January 15 2010

So, the gloves are now off, although not that you’d know it from the craven reporting of the opening of the eight week public consultation on Sir Ian Wood’s megalomaniac scheme for Union Terrace Gardens in Aberdeen. As the Wrap has previously pointed out, this is not likely to produce anything that might legitimately come within the normal interpretation of the term ‘consultation’, given that only one option is on offer: Sir Ian’s. The public don’t get to vote on the existing competition-winning – and planning approved – designs for new premises for Peacock Visual Arts. Mercy me, no – that would smack of democracy and that’s not the game being played out here.

Fronting up Sir Ian’s project is the finance-free Aberdeen City and Shire Economic Future (Acsef), which touts itself as ‘the North east’s economic forum’. At the launch, its chairman, Tom Smith, said “the city square project is, I think, Aberdeen’s last, but probably best, chance to get the plaza it deserves. Obviously this statement – and particularly its final sentiment – can be read in a number of ways, but the very word ‘plaza’ is likely to bring anyone with any feelings for urban design in Scotland out in hives. Having no interest whatsoever in good urban design, the press has of course, bought hook, line and sinker into the absurd hyperbole of Sir Ian and his flunkies when its real role should be to question where the largest part of the money for the project is going to come from. This, after all, is in a city whose council presciently decided in November last year not to renew the leases on six gritting lorries because it couldn’t afford them.

Much has been made of Sir Ian’s proposal to stump up some £40m or £50m (the press can’t decide on which of these figures so generally plumps for the larger one) towards a proposed budget of £140m. The Wrap has previously reported on Sir Ian’s expectations that we, the taxpayers, should be pleased to put forward the other £100m or so, but that was before politicians were having to face up to the consequences of large holes in the nation’s financial pockets. It therefore still remains for Sir Ian to be considerably more upfront about where exactly the money is going to come from since it’s unlikely that colleagues in the business sector will be too interested in funding his patrician plans. They haven’t, after all, stumped up much to improve Aberdeen during the past 40 years of oil wealth so why should they start now?

And be in no doubt that 19th century patrician is what these plans are, for in seeking to offset objections from the arts community to the loss of the Brisac Gonzalez’ project for a new building for the Peacock, Sir Ian rather patronisingly commented: “I understand the arts community have their heart (sic) set on a particular building built in a particular way. Obviously it’s been extremely difficult to get them to divert their attention to the wider possibility. But a contemporary arts centre, built as part of what is a transformational development in the centre of Aberdeen will cost less. They will get exactly what they want: lower costs, better prospect for viability.”

So that’s them told then, and its good to know that Sir Ian, from his oil industry background is able to dismiss a well-examined arts project because he knows better what the arts community really, really wants. Which would be fine were it not that the visuals issued at the launch of his plans only too clearly illustrate a bunch of contemporary urban clichés in search of a cohering idea. Sadly, however, should Sir Ian triumph over people he clearly considers to be Luddites, these numpty notions will add up to the plaza that furrybootville deserves and we will all be paying through the nose to satisfy his hubris.

But there may be one small light on the horizon for opponents to Sir Ian’s plans, for whatever his business skills may be, they don’t seem to be matched by substantial amounts of political savoir-faire. He’s come out publicly against the Scottish government’s anti-nuclear stance, accusing ministers of being “in denial” over their belief that the country’s energy needs could be met from renewable resources, and you have to say that even for an administration prepared to bend over backwards to accommodate the worst of Aberdeen and Aberdeenshire excesses (see Wraps passim on the Beast of Menie, Ring Road, etc) this may prove a bridge – or a terrace garden - too far. Not perhaps the best way to encourage humongous amounts of public money into his pet project at a time when politicians have to be seen to be avoiding any form of unnecessary expenditure.

Leery of Gehry
Scrunching southwards through the snow to Dundee, another big urban idea is getting its fifteen minutes in the limelight. This time it’s the V&A’s plans to open a branch outlet on the waterfront and, it has to be said, one that has considerably more chance of being realised than Sir Ian’s priceless plaza. Since the V&A is actually on board and very up for it. Apparently there’s going to be a two stage international architectural competition, although already the fashionable phrase “we want to find a design team that can deliver a world class building fitting for such a high quality project” has been mouthed by Mike Galloway, the Director of City Development for Dundee City Council. Mike, you may remember, used to be in Glasgow and charged with the regeneration of the Gorbals, so it would be a fair bet to presume that his favoured masterplanner, Piers Gough, will turn up somewhere, either amongst the judges or on the shortlist. I suppose it’s all a question of how you define ‘world class’.

But there I go again, getting ahead of myself. I blame the press for starting it though - already they’ve more or less given the project to Frank Gehry for three reasons: first he designed the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao and every journalist too lazy to look deeply into the regeneration success of that city thinks it was all down to Frank; second, Dundee already has the UK’s only Gehry building, so a second one provides double-whammy p.r. value; and three, Gorbals Mike led them to think so (“Frank knows about the process so I’d be very surprised if he didn’t put something forward”) .Forget for a moment that Frank is now in his eighties and a bit choosy about how often he puts himself through full body scans and shoe examinations because Dundee Council has - according to Mr Galloway - continued to seek the Los Angeles-based guru’s views for its planned waterfront ever since his involvement in the teacake-sized Maggie’s Centre at Ninewells Hospital, an apparent fact that had certainly  passed me by.

Anyway, while you’re trawling through the OJEU lists for the competition details, the Wrap will spend a bit of time finding out more about the background politics to this one. It is, after all, only two and a half years since it was widely touted that Kath Findlay would get the Dundee appointment from the V&A and although admittedly her star was quite a bit higher in the city at that time, it’ll be interesting to find out how the thinking has developed since then. It’s a £47m project so not to be sniffed at, but will it turn out like the Glasgow School of Art competition – i.e. hundreds of downloads of the details with only a relatively small proportion turning into actual submissions? One thing though: Dundee architects need not apply since it’s not in the city’s DNA to give any of you work on your home patch. If you don’t believe me, ask jute town’s professor of Scottish architectural history, Charles McKean – he’s done the stats on this little-known fact so of course it must be right.

Think global, act loco
And while we’re on the subject of competitions – and the Glasgow School of Art one in particular - I have to say I was a bit surprised to see a headline in Architectural Record (the main journal of architecture in the good ol’ US of A) that loudly stated “Steven Holl’s Glasgow Commission Rankles Scots.” Now even someone with his ear as close to the ground as myself wasn’t aware of huge swathes of outrage coming from the profession here and indeed many have commented to me that with such a strong shortlist any of the practices or collaborations listed would have produced a good result.

It turns out, however, that it’s our old friend Tweedle-D who has taken umbrage at the appointment of the Yankee Holler. Tweedle-D‘s practice did not of course reach the shortlist for the project, but with a project in Australia and a professorship in Kansas, it would not have been politic to overplay the Scottish card to Architectural Record and so our local luminary ingeniously suggested that whilst Holl was a “damn fine architect”, the job should have gone to the team of Nord and John McAslan and Partners because “they better understood the complex issues and were more sensitive to the Mackintosh building.” The latter may well be true but one complex issue that seemed to pass by Tweedle-D’s preferred option is that Nord is headed by Alan Pert, a professor at the University of Strathclyde School of Architecture and, in the small world of academic politics in Glasgow, there was about as much chance of someone from its main competitor institution in the city being appointed to this particularly prestigious project as pigs flying.

One wheel on the wagon – the story keeps rolling along
With the seasonal festivities now over, the big wheel in Edinburgh’s Princes Street has been rolled away for another year, but tales of the other one – the Och Eye – proposed for the capital’s Waterfront still seem to be doing the rounds. Wrap readers will remember me mentioning this chimerical wheel before Christmas and setting both the sheer inappropriateness, the spectacular lack of originality and the all-too-obvious lack of funding against the tourist-catching case being made for it by its advocates. Interestingly, shortly after the story first appeared, an international poll of favourite landmarks showed – contrary to the justifications being made for the Och Aye – that the London Eye wasn’t quite the dollar magnet Edinburgh’s politicians believed it to be and, along with Big Ben, failed to make the global landmark top ten in a survey of 10,000 world travellers carried out by Hotels.com. In fact, it came some way behind the Eiffel Tower, Sydney Opera House, the Sagrada Familia – original projects all – and, if anything, simply multiplied the number of reasons for politicians in Edinburgh not wasting any more time on this specious concept.

Frighteningly though, this daft idea continues to trundle on – in a report by the environmental reporter of the city’s Evening News on Forth Ports plc’s plans for four biomass stations on both sides of the Firth, the accompanying graphic insidiously compared the 100m height of a possible chimney on the Imperial Dock to the proposed circumference of what the paper now refers to as ‘Scotland’s National Wheel’. Eek. To be fair to the journalist, his report itself made no mention of the Och Aye, but as we all know a picture tells a thousand words. Given Edinburgh Planners’ recent lamentable track record, can planning permission for this 21st century folly be far away? They would of course, require the developers of the wheel to make a sizeable contribution towards the cost of the tram, but perhaps it’s best not to grind that old axle again.

Gone fission
Back up the east coast of Scotland to Wick, where Reiach and Hall Architects have won the commission to design the UK’s first National Nuclear Archive. The new £15m building will house up to 30 million digital records, papers and photographs chronicling the history of the UK’s civil nuclear industry since the 1940s and in announcing the winning practice, Randall Bargelt, director of the Nuclear Decommissioning Authority, said: “this is a UK facility which will be housed in a building of international quality, a new asset for the Wick community and a hugely important store of history and knowledge.” Which made me wonder why, if this archive is actually so critical to our cultural, economic and social history, it finds itself in Wick? I know it’s not so far from Dounreay but you don’t have to go all the way to Antartica to see an exhibition of original material on Captain Scott. Whatever, the Dounreay Dome is a rather more visible memory of the northeast’s most prominent 20th century industry than remains from the 19th century of the impact on the area of the Silver Darlings. And with the fishing and nuclear industries now gone, a records archive is infinitely (sic) safer material to be storing than plant’s uranium waste legacy.

In any case, Neil Gillespie and his talented team will, I am sure, bring something as special to this job as they did to the Pier Art Centre in Orkney, but we need to bear in mind that Wick’s a town of just over 7000 inhabitants and not exactly easy to get to so visitor numbers are unlikely to be especially high. But then, the project is very clearly described as an archive and not as a library, so not a facility that needs to count the number of its regular users. In any case, it will provide secure employment for the archivists – a job for half-life, so to speak. And I agree wholeheartedly with Neil that it will provide the opportunity to introduce some good architecture into this part of the north of Scotland – God knows, there needs to be some alternative for visitors to the area if Robert Adam’s plan for nearby John O’Groats proceeds.

And finally…
The Festive break brought some good news for at least two Scottish practices. The announcement of Graeme Massie’s third competition success in Iceland – this time to masterplan the 80 hectare Old Harbour site in Reykjavik –was perhaps a bit overshadowed by the Icelandic public’s resistance to paying exorbitant interest on the monies agreed by their government with the British and Dutch governments over the losses of the small nation’s banks, but the fact remains – Graeme is on a roll here and is one undoubtedly of our most active geysers when it comes to succeeding in the international architectural marketplace.

The other practice to surprise everyone over the New Year was that of Gareth Hoskins – or Gareth Hoskins OBE as he now is after the announcement of the Queen’s Honours List. There have been fairly few such baubles given to architects in recent years and even fewer to architects in Scotland so it would be churlish to grudge Gareth this new plaudit. Not that some haven’t tried – the usual crew that post anonymously on the AJ’s web pages were not slow to ask what on earth Gareth had done for architecture that he’d not received a fee for. The obvious answer is of course twofold: first, he’s managed to make some very good buildings out of some very inauspicious briefs and second, he has of course taken the Donald Trump shilling, thereby saving all other architects in Scotland from having to hang on this very shaky peg themselves.

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