Letter from Glasgow - Glasgow's Year of Architecture and Design

Architectural Review, The, Dec, 1999 by Gavin Stamp

Through an ambitious and varied year-long celebration of architecture and design directed by Deyan Sudjic, the city of Glasgow has been the (often recalcitrant) subject of much creative and political effort to improve it. Gavin Stamp reports on the results.

I am scarcely the best person to give an objective view of Glasgow's Year of Architecture and Design as I was so much involved with what even others admit was the great success of the year: the Alexander Thomson exhibition. But I have the virtue of being both an outsider and an insider, and as an immigrant, a resident non-Glaswegian, I can see beyond the constant campaign of denigration, of carping, of satisfaction in failure, which has characterized some local opinion and the reporting of the local, deeply provincial press. Resentment there has been that so many who run 1999 were imported from London, this, and the old Scottish trait of hating success and the new Glasgow tradition of celebrating mediocrity, together with Edbinburgh's deep, deep hurt at losing the Arts Council's accolade to its rival, has festered. But all that matters is whether the Glasgow 1999 team has served the city well or badly and, on the whole, I think they have done well -- despite having had to cope with tight budgets and ghastly l ocal politics.

The Year of Architecture and Design was intended to 'pull architecture and design out of the professional ghetto and to provide a full programme of events and exhibitions that will involve the whole community and leave a lasting legacy'. It has certainly made an impact on the city: banners bearing the faces of Aalto, Wright and Mies as well as Mackintosh and Thomson hang in George Square while the face of Greek T also appears on the Clydesdale Bank's [pounds]20 note (the only British architect other than Wren to receive such an accolade). But successful publicity is not the whole story: the principal vehicle for interesting the public has been exhibitions and while some have drawn the crowds, some have not. It was brave, if foolish, to put on Vertigo: The Strange New World of the Contemporary City -- show still coming from well inside that ghetto -- in February in a disused cast-iron market hall in the Merchant City, and the visitor figures reflect this, even if it has been one of the virtues of 1999 that so mething has gone on in every month of the year -- including the bleakest.

Architecture of Democracy at the McLellan Galleries also failed to draw in the crowds, and that was a great shame as it was a fascinating as well as cleverly designed show full of new and unexpected material -- photographs, models and drawings of strange parliament buildings whose existence I had never suspected. Happily, it is to travel elsewhere: it deserves to. Similarly, attendances at the Home exhibition at the Homes for the Future site were way below estimate but it was always going to be difficult to get people out of the city centre to Glasgow Green. Besides, much more important is the fact that all the flats and houses -- by Rick Mather, Ian Ritchie, Ushida Findlay and local architects like McKeown & Alexander - sold before the show opened.

Homes for the Future is Glasgow's modest Weissenhofsiedlung, and it was no mean triumph to have persuaded housebuilders and the planning department not to build the usual run of orange brick, vaguely Post-Modern blocks that disfigure much of the city but to try something different. Walking to the opening on a cold wet day in June, I turned a corner to be confronted by the dazzle of white amid the usual ugly brick and decayed stone and suddenly understood how exciting the Modern Movement must have seemed in the '20s. I was also reminded of John Summerson reviewing the new Churchill Gardens and writing that he was surprised not to hear German spoken in the streets, for the development is really a piece of IBA of the 1980s, transported from Berlin. Never mind: Glasgow needs a bit of such sophistication, even if 15 years late, although the buildings will not be white for long, and the finishes are nowhere near as good as they ought to be.

The most successful exhibitions apart from Food: Design and Culture -- were Frank Lloyd Wright and the Living City and Alexander Thomson: The Unknown Genius, and quite right too (not for nothing do many visitors comment that Holmwood, Thomson's finest villa, now open to the public, looks like a Prairie School house). But Wright, like Aalto and Mies and much else, was imported, whereas Thomson was a home grown exhibition about a local hero -- something very necessary in the programme. Naturally I think it much to 1999's credit that, after years of abuse to his creations, poor old Greek T was celebrated and that Murray Grigor and I were asked to put the exhibition together. Not that Thomson was ever 'unknown', which is why Glaswegians came to see it, as well as many from outside, bringing the attendance figure to over 70 000-- way over the estimate.

Thomson was the first exhibition in The Lighthouse -- 'Scotland's Centre for Architecture, Design and the City' -- which is the other permanent architectural legacy of 1999. It is the conversion and enlargement of the old Glasgow Herald building detailed by the young Mackintosh when assistant to Honeyman & Keppie (though that is not the story now told) cleverly contrived by Page & Park and executed with great flair despite severe constraints. Escalators whizz visitors up to the exhibition galleries and the viewing platforms above, and already the Lighthouse has become a vital part of the cultural life of the city. My complaint (apart from there being too much glass) is that the politicians foisted an over-designed and under-filled Mackintosh Interpretation Centre on the institution, on the tired old assumption that Toshie equals tourism equals money.