January 28 2010

In a three part odyssey on BBC2 critic and author Jonathan Meades has launched an exploration of Scottish culture with ‘Off Kilter’, a narrative which commences in Aberdeen.

Aberdeen has fascinated Meades since boyhood, borne out of an irrational detestation of corned beef, but nonetheless finding succour in this foreign land of quarried mineral. Of themselves these hewn chunks of granite are “mute” but “put in structured order they tell a story.”

Meades revels in the qualities that make the granite city unique amongst its contemporaries, omnipresent dormer windows, fusion of industry and, most of all, an unprecedented lack of change.

Cities like Bath may share a dominance of stone but their sandstones erode with time, Aberdeen on the other hand remains a working city of “brand new two and three hundred year old buildings.”

Celebrating the many spires which serve as punctuation marks in the townscape, “alleviating the horizontal,” Meades bemoans the shameless pursuit of short term wealth evident in today’s oil industry, manifested by a mushrooming “blight” of research parks and HQ buildings. Meade laments: “There is no drama in dystopia. The golden rule is the more recent a building the worse it will be.”

This rule finds itself applied to future constructions as Meades turns his ire upon Sir Ian Wood and his plans for Union Terrace Gardens: “The last thing Aberdeen needs is a huge car park that will merely increase the volume of traffic. It’s a mad melange of utopia and Dubai that will replace a complex space… with a simple not to say simplistic space.

“Making cities tidy makes them die.”

Trump also fell prey to Meades intellectual assault over the “sustainable” golf course and housing plans for Menie. Criticising bland archi-speak Meades stated: “There is no architect left on Earth who fails to speak the language of sustainability”.

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