Elder and Cannon have played a significant role in the development of a contemporary architectural language for city centre development. Penny Lewis talked to Dick Cannon about the last twenty five years in practice.

11 Feb 2005

by Penny Lewis

Last year Elder and Cannon’s Clavius Building, for St Aloysius in Glasgow, won the RIAS Award for Architecture. When Gordon Murray, RIAS President, handed over the prize he said the award was for both Clavius and the practice’s broader body of work. That body of work spans almost 25 years, from the post-modern National Bank of Pakistan, to the restrained elevations of Clavius and the daring zinc-clad Icon tower on the edge of the Clyde. Over that time Elder and Cannon have had a significant influence on architecture in Scotland, directly through their work, through teaching and as a studio.

The launch of the practice in the early 1980s coincided with the start of Glasgow’s so-called ‘urban renaissance’. A revival of interest in inner city development posed a number of important questions for architects and planners, and Elder and Cannon were at the forefront of addressing them. In the early years they pioneered a new architectural language for buildings being placed cheek by jowl with the city’s historic building stock, and as the practice developed they played an important role in the re-working of the tenement, first for social tenements and more recently for the private sector. In the last ten years they have become involved in education projects, both as designers for St Aloysius and as advisers to the public sector.

Tom Elder and Dick Cannon had met while they were both apprentices at Wright and Kirkwood in the 1960s, and started sharing an office in 1980, before landing their first significant commissions, the D&D warehouse, the Church of the Holy Name and the National Bank of Pakistan (NBP) at 552 Sauchiehall Street, and subsequently three other banks in Bradford, Manchester and London. Not long after setting up they were joined by Tom Connolly, now a partner in the practice.
The early work looks decidedly playful, but when Cannon starts to talk about this work the fundamentally modernist approach of the practice is clear. “The NBP Sloane Street bramch was about levels of privacy, careful positioning allowed us to keep a vista through the building and layer the space. The geometric forms helped to give an identity for the client. As for the Church of the Holy Name, in Mansewood, it was a modest building; a simple rectangle and a lantern light to suggest church and community. We used these two simple elements to generate something inside and out,” explains Cannon.

“When we use embellishment it’s to support the main idea. When you look at some architects in the 1980s, like Venturi, often the main idea was obscured by the embellishment. I don’t think that our work was like that; it was about clearly organised spaces with decoration that was supportive,” he adds.

Henry McKeown worked at Elder and Cannon from 1987 to 1996. “ I remember Dick Cannon showing the D&D warehouse in a lecture. In my experience it was the first sign of a departure in language, the first foray into post modernism, but not PoMo with bells and whistles, not consciously PoMo, it was more that they had a good eye. They said, if we do a warehouse, it doesn’t have to look like a warehouse,” recalls McKeown.

Elder and Cannon work is about a marriage of a rigorous approach to the programme, plan, section and execution of a project with an active engagement with place – Norman Foster meets Rafael Moneo. Cannon talks about their work in a very down to earth, rational fashion, but he is not afraid to talk about a building’s identity. For him identity is not something dreamt up by the architect, it stems from the architect’s response to the peculiarities of place, brief and client. “Architecture is about ‘care in placement’,” said Cannon. “If you make the wrong move you can kill something, so we spend a lot of time thinking about these things.”

When you ask Cannon what the influences have been on his work, he admits that the practice’s tastes are catholic (he mentions both Foster and Moneo as the two extremes of the spectrum), and says that the practice absorbs influences from the people and buildings in ‘their own city’.

St Aloysius

St Aloysius is an independent Catholic school with a number of sites in Glasgow’s Garnethill. The area is made up of an interesting mix of old tenement blocks climbing seriously sloping streets and Glasgow School of Art buildings, including the original art school by CR Mackintosh.

Over the past ten years St Aloysius has developed a strategy to upgrade and rationalise its properties. Elder and Cannon have completed two buildings for the school and plans are underway to build a residence for the Jesuits. The first project, a junior school organised over six storeys, was completed in 1998. The second, the Clavius building, was finally completed, at a cost of £1,000 per square metre, last year after the contractor Lilley went bust halfway through the project.

The junior school is a self-contained composition, while Clavius’s functions link to other buildings further down the road, but both buildings are the product of an aspiration to avoid the wasted corridor and circulations space, a break from the traditional cellular classrooms arrangement. In the junior school, Elder and Cannon placed the majority of classrooms on the prominent southern elevation and used the conventional Victorian device of an atrium, or light well, to bring daylight into the heart of the building.

“We took the Victorian void, with its uniform experience all around and decided to introduce variety, scary corners. The idea is not to re-invent the wheel, but to make a contribution to its development,” said Cannon.

In Clavius too, circulation spaces double up as rooms to be used by students on a more informal basis. The architects even managed to provide a small internal garden. In both cases, an energetic section is complemented by bold innovative detailing. At Clavius the windows on the north elevation step up above the ceiling level creating the illusion of a seamless link between the building and the street, and the Campsie hills beyond.

In the junior school the main elevation is made up of carefully placed glass louvers that are programmed for light and sun control and create a stack cooling system.

The glass, stainless steel and concrete elevations contrast with the grubby blonde and red sandstone of surrounding tenements, but they have been designed with sensitivity to sight lines, eaves levels and proportions, although they look highly novel and almost chiselled, they are strangely appropriate.

Housing and the city

Elder and Cannon began work on their first major regeneration project, Ingram Square, in 1984. The scheme involved the re-development of an entire Glaswegian city block, made up of 14 buildings to provide 240 flats and shops, and consisted of an interesting mixture of new build, conversion and façade retention. The client was a partnership between Kantel, a development company run by Andrew Doolan and Andrew Burrell, Glasgow City Council, and the Scottish Development Agency.

“At the time most cities were embarking on a cautious journey, they were beginning to change their attitude to expression in inner city developments,” recalls Cannon. “For us context was important, but it can be respected through the use of height, skyline and proportion; it does not necessarily mean responding strictly to the traditional geometry and form.”

The first new build blocks to be completed, blocks one and two, were designed to reflect the traditional approach to façade making, e.g. base, middle and a top, plus certain proportions and vertical elements. However, it was very hard to get planning approval for any brick building in an area populated by A-Listed buildings. Elder and Cannon used pale mortar and a buff brick to get the façade to read like a monolithic structure, and placed ceramic dots across the elevation to distract the eye and suggest a bigger scale of components associated with stone.

By the time Elder and Cannon came to design the Brunswick Hotel, on a deep narrow site in the Ingram Square block, the architect’s language was becoming more understated, but they struggled with the planners to allow the development of a seven-storey tower that matched the eaves lines of the adjoining buildings. “Brunswick was all about scale and how to detail stone and stainless steel to be modern, but not upset the neighbours,” said Cannon.

Since the mid-80s the practice has been involved in housing association work, a task that Dick Cannon describes as “a privilege”. Working with ambitious clients the practice developed new ideas testing the water as they went. “Every client provides unique requirements. It is always about scale and context; then you have to look at the cores and groupings to generate the right number of flats with the right point of view,” said Cannon.

Over time a distinctive response emerged. Elder and Cannon’s scheme for Reidvale at Duke Street in the city’s East end was the first of these works. “Reidvale was five storeys high, with no lifts. The issue was how do you get access to the top storey. It’s a case of looking at what is permissible and finding a solution that works. Sometimes that is easier said than done,” recalls Cannon. The Reidvale project has a strong contextual response to the front and a looser identity at the back. For the first time the backcourt was treated as a landscaped environment, not just a place to put the bins. This section of the blocks was organised to create one large family unit at the heart of each block with a double-volume, split-level living space in the largest units, and large floor-to-ceiling heights in other living rooms. On plan the living spaces took up the full width of the plan, creating a living-dining space with a kitchen against the back wall. It’s a formula that has since been repeated in many highly successful social housing projects.

Elder and Cannon have worked on a wide range of social housing schemes since Reidvale, Annadale Street in Govanhill and Moffat Gardens in Gorbals are both projects in which they have carefully addressed the issues involved in tenement housing and given the building a distinct identity. Elder and Cannon were also key players in the Glasgow 1999 Homes for the Future project, a scheme that Cannon feels was misunderstood. “The final scheme was an amalgamation of elements from two of the competition entries. We worked with Rick Mather and ODBC, and our skydeck proposal formed part of the final exhibition. There was potential to produce some quite exploratory, possibly pre-fabricated, homes on the top floor; in reality it was all a bit less adventurous.”

Since Homes for the Future Elder and Cannon have moved with the market and started to produce more housing for private developers. Last year the Icon building, a tower block on a narrow deep site on the edge of the Clyde, picked up a Saltire Award. The scheme has an ingenious plan that provides all of the homes with views of the river.

The practice

“Our studio is organised to absorb the best from everyone. We seldom explore one single idea; three people explore separate ideas and then we get together. We do the best within the constraints,” said Cannon. The Elder and Cannon studio has a very stable workforce, but a number of highly talented designer have passed through the office including Chris Hermansen, who taught at the Mac and now heads up a School in Norway, and Graham Robertson and Adrian Hawker, who are both now teachers at the Mac and Edinburgh University, respectively. Others include Jill Mulvenan, who went on to work for developer Pathfinder; Ross Hunter, who formed Graven Images and was joined by Willie Nolan; Graham Forsyth, who went on to a senior position at Cooper Cromar; and Bruce Kennedy, who now works for BDP. Henry McKeown and Ian Alexander, who formed their own practice and recently merged with jmarchitects, both worked with the practice. McKeown describes the office as a brilliant place to work. “The octane levels were very high, there was a lot of creative energy and a pressure to do better. Dick is very good at coaching people in how to be a professional at all levels of the job,” said McKeown.

Elder and Cannon’s work is clever, they could even be described as the architect’s architect; their work exudes those lateral moves and that attention to detail that makes fellow architects almost green with envy. “Architecture is not just about organising functions and spaces; it’s about serving a need creatively throughout the design process through the execution. Care in detailing is what we believe brings a certain refinement to a building; it’s part of what gives a building its character and its materiality.” said Cannon.

But they are not a precious bunch, it is not the shadow gaps that impress their peers but the big moves, the clever turns that allow the architect to follow through on a design without compromising the initial intention and ambition.

Cannon is either modest or impatient in the face of compliments. He prefers to think of the practice’s approach as ‘lateral’ rather than ‘clever’ and rejects any suggestion that the work is wilful. “We try to retain an open mind about how something is achieved. If you understand the regulations then there may be a way to make it work without giving up on the original objective. We are lateral thinkers. Architecture is a collaborative process, with client, design team and other specialists. We are always trying to discuss and explore ways of doing things. We look at each project in its own terms and as a result each project has its own distinct identity.”

With such a strong track record it comes as a surprise to many onlookers that Elder and Cannon have not been more successful at exporting their talents. Although they have done some speculative work in Manchester and Sunderland, they have not worked much outside of the central belt of Scotland, and the vast majority of the practice’s work is focused around Glasgow. Why? “Circumstances and a lack of marketing,” said Cannon honestly, “but we are always open to opportunities.”

Elder and Cannon is currently made up of the following people: Tom Elder, Dick Cannon, Tom Connolly, Stephen Hoey, John Docherty, Malcolm Inglis, Johnny Togneri, Mark Kilkenny, Edward Dymock, Glen Massey, Douglas Spence, Claire Dymock, Donald Shearer, Duncan Taylor, Joanne Cunnion and Julie Brownlee.