company had made a planning application to build several hundred houses on the estate policies. He drew two conclusions: firstly, here was a man at the height of his powers as an egotist; secondly, here was a developer with ambition. That ambition, it was becoming clear, was to build lots of executive ranch-style bungalows on the estate and make money under the auspices of saving heritage. That trump card, the enabling development, had evidently been played. It’s almost an act of altruism, we are after all just custodians for the next generation, aren’t we? And how else can the dry rot problem be solved?
In light of the earlier “Country Life” shoot, Mr Wolf realised how easy it is for magazine articles to misrepresent peoples’ intentions... Ironic, really. Perhaps one day magazines will report the world in the breadth and depth it deserves, and developers will tell the truth in substance as well as in spirit. In fact, lets’s make a resolution ... but it’ll have to be for 2014 now, won’t it?
My next piece for the blog will expand on my article in the Winter 2012 edition which recently hit the news-stands, and will look at the fate of another former asylum.
It’s a truism that the great ones die too young: the talented, inspirational, and insightful often live shorter lives than average, perhaps because they pack more into their time, and give more of themselves to the world. (Picasso, as with everything else, is the exception.) While I was away travelling in Europe, Lebbeus Woods passed away: I learnt of his death when I returned, after a friend emailed with the sad news.
We were both hugely taken with Lebbeus Woods’ work while we were at Duncan of Jordanstone, and the copy of his book “Terra Nova” in the college library was probably the most dog-eared volume on the shelves. I later bought my own copy direct from the publishers in Japan: now it’s out of print, and copies fetch prices way above what they should. Terra Nova has become a collector’s item, when paradoxically it should have been reprinted in the thousands and become widely known amongst the general public. Woods’ real currency was that of ideas.
I think the first drawing of his I can recall seeing was a colour pencil illustration for a competition to build a new aquarium in San Diego, closely followed by his striking black and white sketches for an Einstein Tomb. The drawings were so thoroughly realised that you knew there was a sketchbook full of working out and development, to make this impression buildable, but which you’d probably never get to see.
Years later, I almost met Lebbeus Woods in person, when I applied to attend a summer school in Turin in 2005. I say “almost”, because sadly the event was cancelled before it went ahead, but I had been accepted, and was on the brink of booking flights to Caselle airport. Of course I was interested in the projects which the summer school would concentrate on – but it would also have been a precious opportunity to meet, and perhaps discuss ideas, with him. That was seven years ago, but I still regret the opportunity passing me by.
I don’t feel the same regret about any other architect – the so-called architectural “stars” with their cults of personality have gained little traction – but Woods was different. It’s interesting that he rarely appeared in the journals, on either side of the Atlantic, and that tells us something important about the dead hand of journalism, and how “the debate” often centres on rehashed rhetoric.
Lebbeus Woods differed firstly through his virtuouso drawing technique – as simple as a coloured chalk ground on paper, overlain by fine coloured pencil work, but with startling depth and detail – and secondly through his powerful essays. Each set of drawings was accompanied by a long-form discursive essay, which often tackled metaphysical questions. If the concepts were challenging, then that was surely the point. His books were books of ideas, providing a superficial kind of inspiration through his wonderful drawings, which eventually pulled you into the deeper inspiration of engagement with the world’s problems.
Woods was born in 1940, in Michigan: he studied engineering as an undergraduate, then took a master’s degree in architecture, after which he joined Roche & Dinkeloo. After being job architect for the Ford Foundation – a notable 1960’s building in New York, one of the first to have a huge plant-filled atrium, and a pioneering use of structural Cor-Ten steel – Woods chose to eschew practice in favour of research and teaching. He helped to fund his research by working as a perspectivist for the top New York practices. The answer to the question, “If architecture is a practice, then what use is the paper architecture which comes out of architectural theory?” was neatly dealt with in his series of studies on War and Architecture. As Woods wrote, “The arts have not been merely ornamental, but central to people’s struggle to ‘find themselves’ in a world without clarity, or certainty, or meaning.”
The destruction in the former Yugoslavia was one starting point, and the chaos brought about by natural disasters: his Zagreb Free Zone drawings proposed a city where destruction and reconstruction could co-exist. "Architecture should be judged not only by the problems it solves," said Woods, "but by the problems it creates." He perhaps belonged to the same philosophical strand as Paul Virilio – particularly the latter’s book “Unknown Quantity” – but he had the benefit of synthesising the products of his imagination visually, too. Virilio had to use a collage of photos instead.
I struggle to think of anyone comparable to Lebbeus Woods. Historically perhaps there was Joseph Gandy, and “Mad” John Martin, who had a similar combination of virtuouso technique and visionary imagination, enabling them to create entire architectural worlds which had their own internal logic. There’s something of the same spirit in Woods’ post-apocalyptic, post-flood, almost post-human cities: a scenographic landscape with steel tendons shooting into the sky, defying gravity. Similarly, other drawings of war-torn interiors capture the half-light which Piranesi found in the ruins of Rome. Yet Lebbeus Woods’ drawings are distinctive, recognisably Lebbeus Woods but never “in the style of”, as his draughtsmanship evolved and his compass grew ever broader.
It’s also a truism that Lebbeus Woods was an under-appreciated prophet: his influence spread widely, although he didn’t necessarily get his dues. For example, he should get the credit for inspiring Terry Gilliam’s film “Twelve Monkeys”, (in fact, he reportedly sued the film’s producers and won damages for plagiarism) and he also worked briefly as conceptual architect for Vincent Ward's ill-fated film “Alien III”, although his schemes were abandoned in favour of a set designer’s stock version of dystopia. A lost opportunity.
Lebbeus Woods took on a huge remit, searching for those architecturally-created problems across the world: from flooding on the Hudson River, to Sarajevo’s shell-scarred tower blocks, to El Malecón, the sweeping waterfront boulevard in Havana. As well as the summer schools, he was a professor at Cooper Union school of architecture in New York. As well as books of his own ideas, he also illustrated science fiction authors’ work, including that of Arthur C. Clark.
If someone organises an exhibition of his work, visit it: or if you get the chance to buy one his books, then seize it, because Lebbeus Woods was a full-blown visionary in an age when visionaries are so rare, that we barely recognise them. R.I.P., Lebbeus Woods.
There is an inherent beauty in machines, perhaps because they take on a life of their own, in a way that buildings never could. They are often mere tools created to overcome the challenges of the world – terrain, gravity, weather – yet we look on them to impose order on a disorderly universe.
As a child of Meccano and Lego, I was always interested in making things. Sometimes the parts came in kit form, sometimes I rummaged for scrap iron, pulley blocks, angle irons and so forth. Making a scale model of a crawler crane was one project: I had a single-cylinder Villiers engine from an old Ransomes “Typhoon” mower earmarked as a prime mover, and 56lb. lumps of pig iron set aside as a counterweight. The kinetics of craning, slewing and winching have fascinated ever since, and I guess there’s always the bonus of some entertainment when things go wrong.
Later, this childhood interest combined with the books I was reading, such as Lebbeus Woods’ “War and Architecture”, and Paul Virilio’s “Unknown Quantity”. The latter is quite unlike anything else I’ve read: Virilio explores a philosophical approach towards unpredictability and disaster. Once I’d read it through a couple of times, it clicked – here is a rational response to the seeming chaos of the world, from earthquakes and hurricanes to the smaller scale disorder and disasters of building sites.
Truckmixer in the mud
Having a project on site opens your eyes: the ground opens up while a truckmixer is reversing, the shifting sands swallow an excavator, cranes topple over and have to be rescued, lorries get stuck in muddy fields. Watching a vehicle being extracted from a morass is always interesting: when the ground doesn’t have sufficient bearing capacity, the wheels sink in, and the vehicle ends up resting on the rails of its chassis. A massive tractive effort may be required to pull it clear of the bog’s suction, perhaps using a Traxcavator or Cat D12 bulldozer if you happen to have one handy...
A perennial challenge is delivering materials to site without the need for double-handling. Ideally you want a vehicle which can drive straight off the road onto the site. Back in the early days of truckmixer, the influence of wartime ingenuity was still felt. Boughton Engineering are best known today for the big “rollatruck” skips which demolition contractors use; when full, they’re collected by an eight wheeler using a giant hydraulic hook which clasps the skip end and hauls it onto the chassis. However, they made their name during the 1940’s building all-drive lorry chassis for the Army, and in the peace which followed, they used their experience of all terrain lorries to convert standard Bedfords into 6x6 drive Boughtons with low-ratio gearboxes and diff locks. The end results were road-going lorries capable of driving through construction sites.
Scammell S24 tank tractor
On the other hand, a “normal” truck stuck in a hole can become a full-blown recovery job, perhaps requiring 50-tonne cranes and an ex-Army Scammell S24 tank tractor. The exercise begins with baulks of timber, snatch blocks, Tirfor winches, and a silent prayer to the Gods of Unconventional Lifting … Lorry rescue is a specialist business, and once freed, heavy goods vehicles are never towed on rope or chains. The two vehicles are connected by an umbilical cord in the form of an air line (since, unless there’s compressed air in the stranded vehicle’s tanks, its brakes will stay applied), but the towing lorry does the braking for both vehicles, with all the retardation transferred through a rigid steel towbar.
Laurel and Hardy made the most of getting stuck, and often ended up lying face down in the mud, with a Model T minus all its bodywork, a great cloud of black smoke, and a braying donkey looking on … I can sympathise. One day I arrived on site to discover the contractor trying to rescue a cherrypicker which was trapped in the glaur. A large crowd of workmen looked on as a JCB full-slew attempted to propel the cherrypicker out of its rut by whacking its engine pod using a two cubic metre bucket. It looked like something from Robot Wars – except there was no sign of a glamorous TV frontwoman wearing leather trousers – and although the excavator eventually won, I’m glad I didn’t have to take the cherrypicker back to the hire shop.
Channel Tunnel TBM
Tunnel Boring Machines or “TBM’s” are another good example of Homo Faber versus world. A typical shield boring machine, as built by James Howden in Glasgow, may weigh 500 tons, cost £10 million, and can drive a tunnel six metres in diameter at a speed of two revolutions per minute. The TBM is large and complex, leaving the factory on a train of oversize low-loaders, and taking months to erect in its new underground habitat. Disaster followed in the case of the Storebaelt tunnel in Denmark a few years ago. One full year after work began and with only minor progress made, water from the seabed found its way through the TBM head which had been left open by mechanics. Both 300 metre long tunnel drives were instantly flooded, and the two TBM’s seriously damaged. They needed a complete rebuild. The high stakes conform to Virilio’s risk thesis.
Ground conditions have a habit of thwarting us repeatedly. On another site I attended, a hydraulic excavator scraped away the overburden and began shifting the rock underlying it. The machine worked all morning, its boom sweeping around balletically, its counterweights sliding like part of a pinball machine. Soon, men were driving timber profiles shaped like a hangman’s gibbet into the soil. Then with a loud squeal, an NCK piledriver crawled onto the site, looking rather reptilian. It moved hard against the rock face, slewed its driving gear into position – then there was a flash of light, and a resounding CRACK! It turned out there was a high voltage cable in the path of the steel pile: it was wrapped in black tarry stuff like elephant hide, which melted in the flashover. Thankfully, the driver of the piledriver was saved by his rubber-soled boots.
An unlucky horsebox
The drowned TBM, stranded lorry and zapped piledriver prove that we’re surrounded by entropy. What we casually dismiss as Murphy’s Law is actually a sign of the fundamental lawlessness of Nature, because the universe is always trying to return to its basis state. In response, we have to improvise using machines. Yet entropic chaos has been used by artists, musicians and even architects, such as Lucien Kroll or Elemer Zalotay. It may seem perverse to consciously design something to appear random, and the result may be a little contrived, like the so-called random number generator on your calculator.
Yet there is an honesty in the approach of anyone who admits to chaos, rather than forcing order on reluctant materials and as Paul Virilio suggests, we have a morbid fascination with disaster. If we spot a lorry stuck in a bog, our sympathy for the hapless driver is mixed with a little derision, a sense of the futility of Man’s actions, and perhaps the fecklessness of building contractors.
Rescue is a practical way to deal with trucks which are stuck; Kroll’s aleatoric design method is an intellectual approach to rationalise the seeming randomness of the world and its forces, but there are countless pitfalls to consider, plus some we may not even be aware of (pace Donald Rumsfeld’s rhetoric about “known unknowns and unknown unknowns”). Instead, we can learn from another American. Hungry Joe in Joseph Heller’s novel “Catch-22” collected lists of fatal diseases and arranged them in alphabetical order, so that he could quickly put his finger on the one he most wanted to worry about.
We are in a similar fix, except that there are many more things on a building site which could go wrong...
I last visited the Botanic Gardens station four years ago, in the winter of 2008 … but recently had another chance to see a fascinating place which lies deep in the city’s affections. I can recall regular “Is the Botanics accessible?” threads on the Hidden Glasgow forum in the early years of the millennium, but by then it was already rooted in folklore. A background to the station’s early life is gleaned from Frank Worsdall’s book, “The City that Disappeared”: the Botanic Gardens railway station is part of a long-closed line which runs underneath the west end of Glasgow: it was last used in its original capacity in 1939, after which the surface buildings became a nightclub, and the tunnels were used by goods trains until 1964, after which the Glasgow Central Railway’s tracks were lifted.
The eastern lightwell from ground level 
Kirklee tunnel portal
The Glasgow Central Low-Level route was mainly built using the 'cut-and-cover' method, so the line runs in a shallow tunnel for three quarters of a kilometre directly under Great Western Road. The track is exposed at the station, creating a couple of ventilation shafts which are also giant lightwells. The Botanic Gardens station was designed by James Miller, a Perthshire architect who trained with Andrew Heiton before he joined the Caledonian Railway Co. The surface building at the Botanics was a strange affair, a rustic cottage with two minarets – quite a contrast to his later St Enoch Square Underground Station – but it burned down in 1970. Everything below ground remains, from the surprisingly intact concrete platforms, to the vaults spanning between the cross beams, faced in white glazed bricks.
The midwinter sun casts a ray deep into the tunnel
Fading embers of the midwinter sun
After closure, the station became disused, but never truly abandoned. The tunnels were regularly used by ravers during the 1990’s, and in 2001 the station became the centrepiece of Hamish McDonald’s novel, “The Gravy Star”, about a modern-day recluse who takes refuge here from modern society. Farchar MacNab retreats to "a black airless hole with pigeons for neighbours and a park full of beauty on the roof of his world". Scared of the light, he leaves his tunnel only at night for the safety of The Coffin - Glasgow's first death-themed pub - and The Gravy Star, a cafe where people don't stare at him. When his epiphany comes, he leaves the darkness of the tunnels and takes a journey across Europe, which also illuminates the terrible damage done to Glasgow by Thatcher’s government.
The station platform in 2012
The station platform in 2008
Although Alasdair Gray’s “Lanark” is still the best novel of and about Glasgow, “The Gravy Star” joins Jeff Torrington’s “Swing Hammer Swing” and Archie Hind’s “Dear Green Place” to show it sloughing off its industrial clothes as it became a different kind of city. Just how different was illustrated when we surfaced, like Farch, from the underground, and headed across the gardens towards the Kibble Palace. The first figures we saw were a hipster in a homburg hat and winklepicker shoes, with his girlfriend in tow leading a French Bulldog. It is hard to imagine a less Glaswegian breed of dog..
A colourful “piece” from 2008
Tagging on the skew arch brickwork at the Kelvinbridge station portal
I worried that the huge fabricated steel knuckle braces which were installed a year after my last visit would ruin the atmosphere of the station, but I admit that they add another layer to the composition, especially now they’ve been integrated by decorating them with a coat of graffiti. Perhaps the most striking parallel is with New York: just as the City Union Line is Glasgow’s “High Line”, the Botanic Gardens station represents this city’s “Freedom Tunnels” complete with screeds of graffiti and shafts of sunlight penetrating down from the public park above. The High Line in Manhattan is a celebrated example of old railway infrastructure – simultaneously very visible, yet difficult to reach – made accessible and brought into the public realm. Nevertheless it loses something in the transition, as you will see when you compare images churned out by the publicity machine of Diller Scofidio + Renfro, with the melancholy photos which Joel Sternfeld took years before the work took place, when the overgrown trackbed wound through the West Side at second floor level as a linear wilderness.
The old Kelvinbridge station platform
Kelvinbridge tunnel, around 700 metres long
The Botanics is perhaps the perfect example of a ghost station, made all the more enigmatic since you can gain glimpses of it through the ventilation shafts in the gardens, and through the railings of the tunnel portal. From previous years, I recall a couple of thesis projects by students at the Mac, one to revive the Botanic Gardens station as part of a railway system, and another for an entertainment venue, probably on the back of Stefan King’s thwarted scheme of 2007 to convert the station platforms into a nightclub. Before that, Strathclyde Passenger Transport laid plans to re-open the station and tunnels as part of their "Strathclyde Tram" scheme in the mid 1990s: that similarly came to nothing. Perhaps the station should be maintained as it is now, a walk through the darkness towards those giant lightwells and a trackbed overgrown with etiolated shrubs.
The knuckle braces, supporting the edge of Great Western Road
A final glimpse along the platforms…
Eventually, all traces of Botanics will disappear: if the tunnels aren’t brought back into use, they may be backfilled to prevent ongoing maintenance costs. So far, the giant steel knuckles are the only evidence of structural problems, but the trackbed to the north-west of Kirklee tunnel has already been built on, part of the endless demand for flats in the West End. Yet the wildcard which has preserved the station and platforms for over 70 years is the speculation of transport planners and council chiefs – proponents of reopening old rail lines, building tram networks, Glasgow’s Crossrail – schemes which may never happen, but can never be completely discounted. Unlike a previous Lord Provost’s madcap plan to build a cable car system from George Square to Port Dundas...
All photographs are copyright Mark Chalmers - none are in the public domain
I had planned to write about the Terris Novalis sculpture as my next feature for the website … but my recent visit to County Durham coincided exactly with Biblical flooding, so I don’t have any photos of that wonderful, strange pair of multi-legged instruments which appear to wander over the former site of a huge steelworks, like creatures from a medieval bestiary. Maybe next time.
Instead, I crossed the Pennines on the A66, stopping briefly at a glum and windswept service station, then stopping again to mourn the ruins of Scotland’s brick industry, before reaching home. Back to work: last week, while I was developing a concept for a site on the west coast which needs to sit happily in a mature landscape, I was reminded about the work of Aldington, Craig & Collinge. I thought it would be worth unearthing some photos of one of their more recent buildings, as their architecture is a model of how to approach such things.
Aldington, Craig & Collinge are best known to the generation of architects who came before me, the men and women who taught my peers at architecture school. Peter Aldington’s house received huge publicity in the 1960’s, thanks to its close integration of people, building, and landscape: Richard Einzig’s crisp photos captured its buttery-coloured timberwork and firmly lodged in architects’ minds. However, by the 1990’s, the practice had fallen from view, until they received the commission for a new library and archive in Ludlow, a market town in the Marches close to the English-Welsh border.
Dubbed “Romantic Pragmatism” by the Architectural Review, AC&C’s approach uses traditional materials to connect buildings to their local context, but with complex programmes allied to a sophisticated sense of composition, these buildings are also inherently part of the late 20th century. Since the practice, now led by Collinge alone, was amongst the most sensitive of the late Modern era, comparable to Cullinan or MacCormac, it seems Ludlow commissioned the right kind of practice to create a carefully-considered building.
The library sits on an elevated site overlooking the town, and Collinge’s treatment of the roofscape responds subtly, perhaps, to the outline of Ludlow Castle. You could see the profile of the stepped roofs as a response to the broken-down curtain wall of the castle, as well as a device to pull light into the depth of the library’s plan; the stair towers of the resource centre serve to signal the entrance of the building, whilst echoing the turrets of the castle.
If this is contextualism, it’s more sophisticated than the mock-Tudor timber and brickwork which laypeople are familiar with. In fact, from some angles the library achieves a faceted geometry similar to Stirling & Gowan’s “Red” period. However, the tones of the brickwork betrays the practice’s continuing interest in texture and richness, rather than Stirling’s smooth surfaces: Aldington’s own house, “Turn End”, used overburnt bricks for their colourful variations and warped shapes.
In terms of architectural context, it’s interesting to see that Ludlow has one of the highest (architectural) quality supermarkets in Britain – the flowing curved roofs of the Tesco just down the hill from the library, designed by one of Aldington’s contemporaries, Richard MacCormac’s practice. It shares the red brick walls, asymmetry, and well-modulated glazing of the library, along with a strong roof form. These characteristics, perhaps, are key to understanding the notion of context in Ludlow, rather than trying to shoehorn a 21st Century programme behind a grim photocopy of an 18th Century facade, which is what some people intend when they think of historical context.
The new building was completed in 2003 and received good reviews in the architectural press: once a few nits had been picked about the over-articulation of columns, it was acknowledged that Ludlow could propel AC&C back into our collective consciousness. Although I haven’t seen reviews of any of their buildings since then, Alan Powers wrote a book about the practice three years ago which praised their well resolved, site specific and overwhelmingly human-centred work.
Happily, the library is a success as a piece of townscape and as a piece of humanist architecture: naturally lit, with internal spaces on a human scale, and with a socially cohesive purpose. However, the one difficulty in Ludlow is that its social context includes gift shops, tea rooms and antique dealers: rural Shropshire is the natural home of the Barbour and Labrador Set. Indeed, Jonathan Glancey noted that Ludlow is “a difficult town in which to build anything new without falling foul of pretty much everyone who lives there”.
Bearing that in mind, the Ludlow Civic Society reckoned that - “visitors should once again avoid lingering over the prospect of Ludlow’s ill-conceived library, designed by modernist architects, Aldington Craig and Collinge and completed in 2003, despite the vigorous objections of the majority of the inhabitants of the town, including the Ludlow Civic Society, on grounds of both inappropriate style and sheer scale within the context of the town. As so often happens when money is to be made, the aesthetic views and preferences of the people were overruled.”
Modernist, in their cultural context, is a filthy imprecation. However, the final sentence raises an interesting issue, which Peter Aldington himself grappled with during his time in practice. Are the Planners there to apply a rationale to the way towns are zoned, and to protect historic buildings … or should they wield a pen and design the building for you? Similarly, should pressure groups and vested interests dictate how a building is massed up, what it’s made of, indeed what it looks like, or even whether it’s built at all?
Architects, after all, study for seven years and work for many more to gain experience before they’re let loose to design a building on their own. I imagine that the complexity of the briefing process for a building like the Ludlow Library would be a revelation to the Ludlow Civic Society, and similarly I wonder how much they understand about the front-loading of an architect’s work on a civic scheme like this. In order to get it to the point where there is a proposal to discuss, the architects will have undertaken weeks of research on the building’s functions and how they inter-relate, will have interviewed various client representatives, drawn up functional diagrams and probably activity data sheets, too.
All of that work is hidden to laypeople, although Alan Powers’ book makes it clear how thorough the practice’s briefing method is: but the care with which the outer expression of the building was conceived is apparent. That makes it all the more surprising that there is virtually nothing on the internet about this building … or perhaps not so surprising, when you consider that the big-name design websites ignore the subtle and nuanced work of practices like Collinge’s to the same extent as small town civic societies misunderstand what the term “context” actually means.
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.