With this article, I’ve chosen to return to Aberdeen which – although it lacks good contemporary architecture – does contain some notable post-war Modernist buildings.
Imagine a city where everything lies within walking distance of home: shops, parks, cinemas, school, a gym, football stadium, and a bus station that connects you to the rest of the city. How can you fit everything in? The answer is high-rise development.
Towers came about in reaction to the land-hungry suburban ethos of the 1950’s. Space on the ground was running out, so architects conceived a new kind of urban, high-rise living. At the same time, many inner cities were riddled with slums sorely in need of regeneration. Scotland was at the forefront of this movement – Dundee with the 26-storey Derby Street multi’s, and Glasgow with the 32-storey Red Road point blocks, which were the tallest steel-framed buildings in Europe when completed – but Aberdeen’s towers are very different to any others in Scotland. Dundee, Edinburgh and Glasgow relied on “package deals”, where the building contractor took charge, delivering a system of concrete panels manufactured on a production line. In Aberdeen, most of the multi-storeys were designed by the staff of the City Architect, George McKeith. Now, whilst the further-flung towers, like Seaton and Tillydrone, look much the same as high-rise council blocks elsewhere in the country, those in the city centre, at Chapel Street, Gallowgate and Castlehill, are unique.
In April 1950, Baillie Frank Magee, the city’s Housing convenor, declared that there were still appalling slums in Aberdeen which must be wiped out. “We are not going to build tenements, but something we will be proud of, and something I hope that may win another Saltire Prize”. What he was alluding to was Rosemount Square, the modernist tenement which I wrote about elsewhere – in 1947 it was premiated by the Saltire Society, which present awards to Scottish housing projects of merit. In January 1952, the Housing committee approved Aberdeen’s first multi – a nine storey block in Ashgrove Road – and even considered installing district heating within the block. The first tower block proved to be good value, so the “multi” programme developed. Another prime mover behind the post-war housing redevelopments in Aberdeen was Robert Lennox, the city treasurer. 
The inner city blocks at Chapel Street, Gallowgate and Castlehill were built on the site of slum clearances, and transformed their neighbourhoods. Although old granite buildings which were retained where possible, the towers dominate. They have dramatic profiles, and were orientated to catch the sun for the benefit of their residents in the morning and early evening, but to minimise the effects of the shadows they cast during the rest of the day. This means that several of them sit with their narrow edge on a north-south axis. Aberdeen was slow to begin its programme of high rise construction – and it was the last city in Scotland to build a high-rise council block, in 1985. None are true “skyscrapers” in the New York sense. Yet in 1977 the city’s Director of Planning argued that tower blocks have a – “dramatic effect seen from many viewpoints outside and within the city, particularly when they catch and reflect brilliant sunshine, burn with the reds and purples of evening sunsets, or appear softly indistinct through the haze.”
The blocks on Gallowgate make dramatic use of the sloping land towards West North Street: Seamount Court and Porthill Court grow out of several tiers of concrete car park. The towers behind the Salvation Army Citadel in the Castlegate – Virginia Court and Marischal Court – command Union Street and act as a vista stop when you stand at Holburn Junction and gaze northwards. They were placed on the highest point of the city centre deliberately, and they look down upon the council offices at St Nicholas House. That’s the way it should be: the people set above their politicians. Further north, Hutcheon Court and Greig Court are less dominant, but loom over the giant roundabout of Mounthooly and its “Clockwork Orange” underpass. Over the course of 40 years, the towers have become an inseparable part of the city’s silhouette, alongside the Town House and Marischal College.
However remote it may seem, we have a tradition of building vertically in Scotland which stretches back to tower houses – castles comprising a vertical stack of accommodation. They were sturdy masonry sentinels with a cluster of rude hovels around their feet – in the same way that the 1960’s concrete point blocks rose from a morass of festering slums. Conceptually, the model for Aberdeen’s tower blocks were the “Unité d’Habitation” buildings in Berlin and Marseilles, designed a few years before by Swiss architect Le Corbusier. His aim was to create self-contained villages, with generous apartments organised along streets in the sky, and facilities such as a laundry and creche integrated into the block. So the multi storey blocks have a mixed pedigree: Scots tower house, and Continental communal living. The tower stretched up to meet the lofty social ideals of post-war architects and town planners.
Playing Devil’s advocate for a moment, Aberdeen is a low-rise city. With the signal exception of a handful of these Brutalist multi-storey towers, the city centre skyline sits four storeys above street level. Anything which rises above the line is alien, particularly if it is a “statement” building. For example, when you approach Aberdeen from the south, the Talisman Energy headquarters of 2001 is a landmark for the wrong reasons. Often likened to an aircraft carrier ploughing through the city, it even has a “ski jump” at one end of the roof, as if to enable Harrier jump jets to take off. The architects – Jenkins & Marr – may have made a simple association between oil companies, the North Sea and giant wave shapes, but the sheer-sided hull of silver-tinted glass forces its way through a tide of grey slate roofs on the medieval Hardgate, and its freeboard is visible from miles away. Talisman House is “just” seven storeys high, but its context sits three storeys beneath it: the projecting part doesn’t glitter in the sunshine like dressed granite does, instead its mirrored glass blinds you with dazzle and iceblink. 
The concrete towers take on a very different aspect, but had to combat a different danger. Aberdeen’s multi-storeys are between 12 and 18 storey high slab blocks built mainly from in-situ reinforced concrete. Public housing at Roehampton, and the Barbican Centre, (both in London) are other scarce examples of concrete towers, cast as beton brut, smooth or bush-hammered like elephant hide. Today, concrete is used as a metaphor for everything that’s perceived to be wrong with 1960’s architecture: but the unique treatment of Aberdeen’s tower blocks avoids the problems that plain concrete suffers from. Fresh bright concrete gradually weathers with age, often becoming streaked with run-off water and stained with dirt from the atmosphere. Granite rubble was cast into the concrete, like raisins in a clootie dumpling, to give it a grain and texture which breaks up the streams of rain which would otherwise stain the panels.
Aberdeen is almost unique with its rubbly concrete towers: elsewhere in the world, multi-storeys are clad in a diaphanous veil of “curtain walling”. The towers were made possible by the “Concrete Age” – which supplanted the city’s more famous Granite Age. Where solid rock lay some distance under the surface, the towers needed piled foundations. A column of soil was removed with a giant auger, then a cage with a man inside was dropped down inside the pile casing – shades of Dickensian times, given that the piles were very deep, and only four feet in diameter. When he reached the bottom, he checked that the building would have something solid to bear onto: quite important, considering it would rise 150 feet above the street. The concrete arrived thanks to recently-introduced truckmixers, or a batching plant on site, which prepared a soup of sand, water, gravel and Portland cement. The liquid was poured into formwork, like plaster-of-Paris into a mould, and took on its final shape. Once it is placed, concrete actually gives off heat as it cures. The tower steams gently as it gains strength … and the heart of the concrete remains warm for months after the building is complete.
For the past 30 years, tower blocks have been routinely derided as a brutally inhumane environment, a piece of 1960’s megalomaniacal city planning gone wrong, a bleak neo-Corbusian high-rise experiment… they were discredited. After all, we still retain the memory of some high-profile council tower-block disasters – especially the partial collapse of Ronan Point in East London in 1970. Yet thanks to Robert Lennox, Aberdeen’s multi-storey blocks, with their large inherent investment in materials and labour, have been well looked after. They’ve been carefully managed, which means that they suffer from few of the problems – graffiti, vandalism and anti-social tenants – which blight the stereotypical multi. As a result, Aberdeen hasn’t demolished its multi’s with the relish which other Scots cities have. Today, a generation has passed since the last of Britain's concrete council tower blocks was built. Attitudes have changed. In the property boom following 2000, they were a signal of successful economy, of high land values and property speculation. New tower blocks were built in London, Glasgow, Manchester, Leeds. They aspired to the aura of apartment towers on Lake Shore Drive in Chicago, or the Upper East Side in New York – but the difference is that they are expensive private flats, rather than council housing. Not any more, of course …
So tower blocks have gone through a complete cycle, from heroic urban interventions, through vertical eyesores, back to being sought after again. Of course, they are compromised – especially if you have small children who want to play outside, and whose buggies have to be man-handled in and out of the lifts. Yet in Aberdeen there is none of the sense of menace you experience in the vicinity of the Red Road flats in Glasgow, or Leith Fort in Edinburgh. Provided you can put up with their drawbacks, they are relatively cheap to live in, centrally located, and always provide an expansive view across the city. In parts of continental Europe or the United States, these advantages would make the high flats unaffordable to all but the rich. Aberdeen’s City Fathers should be applauded for having invested in affordable social housing which towers above other cities’ efforts.
