Design Show Gives Value

25 Oct 2005

The first Scottish Design Show took place at the Tramway on 6 and 7 October. It provided a unique opportunity to bring together the public and private sector for a frank and open debate about planning, the future and design quality.

Professor Stuart Gulliver opened the show with an enthusiastic but critical look at progress in Scotland over the past five years and some ideas about potential developments for the next 15 years. He argued that Scottish cities are being failed by political leaders locked in the mindset of the welfare state and uncomfortable with encouraging private sector enterprise.

Gulliver identified 1983 and the opening of the Burrell Collection as the high point of Glasgow’s regeneration, it was our “Guggenheim effect” he said. “We have underestimated the impact of the Burrell. For the first time in living memory Glasgow had done something that was first class, in both the collection and the building.”
Gulliver told industry leaders at the business breakfast that cities such as Glasgow and Dundee were lagging behind English rivals in successfully addressing de-industrialisation.

“The political championing of place development is nowhere near as evident. When the cities review was published I didn’t really notice a scramble amongst senior politicians to champion this important strand of public policy.” He continued: “[A political champion] is a necessary condition. It needs that kind of political leadership. People develop confidence from knowing that people in senior positions want them to win and that’s important for morale.” Gulliver went on to argue that Scotland should focus attention on speeding up infrastructure connections within the Central Belt. This was a theme that was returned to throughout the show.

The key debates or forums, Is the Future Tartan?, Who Needs a Design Guru?, The Architecture of Belonging, and Imagining the Future, provided an interesting taster of the broad range of opinions and ideas about how we can improve government and urban policy. These debates will be returned to in future issues of Prospect.We ran a series of great masterclasses; the highlights of this strand were talks given by Isi Metzstein, Amin Taha, Dick Cannon, Richard Murphy and Neil Gillespie.

Taha gave a highly engaging presentation in which he talked about a range of domestic projects from social housing to a couple of up-market houses with glass-bottomed swimming pools and talked to Adrian Welch about the influences on his work and the way in which his practice had developed its own language. Taha, who was taught by Metzstein at Edinburgh, recalled how he had learnt about urbanism from Metzstein and how he had tried to get a job from Rob Hunter on leaving college.

The show’s exhibition had 34 stands from a mixture of public and private sector bodies. The Scottish Executive produced an installation on its new mapping project, a scheme, currently in its infancy, which aims to collect together information on all of the proposed new developments in Scotland .In the public sector, Clydebank Rebuilt held a highly successful workshop in which Eleanor McAllister and David Page talked about their plans and approaches to the project and looked at the challenges involved in building according to a master plan.

The show was also supported by Edinburgh City Council, which provided a massive poster with the slogan ‘Design is Value’, and an aerial photograph of Edinburgh waterfront. Glasgow City Council, the sponsors of the opening business breakfast, provided a model of the new pedestrian bridge linking Broomielaw to Tradeston. Johannes Hoffman, from Zaha Hadid’s office, gave a highly informative lecture on how the proposals for the new Glasgow Transport Museum are developing. Meanwhile, Glasgow Harbour provided a fascinating model and background material to show how its plans for the north side of the Clyde are developing. Falkirk Council provided information on its latest plans and its ten-year regeneration campaign, My Future’s in Falkirk.

Heriot-Watt University’s School of Built Environment used the show to highlight its full, part-time and distance-learning courses in civil and architectural engineering, construction management, planning, facilities management, housing, urban regeneration and conservation. Malcolm Cooper, Historic Scotland’s new chief inspector, gave an encouraging introduction in which he explained how the body wanted to spend less of its resources looking at the detail of minor projects and more time concentrating on helping to bring historic buildings into a position where they can make a useful contribution to built landscape and social function.

BRE, the British Research Establishment, held its annual conference at the event. The forum provided an opportunity to review some of the lessons learnt from work on risk and sustainability. IIt was good to see a number of developers on board. AMA New Town was showcasing its work at Cramond, where it is working with Richard Murphy, and Silvermills, where it is working with Reiach and Hall and Oberlanders. Grosvenor, the developers for Pacific Quay, ran a high-powered workshop at which leading developers and politicians engaged in a lively discussion about the difficulties of delivering joined-up regeneration projects.

Archetype demonstrated how its product, software designed specifically for the construction industry, can help bring order to practices struggling under the weight of paperwork and filing. Woodhouse, which designs and supplies external lighting, street furniture and architectural features with a strong contemporary quality, used the show to demonstrate its work throughout the North of England and Scotland, focusing on work in George Square, Glasgow and on the Gateshead Millennium Bridge.

Cupa Natural Slate, the Edinburgh-based company that exports more than 140,000 tonnes of slate to 20 countries and is a major supplier in the Scottish market also attended. Corus Colours, the international metal group and Cairney Hardware, specialist in fine design ironmongery products also had stands. Kingspan Insulation Ltd used the event to showcase the highly efficient Kingspan Kooltherm K-range of CFC/HCFC-free insulation, and the stand by Intaglio Glass, specialist in glass design, which produces bespoke glass products for a range of clients from private individuals to large corporate bodies, captured the imagination of many delegates. Tree Craft Woodwork came from Dornoch in Sutherland to showcase its timber windows and doors. On the interiors front, Scope Bathroom Interiors, the Scottish-based company that imports high-quality bathrooms, used the show to demonstrate a number of its latest products, and A&M Robinson, a Scottish company with long-established links with Italian manufacturers,
showcased its cutting-edge bathroom interiors.

The show looked fantastic thanks to architects Nord, who desgined the show layout and the Prospect Pavilion, and B&S graphics, who produced all of the exhibitions and graphics for the show. The 100 Best Buildings exhibition attracted a good deal of attention as delegates debated the merits of the ranking, One of the highlights of the exhibition was the stand belonging to the St Peter’s Building Preservation Trust. The trust borrowed some exquisite models of St Peter’s seminary at Cardross, made by students of Glasgow School of Art.