The Carbuncle Awards 2007
Nominations
Click on a links below to view the nominations of The Carbuncle Awards 2007
This year voters selected Coatbridge as the Most Dismal Place in Scotland. But Coatbridge’s problems are shared by many Scottish towns.
If you make it to the main street, Coatbridge’s Quadrant shopping centre looks like is was lifted directly from the set of Camberwick Green. A new clock tower, which looks as if it was designed on the back of a beer mat, marks the town centre, a throw-away gesture compounded by the addition of some ill-conceived public art-cum street furniture.
Directly opposite, the visitor is confronted with a dark and dingy public square and a derelict swimming pool. To be fair, planning proposals have been submitted to pull down the pool and replace it with a NHS centre-cum-library centre designed by Keppie Design. However, there are some serious question to be raise about the new public facility, not least whether the current fad among public clients for lumping together public services into single buildings on the ‘pools-cum-libraries’ model, but more importantly, the scale of the new four and five-storey building seems to dwarf the main street.
Given that North Lanarkshire recently commissioned a report on design quality, produced by Anderson Bell Christie, which talks about the importance of recognising the importance of built heritage, you might have thought the architects would have explained why they didn’t feel it appropriate to retain the simple but elegant sandstone building on the site.
If you make it to the main street, Coatbridge’s Quadrant shopping centre looks like is was lifted directly from the set of Camberwick Green. A new clock tower, which looks as if it was designed on the back of a beer mat, marks the town centre, a throw-away gesture compounded by the addition of some ill-conceived public art-cum street furniture.
Directly opposite, the visitor is confronted with a dark and dingy public square and a derelict swimming pool. To be fair, planning proposals have been submitted to pull down the pool and replace it with a NHS centre-cum-library centre designed by Keppie Design. However, there are some serious question to be raise about the new public facility, not least whether the current fad among public clients for lumping together public services into single buildings on the ‘pools-cum-libraries’ model, but more importantly, the scale of the new four and five-storey building seems to dwarf the main street.
Given that North Lanarkshire recently commissioned a report on design quality, produced by Anderson Bell Christie, which talks about the importance of recognising the importance of built heritage, you might have thought the architects would have explained why they didn’t feel it appropriate to retain the simple but elegant sandstone building on the site.
