Gallery: "ghosts"
The Gardyne Campus Library in Broughty Ferry was designed by Thoms & Wilkie and opened in autumn 1976 as part of the new Dundee College of Education. It was the last major work by this architectural practice, and arguably the best late-Modern era building in Dundee, set in mature parkland to the east of the city centre.
The new college was planned from around 1969 to replace the Edwardian-era college in Park Place. By 1970, Thoms & Wilkie had established that the building would be a series of “terraces” stepping up the hill, and that was set out in a big polystyrene and balsa model which featured in subsequent press coverage.
Gardyne Road, as the college was known, was built by Charles Gray Builders – one of their largest projects at that time – work began on site in June 1971, and construction was completed in May 1976. With a small palette of materials including beautifully-executed dimensional blockwork and varnished timber, this building is all about proportion and surface, with prismatic glazing growing from the main volume.
According to a contemporary article in The Courier, the college extended to over 300,000 sq.ft., and consisted of 400,000 concrete blocks set into a reinforced concrete frame with 40 foot main spans. The structure consumed 1500 tons of reinforcing steel, plus 40,000 tons of ready-mixed concrete supplied by Dundee Readymix Co.: special French-designed hydraulic formwork tables were used to support the coffered floorslab.
As a teacher-training college it had a working life of only 30 years, as the buildings stood largely empty after Dundee University vacated them in July 2007. At that point the library interior, with fair-faced columns and a coffered "waffle" ceiling, was completely original and intact, and walking amongst its columns, with the coffers high above, felt like crossing the floor of the Hypostyle Hall at Karnak.
I have fond memories of the place: firstly from the end of the 1980’s when I was at school and swimming lessons were held here. I usually made sure I had a cold so that I didn’t have to bother swimming: instead, I joined the reprobates at the side of the pool who shouted abuse at the swimmers and tried to push each other in.
The second era was at the start of the 2000’s, when I discovered that my University library ticket allowed me to borrow books from the Gardyne Campus library. Like the building fabric, the interior fit-out was also perfectly preserved from the late Seventies, with the original fawn-coloured needle-punch carpet, sage green moulded plastic chairs, and timber study carrels.
It was a sanctuary, and the glazed gallery around the edge of the library was reminiscent of both Jim Stirling’s work at St Andrews, Leicester and Cambridge; and the later Burrell Gallery in Glasgow was even closer in execution, its mass offset by similar bevelled patent glazing around the perimeter, hard against the landscaping. The warm, small scale reading spaces perfectly balanced the dark, high-ceilinged stacks which lay further into the plan.
On a weekday afternoon you could sit on the bright edge of the library and flick through books from the 1970’s which had long disappeared from other libraries. The shelves were stocked when the college opened and never really brought up to date: I got into Saul Bellow and Lawrence Durrell, and rediscovered Joseph Heller, thanks to its original librarian’s catholic tastes.
The building was part of the former Dundee College of Education, which became the Northern College in 1987, then part of Dundee University in 2001. Dundee College took the building on after the University left, and by 2009 the books had gone, but the shelves and tables were still there, along with worn patches in the carpet which 30 years’ worth of feet had rubbed.
The waffle soffit carried an Op Art pattern of striplights, staggered at 90 degrees to each other; beyond the library were long corridors with either vinyl tile or terracotta quarry tile flooring, and slatted ceilings of varnished red pine.
Rumours began to circulate that the Gardyne Road campus would be redeveloped, and this would entail demolishing the library. At the time, I felt that would count as cultural vandalism; nevertheless, demolition began at the end of 2009, and over the Christmas holidays the glassless walls let snow drift over the rubble.
The resulting “intervention” looks as grim as anything built in Dundee under the PFI Schools programme and is a dismal result which destroyed one of the best pieces of late Modernism in the city. It also speaks volumes about Dundee College’s disregard for learning environments.
Fin.
Many of the best-known myths originate in Classical Greece. Prometheus, Midas and Achilles are well known throughout the western world. Scots myths don’t seem to travel well, perhaps because the Laird of Cockpen, or Bruce and the spider, have a certain couthy quality. By contrast, Greek myths are raw and powerful. The rawest is the mythical story of Elektra, related in dramatic form by Euripides, and made into an opera a century ago by Richard Strauss.
As it did in January 1909 when it was first performed in Dresden, Elektra still has the ability to propel you from your normal, reasoned existence into a place where savage, uncontrollable emotion wells up inside. The myth is part of the classical saga of the House of Agamemnon, a study of pathological hatred, sexual repression, and a parable of how violence begets violence.
Euripides shows that hatred kills the hater: Elektra is caught up in an act of vengeance against her mother, who murdered her father. In the opera, Strauss comes close to raw expressionism as he tries to represent the title character’s insanity. As a result, Elektra’s terrifying intensity has few parallels elsewhere in art. It is difficult enough to translate these feelings and experiences into literature or drama; transferring them into architecture seems almost an impossibility.
The experience of opera may be heightened by an element of fantasy: whether the dark, glamorous diva who sweeps across the foyer with her spray of black orchids, or that mysterious gent who is about to pull a silenced Browning Hi-Power from his cummerbund, and aim it at the foreign diplomat… The background to this may be baroque, rococco or merely a parametric architecture with an expensive polish.
Most environments we design are intended to be calm and rational: in fact, the Classical orders of architecture set out to achieve exactly that. It’s rare that anyone would wish to design somewhere at the opposite extreme, but such places do exist. Likewise the un-designed places which may have evolved over time – as in the case when you walk into the darkness of an abandoned railway tunnel, or a cave system. The complete absence of daylight, plus the strange acoustic of these places, suggests the Labyrinth, of Minotaur fame, and under the surface you certainly feel quite different to the world under the sun.
The senses are heightened, blood pulses in your ears, and your nerves are at a high key – despite depriving the senses of stimuli. Just make sure you take a torch, and a spare; plus a spare battery, and a spare for the spare … otherwise your mind will play tricks. The darkness does strange things to space – it grows and shrinks beyond the edge of the torch beam, and imaginary forms flit across the twilight beyond the torch beam. Fear can become an overwhelming emotion, if your imagination is left to its own devices.
Another example which springs to mind is the Rhubarb House. With its dank brick vaults hidden behind heavy wooden doors, rhubarb plants were “forced” in its darkness. The rhubarb was brought on when it was out of season, when it couldn’t grow outside due to the cold and darkness. Inside is absolute stillness, with moist air hanging at the back of the vaults and a soft carpet of humus and strawy manure which absorbs everything. When the rhubarb crowns are growing, set three feet apart and sprouting like triffids, their pale stalks and monstrous leaves dominate the space. Once they’ve been lifted, the hollow sheds are a void.
I’ve walked through them – tucked away in the Angus countryside, known by only by a handful of local people. There is a feeling of suppression and sensory deprivation in the vaults, and just like an anechoic chamber or a drainage culvert, they offer their own particular experience once you get used to the idea of being where you are. Claustrophobia is one symptom, or perhaps a vague unease about those cold, organic things with names like Timperley, Hawkes Champagne, or The Sutton.
The other extreme is a place of over-stimulation, which for these purposes we will call the Hazard Room. It does exist, somewhere south of the Pentlands – a place with yellow and black striped walls, floor and ceiling; strobing lights and revolving mirrors; sirens sounding at random; blasts of dry heat and freezing fog. Blood pressure and physiological stress levels are greatly increased: you are set on edge, and the space quickly becomes unendurable for anything more than short periods.
The loudness, exaltation, bizarre perspectives and confusing visual cues owe something to surrealism, and something more to Jungian psychology. No-one really knows why the Hazard Room was created, although its context suggests it was dreamed up by psychiatrists, or perhaps installation artists. It is not a comfortable place to be – but that’s the idea. It was designed to over-power with raw emotion to represent, or perhaps trigger, insanity.
The godfather of the study of these sensations is Edmund Burke, who attempted to theorise the sublime in his Philosophical Treatise of 1756. Burke was the first philosopher to scrutinise our sense of awe: what stimulates it, how it acts upon us, and why the triggers exist in our mind in the first place. He listed attributes such as obscurity, power, darkness, vastness, and magnitude. “To make anything very terrible, obscurity seems in general to be necessary. When we know the full extent of any danger, when we can accustom our eyes, a great deal of the apprehension vanishes.”
Perhaps we need to feel, in a metaphysical sense, that there is something greater than us out there – whether through an understanding of religion, animism or aestheticism. Perhaps it does no harm to be jolted into a state of agitation by these extreme stimuli? This was the thesis of the Lettrist International, when they conceived their Formulary for a New Urbanism in the early 1950’s – that group of amateur revolutionaries later evolved onto the Situationists, who fomented the student rising in Paris in 1968. The Lettrists put forward a city which works directly on the passions and emotions, and they offered us a new conception of space:
“They are to be found in the magical spots of fairy stories and in some surrealist art: castles, great walls that cannot be climbed, small bars run to seed, caverns with a mammoth frozen in the ice, the mirror behind the pool table. Even as images as dated as these will have some power as a catalyst. Not that they could actually be used in a building a new symbolic town without being completely transformed, without being given a completely new sense. Our minds, ridden by key images from the past, have fallen far behind the sophistication of our machinery. The few attempts made to fuse modern science into a new myth that proved abortive. As a result, all contemporary art has been forced to become abstract – contemporary architecture being the worst example of all. Pure plastic art, telling no story and making no movement, cold and soothing to the eye …” - Gilles Ivain
The Situationists crystallised the impulses of their predecessors, such as the Lettrists’ “Formulary”, and Constant Nieuwenhuys went on to develop a radical proposal for an architecture in which all traces of conventional buildings and social institutions would be abandoned. Everyone would drift around in vast, labyrinthine interiors, which would be continuously reconstructed to meet their needs. Any desire could be satisfied, so the theory went, and new desires could be stimulated, along with new modes of behaviour – all through an architecture forever in flux. The underlying aim was to create an environment in which we experienced a far wider range of sensations than today.
Similarly, one of Constant’s Situationist colleagues, the Scots writer Alex Trocchi, developed a radical new kind of university (in a loose sense) called the Sigma Project. As the name suggests, it was intended as a summation of the many strands of human experience and knowledge, and owed something to the Black Mountain School of the 1950’s. Raw emotion might be harnessed alongside rational analysis – so that “Primal Scream” therapy and psychotropics might play their part in a curriculum that extended self-discovery across a wide range of arts, sciences and humanities.
More recently, Daniel Libeskind’s Jewish Museum in Berlin could be construed as an architecture of raw emotion: the harsh surfaces, disorientating floor planes and jagged forms are designed to challenge, and make you feel unsettled. It’s the embodiment of unheimlich, a German word which is slightly tricky to translate. It describes the uneasy feeling which raises the birse on the back of your neck; the edginess you feel when you know something’s out of place.
Unheimlich is what countless horror film-makers have attempted to capture: it’s the noises off in pictures like “Silent Hill” which create a clautrophobic atmosphere and account for their creepiness. These cues touch primitive parts of our brains, where the gut instincts live, and which fight the rational thoughts that tell us nothing is amiss.
Why do we need these stimuli? Firstly, at the very core of our humanity is a need to explore the world around us, and our inner selves. We seem to lose a certain degree of curiosity as we grow older, but it remains at the heart of some peoples’ lives. They need to feel challenged, to see and experience new things, and they aren’t satisfied with simply ignoring those parts of the city that the authorities have proscribed.
Secondly, we live in a heavily moderated and constrained world. A good Health & Safety culture on building sites is essential, because they are dangerous places – but it has extended into the safest parts of everyday life, arguably making us too risk averse. Because of this, we no longer live a complete existence, we do not experience life fully, nor by extension do we experience the fullest range of sensations and human emotions. After all, a dangerous world is an interesting place to be, and it will teach you to trust your own judgement, to understand your limits, and crucially it will teach self-reliance.
Meanwhile, what about Richard Strauss? It’s been suggested that because he and his librettist, Hofmannstahl, worked in fin-de-siecle Europe, consequently their operatic works were Art Nouveau. However, not everyone working at a given time uses the same aesthetic, and in fact artists often react against a prevailing trend. Edward Munch (who painted “The Scream”) is one of few artists to approach the metaphysical savagery of Strauss’s Elektra, whilst his contemporaries such as Gustav Klimt followed a very different path.
Similarly, none of the Art Nouveau architects, such as Horta, Mackintosh or Hoffman tried to cast those emotions into stone: in fact, the harmonious forms and flowing lines of their buildings seem to embody calmness and control, the very antithesis of raw emotion.
Elektra, then, is out on her own.
Type “Brick Shortage” into a search engine and it will return thousands of hits. TV news editors have despatched their dashing reporters (in brand new wellies) to stand uncomfortably in puddles of clay, while stolid men in boilersuits tell them that business is good. In fact, business is better than it’s been for at least five years. Behind them lie huge stacks of russet-coloured facings, wrapped in steel bands. So where’s the shortage?
Elsewhere, red-faced contractors’ buyers roar down the phone at merchants, frustrated by lengthening lead times and prices which have firmed up in recent months. Site managers are screaming for another ten thousand as the brickies shrug, heading for an early finish since they have no more bricks to lay. Perhaps there really is a shortage on some sites - and might we stop specifying bricks as a result?
The downturn of 2008 saw house-building collapse to a level not seen since the Great Depression, and because so many spec houses are clad in brick, its makers suffered. The industry carried on making bricks for a while, but eventually it was left with a stockpile of 1.2 billion unsold bricks – around half a normal year’s demand. Accordingly, it began mothballing and closing factories for good - for example, Hanson shut five plants and reduced its workforce by half. UK brick production fell from almost three billion per year in the first half of the 2000’s, to around half that level.
In Scotland, Errol Brick closed for good in March 2008, and Caradale Traditional Brick closed both their works in September 2011. As I wrote earlier, that leaves only Raeburn Brick with an active brickworks north of the border – and Jimmy Raeburn noted that his factory can meet about 15% of Scottish demand. Suddenly, the market is recovering strongly and house-building is leading that. However, the narrative in the media is that brick shortages are holding back the recovery. Can the brick manufacturers meet pent-up demand? Is the Great 2014 Brick Shortage just a newspaper scare story?
From a peak level of around 200 million bricks produced each month in 2007, demand dropped below supply and during a couple of troughs in 2009, fewer than 40 million bricks were delivered to site each month. However, ignoring the annual cycle of shut-downs (many brickworks close for planned maintenance every December), the trend is upwards from around 100 million a month in 2009, to around 150 million per month this year.
So the evidence is that brick-makers have responded to demand by increasing production. Hanson, for example, plans to reverse the 2010 closure of a plant at Claughton in Lancashire by the end of the year, and is putting on additional shifts at two other works. Even during the darkest years of the recession, the larger, well-capitalised brick companies were actually building capacity, in anticipation of the recovery. Hanson built a new factory at Measham in Leicestershire in 2009 and Ibstock opened a new factory at Chesterton in Staffordshire in 2013. Between them, they made an investment of £75m which bolsters supply by bringing new more efficient “super brickworks” on line.
On analysis, the problem may actually derive from the demand side. Much of the panic seems to arise from the low stock levels which brick merchants are carrying at the moment, and the fact that there’s a lead time of several weeks on many types of brick. Bear in mind, though, the luxurious position which contractors enjoyed three or four years ago, when almost any quantity of bricks could be had “ex stock”, and full artic loads could be called off instantly … provided you had good credit.
How that demand works in practice is that brick production in September 2013 was 14% higher than the year before, but stocks were 34% lower and imports were 34% higher. Hence production was increasing, but demand outstripped it and was met by a combination of imports and running down stockpiles. However, the peak in brick consumption may not be a natural result of an open market.
It’s been reported that some house builders are panic-buying or trying to arrange exclusive access to certain bricks. If that’s the case, then the Great 2014 Brick Shortage is both a self-fulfilling prophecy – the more people worry about it, the worse their actions make it – and a symptom of the chaotic way the construction industry moves from trough to peak.
The brick makers could cope with either of those conditions if the market remained steady, but the really tough times come when demand halves or doubles in the space of a year or two. The lead-in time for a new brickworks isn’t the 18 months it takes to build and equip the brick factory itself, but the five or more years required to battle through Planning inquiries, receive minerals extraction consents then finally open up new clay pits to feed it.
It’s the cyclical nature of the construction industry which is the real problem, acting like a Great British Whale which rises from the ocean depths and spouts out a vast plume of work, before diving into an abyss for the next few years.
What the brick firms must hope is that this “shortage” doesn’t turn into a long term re-run of the 1940’s and ‘50’s. Britain suffered an even greater shortage of bricks in the years after the Second World War when everything was in short supply, and building licences were required before construction could start. One consequence was the rise of prefabricated metal and timber houses, plus concrete system building. By the building booms of the 1960’s, the brick industry had vastly increased its capacity, and was able to compete with “modern methods of construction”. Sounds familiar?
However, the interactions of the market don’t affect bricks in isolation. In the post-war era, steel was also in short supply and since reinforced concrete uses far less steel (in the form of rebar) than a pure steel-framed building would, then both in-situ framed and precast panel systems gained in popularity. You could accuse them of opportunism, but in the last few weeks, a well-known Aberdeenshire timber kit firm has begun marketing its frames to house-builders in the south-east of England.
The Great 2014 Brick Shortage headline does little to help, as the industry goes from glut to scarcity and back again in the length of time it takes to plan, build and bring a brick factory into production. What’s needed is long term stability so that brick can be considered calmly alongside timber kit, steel frame or the various SIP’s and hybrid panel systems coming onto the market. Perhaps a steady demand will encourage a manufacturer to build a new brick factory in Scotland, as I alluded to here in a previous piece.
After all, the opencast coal industry was recently rescued by Hargreaves after Scottish Coal and ATH Resources folded, and one of coal extraction’s “by products” is vast quantities of fireclay, which would otherwise be ploughed down during land remediation…
In the spring of 2012, I visited an abandoned brickworks. The firm which ran it had already passed out of existence: I strode across tussocks of grass beaten flat by the winter storms, then over a flooded hardstanding which stank of gas oil. 
Inside, the brick-making machines had already been dismantled – their gear wheels, guards and bed plates were strewn around inside – but everything else appeared intact. The walls were coated in decades’ worth of shale dust, and the floors were hidden under standing water.
I guess it’s no surprise to discover that an architect is interested in bricks, and grows a wee bit pious and sentimental when a firm whose products he has specified passes from existence. Perhaps bricks don’t mean much to the general public. After all, people overestimate the significance of their own field – this bias is known as the “deformation professionelle” – but the brick is a universal material.
The previous day, I had finished reading a book about Playfair.
The Playfair we’re most familiar with is William, who was born in 1790 and designed classical buildings in the New Town, and Scotland’s Shame on Calton Hill. What I learned about Playfair the architect encouraged me to read about the rest of his family. William came from a talented family, and the uncle after whom he was named was perhaps the most talented. His story goes far beyond the narrow concerns of architecture to touch many aspects of how the modern world works.
The elder William was born in Dundee, the fourth son of the minister of Liff and Benvie, James Playfair. William was a lad o’ pairts, as they say here, and over the course of his life, his flexible mind and good Scots tongue enabled him to become a millwright, engineer, draughtsman, accountant, inventor, silversmith, merchant, investment broker, economist, statistician, pamphleteer, translator, publicist, land speculator, convict, banker, editor, blackmailer and journalist…
Perhaps he never became a brickmaker, but Playfair grew up during the Scottish Enlightenment and after an apprenticeship with Andrew Meikle, the inventor of the threshing machine, at 18 years of age, he became assistant to James Watt. William’s greatest achievement is the so-called Playfair cycle, which presciently looked forward to how capitalism works:
Wealth and power have never been long permanent in any place.
They travel over the face of the earth, something like a caravan of merchants.
On their arrival, every thing is found green and fresh; while they remain all is bustle and abundance, and, when gone, all is left trampled down, barren, and bare.
Playfair summed up the never-ending drive for efficiency, and anticipated the nature of manufacturing. It’s now cheaper to build and equip a new greenfield factory, than to renovate and run an old one. It’s even cheaper to shift the entire operation offshore, which is what has happened to so many multinational companies. Companies are constantly being destroyed, even during the good times. This brick-making firm was one of them.
This brickworks had little romance or nobility – especially in winter, caught between the freezing sheds and roasting heat of the kilns. It offered workers nothing but hard, dirty, back-breaking work. Yet, just like the blast furnaces at Ravenscraig and shipyards of the Upper Clyde, it bred a skilled trade with a long tradition. After the final artic load of Scotch Commons departed, the legacy of the Scottish colliery brickworks was dead. Similarly, the pan mills and the breaker were built by Mitchells of Cambuslang, so the death of the Scottish brick-making industry also killed its brick machinery makers. 
Once this capacity has gone, it won’t be replaced – unless a miracle happens, as it did 25 years ago. In 1988, L.A.W. Holdings opened a brand new brick factory at Tannochside, in Uddingston on the south-eastern side of Glasgow. The firm was headed up by opencast mining entrepreneurs Ian Liddell and John Weir and in the best traditions of the Carron Company and NCB, they used coal mining’s by-products for brick manufacture.
A miracle, perhaps. One comment chalked on a door – “We will survive!” and underneath it a reply in a different hand, “No you fuckin won’t.” As I stood on a Lionweld stair overlooking the space where the brickworks’ pan mills once sat, a man around my own age walked in through a hole from which a large door had been knocked off its hinges. Despite the sea of mud around the buildings, he wore a pair of pristine white trainers. 
We started talking: he’d worked here until the brickworks closed, and had come back for a last look. He explained that the owners of Scotland’s one remaining brickworks had bought up the equipment and trademarks, perhaps to ensure that no-one could buy the dead company out of administration and start production again.
As I packed my camera away, he took a final look at the devastation then turned to me. His parting words were, “I’m going to get away up the road afore I start cryin…”
Text and photos all copyright Mark Chalmers.
"Fit like the day, then?"
-Not bad, I replied, -How's it going here?
"Ach, I’m nae getting on worth a docken. The site agent shook his head. "I'm near certain these drains are chokit up.
We went out into the road, he picked up a crow bar and heaved – but the iron lid didn’t shift.
"Need tae gie it a great yark wi the pinch…
With a big effort, he rived up the manhole cover: the rich smell of fermenting malt hit us immediately.
"At's nae surprise, is it? and he nodded to the pagodas of the distillery malt house behind us. It was gloamin, and their distinctive forms were silhouetted against a pale violet sky.
"We'll need tae pressure jet aa that – he nodded at the open manhole – an the chambers are collapsin, tae. The drenns are connached. You anes'll need tae gies anither Instruction, eh?
As he watched for my reaction, the site agent offered a smile for the first time that day and I began to understand where the expression "pouring money down the drain" originated…
The Song of the Drains is something we take for granted. Rather like the keen hissing of the nerves, and the low note of our pulse, it's a sound which is with us all the time, yet we have to listen carefully in order to hear it. It has deep roots: the song began over 150 years ago. The Victorians were obsessed with sanitation – you could say they were anally-retentive about it – and they were the first to hear this song.
Mucky water sluiced through iron and fireclay conduits at the start of Victoria's reign, and some of our present day infra-structure dates back to then, too. Every building built before the 1950’s has a buried network of fireclay drains under and around it, socketed and spigotted together and all shiny with a rich chestnut-brown salt glaze. There are complex manifolds whose tails fan out to gather in the branches, each laid gently on a bed of pea gravel, carefully back-filled with selected granular material – a work of artistry and loving care that no-one ever sees.
Just like every other component of a building, this is a world apart, with its own vocabulary, conventions, and hundreds of pages of B.S. to guide you. B.S., in this case, being "British Standard" rather than the cow shit which flows down gullies in cattle courts. Water sinks down into the fireclay system with a gurgle, then runs near-silently, with just a faint sussuration each time it flows through a trap. Alongside the drains, you have the steady hum of electricity cables, the evil hiss of gas mains, and the enigmatic silence of fibre optics. The only clue to the existence of this Underworld are the iron covers with cryptic messages cast into their lids.
The fireclay industry began to decline in the Fifties as drainage pipes became plastic, roof tiles were cast in concrete, and stainless steel flues were introduced. When the closely-related refractory industry crashed in the 1970’s, it took with it many of the remaining architectural fireclay manufacturers. Until then, Scotland led the world. Companies thrived in the coalfields of Ayrshire, Lanarkshire and Fife for one hundred and fifty years: since the coal measures harnessed to fire the kilns are often underlain by seams of fireclay, there was a happy synergy between raw material and the means of its transformation.
The mantle passed successively from the Garnkirk Fireclay Co. to J&M Craig of Kilmarnock, and finally the Glenboig Union Fireclay Co., which was the world’s largest fireclay producer for many decades. From sinks and baths and lavvies made by Shanks of Barrhead, the fireclay pipes run under the building, through the scarcements of the external wall. Often, they’re trapped under great drifts of rubble and sour earth.
Once they escape from those confines, the pipes meet up with other effluents from tanks and rectifiers and gullies, then make their way gently downhill – the pipes grow in diameter, gathering momentum until they reach the Disconnecting Manhole. At that point, Private drainage (and if ever you wanted to keep something to yourself, it’s this), becomes Public drainage.
Drains represent the inner world, and in contrast to the outer concerns that architecture usually has, great sums are spent in order to keep it out of sight. Designing a building with its gizzards on display would be no different from leaving the lavvy with an Andrex tail hanging from one's strides. Authenticity of appearance and truth to materials never stretched this far. There are so many things to hide: like the Buchan Trap, for instance.
This ill-natured switchback, designed to prevent bad air venting through the system, is also an impediment to good drainage. The Buchan Trap is the cause of so many blockages that the "Hot Rod" companies suspect it first when the water backs up. In the old days, the Victorians flushed through the system regularly … we don't, so the Buchan Trap chokes up. Mr Buchan's name has been taken in vain many times. In fact, you could say that his name is dirt.
The Buchan Trap lives underground with other things bearing wonderfully evocative names, like the “Ames Crosta Gully Pot”. I knew nothing about that until I happened to visit the Clay Cross foundry in Derbyshire. Just like the nearby Stanton and Staveley, Clay Cross was the descendant of an ancient iron founding company which latterly made castings for hydraulic engineering, from simple drain covers to complex valves. In the usual manner of these things, the Ames Crosta company had been successively swallowed up by larger and larger rivals like Babcock until the pike at the head of the water treatment foodchain, Biwater, bought it.
While the initial lure of Clay Cross was the rumour of several old XJS Jaguars lying abandoned inside, I discovered huge fab halls and iron foundries which had been abandoned when Saint Gobain bought Biwater over and closed Clay Cross down. The dark, grimy sheds were too interesting to ignore, and I photographed everything from timber casting patterns to an ancient furnace bank incorporated into modern buildings. On a later trip through the area, I discovered that the site had been completely cleared, and a white sales cabin spoke directly about what would come next.
Similarly, gully gratings come in many designs, but two of the most common in Scotland are the Grahamston pattern and Bo’ness pattern: both named after big industrial foundries in the Falkirk area. They are still available from McLuckie of Dalry, who have developed a theft-proof gully to foil the metal thieves who steal anything they can weigh in at the local scrappie – even if that meant leaving a gaping hole in the middle of the road.
Then you have the mysteries of life. I recall a Shone sewage ejector which lived in a deep shaft down by the river. Every now and then it would give a deep hiss and thump, leading the surprised visitor to ask "Just what do you keep down there?” It would have been no surprise at all if we’d replied that it was one of Tolkein’s balrogs.
Darkness proper had fallen at the distillery, so I turned my back on that sweet, rich scent of malting grain, leaving the labourers up to their knees digging out the sodden barley draff. They toiled for a whole week. And so the project's Contingencies were flushed away, and the Completion date went down the pan. Oh, let that be an end to the puns. Let's keep walking.
As in the Classical myth, Orpheus must not look back when he leaves the underworld – otherwise the site agent will catch him and demand yet another Architect's Instruction, to rebuild yet more collapsing manholes...
The Torre de David in Caracas is a symbol of the worldwide housing shortage. The 45-storey tower was once part of an urban renewal scheme in Caracas. Today, it’s a concrete armature, half-filled with an army of squatters who claimed it as their own after the country’s financial system collapsed. It could only have happened in the Venezuela of Hugo Chávez…
Photo: Daniel Schwartz/U-TT & ETH
Across the world, planners argue about ways to provide large-scale housing. In Western Europe, housing is either left to the free market, or provided by the state. In the unrepentantly socialist Venezuela, the Chávista government had a permissive attitude towards land invasions, so squatting became a realistic option. As a result, Torre de David became “the tallest squat in the world”.
Until recently, la Torre de David wasn’t well known beyond Caracas, but the BBC ran an feature about it, then the New York Times picked up on it, and Domus magazine later covered it too. All were equally fascinated by its appearance, which carries hints of William Gibson’s or JG Ballard’s dystopian novels, and the notion of the tower being a “vertical slum”.
However, it was only when an installation by the Urban-Think Tank at ETH Zurich won the Golden Lion at last year’s Architecture Biennale in Venice, that the Torre in its current state was considered as a piece of urbanism. It was conceived as the Centro Financiero Confinanzas: a concrete-framed, curtain-walled tower block designed by the Venezuelan architect Enrique Gómez. The masterplan included a cluster of buildings around the tower’s podium, with luxury flats, a helipad, and a hotel. 
Photo: Iwan Baan
Construction began in 1990, propelled by David Brillembourg's financial group, called Grupo Confinanzas. It was almost complete when work stopped following his death, in 1993. With the collapse of the Venezuelan economy a year later, the tower was abandoned. All of Brillembourg's assets were liquidated by the collapse, and the Venezuelan government's insurance body FOGADE acquired the unfinished tower. However, the lower storeys lacked flooring, drainage, second fix joinery. M&E services were incomplete. Large slabs of marble, intended for a luxury hotel on the lowest six storeys, lay shrink-wrapped in plastic.
High rise stasis isn’t unprecedented: after the Empire State Building in New York was completed, many storeys remained as unlet shells until well after WW2. Similarly, after Siefert’s Centre Point in London was finished, some floors lay empty for decades. Like both, La Torre de David is a building born of speculation. It was the lynchpin of a plan to transform this area of Caracas into a financial district: it was one of many planned along a so-called Avenue of Banks.
The tower was also symbolic of the new money which emerged during the boom years of the 1980’s, quite distinct in its attitudes and approach from the “amos del valle”, or old families of Caracas. With new wealth came risk-taking, speculation, loss of control and eventually, total collapse… It seems that once the acquistive half of the human brain overcomes from the ethical half, a Financial Crash is the result.
Photo: Daniel Schwartz/U-TT & ETH
First squatted in 2007, today around 750 families live in the tower, in conditions which some writers have described as a vertical slum. It’s the eighth tallest building in Latin America and squatters live on 28 of the building’s 45 storeys. “It doesn’t look good, but it has the seed of a very interesting dream of how to organize life,” suggests Alfredo Brillembourg, an architect and namesake of the building’s original developer.
La Torre de David is a good example of how people organise a society for themselves, when the larger super-structure of government, law and civic life around them breaks down. Although the building still lacks lifts, mains water, balcony railings and so forth, in a societal sense it works. The tower’s new residents hooked up electricity and created a rudimentary drainage system. Space is granted to new squatters for free, but they pay a monthly fee of around 150 Bolívar fuerte (£13) towards health services, recreation and security.
Its human worth is arrived at using a different calculus. Mike Davis, author of Planet of Slums, thinks the building has great potential: "What interests me more about Torre de David is its emergent ecology with small businesses, jerry-rigged services; it makes it an obvious candidate for a 'green skyscraper' experiment." 
Photo: Iwan Baan
Regardless of what many press articles say, la Torre is definitely not abandoned, nor post-apocalyptic, and arguably it’s not a slum, either. There are many practical examples throughout history of how expropriation works. It offends the established system of land ownership and capital markets, yet offers high density urban development where the “system” has patently failed to. It happens in direct response to a defined need.
La Torre’s closest relatives are Kowloon’s Walled City, bulldozed many years ago but recorded in an excellent book published by Watermark a few years ago; Lucien Kroll’s experiments in Belgium which provided a structural frame into which residents could adapt their own homes; and the Kabouters, the epitome of squatters who created self-sustaining communities during the 1970’s in the Netherlands.
The tower confounds many received ideas. It’s been compared to J.G. Ballard's novel, "High Rise", yet Ballard thought of the archetypal tower as a diagram of hierarchy. The rich and powerful live upstairs in the rarified air, while the poor stay close to the traffic fumes at ground level. Torre de David disproves Ballard’s vertical stratification: in Caracas there is a distinctly horizontal separation between towers for the rich and towers for the poor.
Photo: Daniel Schwartz/U-TT & ETH
Rather than Wall Street’s financial monoliths, which it sought to imitate, the Torre de David became a vertical favela - and of course Kenneth Frampton posited that the favelas are ”Italian hill towns”. This is a helpful model, and at one time the Italian hill town was on the syllabus of every school of architecture’s first year course.
It became an archetype – perhaps the best archetype of all – as it tumbles down the slope in higgeldy-piggeldy fashion. It’s more than picturesque: it’s a diagram of kinships and social ties; it responds to the lie of the land; over time it evolves, organically. Much beloved of cosmopolitan architects, the type who contribute articles on “my architectural travels” to the learned journals, the Italian hill town is an example of architecture without architects.
There were several outcomes in Scotland. One was the sprawling megastructure of Cumbernauld town centre; another was the way in which the suburbs nearby, like Seafar, ran up and down the contours to create a serrated roofscape. Today folk can’t see past the buildings’ bleak context, harsh microclimate and lack of maintenance. Nonetheless, the Planners’ original vision for Cumbernauld comes from the same root as those well-organised folk who live in la Torre.
Photo: Iwan Baan
Similarly, it was a dream of the socialist governments of the 1960’s to place Scottish social housing tenants in tower blocks. Had they been built on Lake Shore Drive in Chicago, or Park Avenue in New York, the flats would be worth hundreds of thousands of dollars each. But in a Scottish housing scheme, their value is low. In Caracas, Brillembourg set out to create floorspace with a high rental value, but in its incomplete state with hundreds of sitting squatters, the tower’s capital value is even less.
Is there a lesson in Caracas for the Scots? Why didn’t we take over the Royal Bank of Scotland headquarters at Gogarburn for bedsits, when Fred Badloss sank the bank? Perhaps because RBS was nationalised, hurriedly, to maintain the credibility of the financial system, and to shore up the distant government in Westminster which would have gone down with the banks. By contrast, the Torre’s backers were allowed to fail by the Chávistas.
That much is different, yet both countries have a housing shortage which hasn’t been diminished by their respective politicians. Now RBS is quietly handing back and selling off offices and branches as it contracts. Lloyds TSB is about to be split into two, in the so-called Verde scheme, and HBOS is similarly shrinking. It seems unlikely that any of their former property will end up housing those thrown out of their social housing for having “too many bedrooms” – although we can only hope.
Photo: Iwan Baan
So, could it only have happened in the Venezuela of Hugo Chávez? Thanks to our squatting laws, it seems very unlikely that a phenomenon like la Torre could happen here. Yet there are things we could learn from it. The Urban-Think Tank at ETH Zurich have studied ways to improve “informal settlements” around the world, using la Torre de David as a case study. Interestingly, they’re keen to explore Giancarlo di Carlo’s notion that the person and architecture should function as one. A simple lesson, perhaps, but how does it work in practice?
Well, di Carlo’s ideal social structure was none other than the Italian hill town…
Photos courtesy of architectural photographer Iwan Baan; and of Daniel Schwartz of the Urban-Think Tank at ETH Zurich.
Here is a link to the full set of Iwan’s photos - http://iwan.com/photo_Venice_Biennale_2012_UTT-Iwan_Baan_Torre_David.php
Here is a link to the full set of Daniel’s photos - http://dschwaz.com/2012/10/19/torre-david/
Once upon a time, Ricardo Bofill created the Palace of Abraxas, a great arc of monumental social housing towers in Marne-la-Vallée which were reputedly recast from an old cement works. Sadly, the idea didn’t catch on across La Manche, despite Charles Jencks’ enthusiasm for the form.
So, rather than Bofill’s post-modern monumentality, here is a vast but more honestly functional works which has been abandoned, rather like the grain elevators which excited Reyner Banham in “A Concrete Atlantis”.
All photos are copyright Mark Chalmers, 2013. Please use the contact form to get in touch if you’d like to use any of them.
Happy New Year. Twelve months ago, Mr Wolf made a guest appearance with his upbeat message. A year on, having gorged on mincemeat over the festive break, he’s indisposed: so this time you will get a gloomy dyspeptic burp.
A dreadful holiday period – school massacre, fiscal cliff, Russian crash – left Mr Wolf searching for an uplifting piece on the television news during the fallow spell between Boxing Day and Hogmanay. He searched, he failed: there wasn’t one. Instead he contented himself with repeats of costume dramas. Downturn Abbey, a portrait of England in the 21st century, appeals to Mr Wolf’s venal side almost as much as the shortbread tin image of Scotland depicted in Monarch of the Glum. They’re both heritage, of a sort, and although they lack authenticity they certainly make money.
Terry Pratchett, in Johnny and the Dead, speaks about somewhere – in this case a graveyard slated for redevelopment – being the wrong kind of heritage. In essence, it wasn’t grand enough, and wasn’t in London, so there was no chance it would be saved for the nation, or money being spent to protect it. Stately homes and baronial houses née castles are different: they don’t necessarily need state help, because they have an irresistible attraction for property developers, although paradoxically they are often the thing which makes them over-reach. In fact, Mr Wolf knows of a couple of developers who have wrestled with tumbledown castles.
One bought a castle near the coast, which is gothic in atmosphere rather than necessarily in style. The previous owners had fallen on hard times. Their distant ancestor had travelled widely and incurred the wrath of the natives, hence falling under a curse, borne out when the Swedish Match Company was extinguished in the 1920’s, and much of the family fortune disappeared. The last laird’s father was reputedly a sot and toper, with an appetite for louche living and loose women. Keeping fast company, he went through the remaining money like water. In the hard years that followed, many unthinkable things happened. After selling off the family silver, the fixtures and fittings of the castle were stripped out and auctioned, then land was sold, and finally the castle was hollowed out and used as a grain store.
When Mr Wolf visited for cream cakes and afternoon tea, the current owner was very helpful; too helpful in fact, when it came to juicy reminiscences about the previous laird and his ancestors. As it turned out, the castle’s shell was sold under the duress of liquidation, and that duress generated friction between the old and new owners, which has continued and keeps two sets of lawyers busy. When Mr Wolf recounted this tale of decline in print, his publisher was served with legal papers: but what the previous laird didn’t realise is that you can only libel living people, not the dead. More importantly, you can’t sue someone for repeating what was published previously.
Nothing more was heard from the lawyers, the article has become a chip wrapper, and the new owner continued to restore the castle at the pace of a sloth on Mogadon. Just enough work to the facades that no-one can claim he’s abandoned it, but not enough to arrest its gradual slide into ruination. There have been rumours of a housing development in the grounds, to help pay to stabilise the castle. The last scion of its former owners looks on in anguish, and bristles each time anything appears in the Press.
Another would-be high roller bought a castle near the mountains. It once belonged to a great political family, which again had fallen on hard times: while they clung on to their grouse moors and tenanted farms, the Big Hoose had to go. It was on the market for a long time. Several prospective buyers came and went, all struggling to make it stack up in practice, because the planners were emphatic that it couldn’t be subdivided. The enfilade of rooms inside would have to be maintained; but most prospective developers were keen to split it into apartments.
During the castle’s empty spell, Mr Wolf took a look inside. The market was stagnant and loans were hard to come by: but the asking price remained high, and no realistic offers were forthcoming. The castle had an air of stillness and melancholy which is what you expect of these places; but it was discovered that the topmost storey was riddled with dry rot, which would require enormous amounts of money to rectify. In due course, Mr Wolf wrote a short history, expressing hope that the castle would be rescued, and wondering how the estate would pay for that, given the likely costs of restoration on top of a large asking price.
A few months later, the article appeared in print. This time it was the new owner who took exception: as it turned out, the castle had been sold during the period between writing the article and its publication. The new owner’s indignant letter to the editor was exceedingly righteous: he was saving the castle for the nation, the article was out of date, it didn’t portray the reality. He was at pains to extol the investment which would follow, revitalising the estate, the jobs created, the weddings hosted… To support that impression, he had orchestrated the publicity for his new venture, including a photoshoot in the style of Country Life with glamorous wife, adoring children and sprawling hounds arrayed around him in the drawing room. He had evidently watched Monarch of the Glum, or was at least conversant with Compton MacKenzie’s novels: tartan wallpaper, decanters of malt, log fire roaring in the grate and so forth.
As a result, Mr Wolf was surprised to discover, a year or two later, that his company had made a planning application to build several hundred houses on the estate policies. He drew two conclusions: firstly, here was a man at the height of his powers as an egotist; secondly, here was a developer with ambition. That ambition, it was becoming clear, was to build lots of executive ranch-style bungalows on the estate and make money under the auspices of saving heritage. That trump card, the enabling development, had evidently been played. It’s almost an act of altruism, we are after all just custodians for the next generation, aren’t we? And how else can the dry rot problem be solved?
In light of the earlier “Country Life” shoot, Mr Wolf realised how easy it is for magazine articles to misrepresent peoples’ intentions... Ironic, really. Perhaps one day magazines will report the world in the breadth and depth it deserves, and developers will tell the truth in substance as well as in spirit. In fact, lets’s make a resolution ... but it’ll have to be for 2014 now, won’t it?
My next piece for the blog will expand on my article in the Winter 2012 edition which recently hit the news-stands, and will look at the fate of another former asylum.
Last time I wrote about how architects think, I chose a metaphor coined by Isaiah Berlin - but when the piece was published in Prospect (the forerunner of Urban Realm) I discovered that someone else had used the same turn of phrase in the same issue!
There’s a subtle irony in that, because I’d illustrated the differences between generalists and specialists using Isaiah Berlin’s Hedgehog and Fox metaphor – where the fox knows many small things, but the hedgehog knows one big thing. In other words, to survive, the fox has to be a scavenger and omnivore (a master of many trades), whereas the hedgehog has specialised by eating worms and defending itself using its spines.
Arguably, only another “hedgehog” would know that metaphor and choose to apply it to architecture... so this time, I’ll begin instead with one of the many small things I know. The German term, fachidiot, or “discipline fool” is the opposite of a polymath. It neatly describes someone who knows their own specialisation, but is wholly ignorant about everything else in the world.
Just how narrow our view is was thrown into sharp relief a few days ago, when I dumped my internet supplier after suffering weeks of glacial download speeds. While they told me the problem spread right across Scotland, another provider suggested that their competitor’s main internet node had failed somewhere in the Central Belt. In the process of swearing at Richard Branson, cursing BT’s noisy twisted pair cable, and trying to decode jargon, I discovered that internet companies employ fachidiots, almost exclusively.
Beyond the realms of ADSL Max and ping tests, lies a physical map of Dundee carved up into familiar-sounding but unknown districts by telecoms hedgehogs. At the centre of each one sits a physical node – such as Baxter, Claverhouse, Fairmuir, Park and Steeple. They’re superimposed onto the Bartholomew streetmap of the city and clash with postcode districts, electoral wards, power grids. Not at all well known, the cobwebs of copper form a network we stare past each day, yet don’t recognise.
Dundee’s internet nodes sit within telephone exchanges, many built during the 1950’s and 1960’s when Post Office Telephones greatly expanded the system. The large floorplates required for the Strowger mechanical exchanges are now empty in many cases, as the System X cabinets which replaced them are much smaller, faster, and digital. The technology is also hidden inside grey metal cabinets. Similarly, while the Property Services Agency’s architects once celebrated the development of telecoms - witness the Post Office Tower in London - latterly other parts of the system have gone undercover. 
Many buildings hide in plain sight – Terry Farrell’s MI6 building on the South Bank in London, and Telehouse in the Royal Docks, are good examples. However, while we have an impression of what the spies and spymasters might do, the function of the big black box at Telehouse is less obvious. According to various accounts, Telehouse is the main internet node for the UK; whereas BT’s satellite earth station at Goonhilly on the very tip of the Lizard in Cornwall with its many huge satellite dishes, looks very like a place where masses of data is channelled, the node in the Docklands is discrete and sub rosa.
Similarly, Craigowl sits on the ridge of the Sidlaw Hills behind Dundee and to the layman, the masts on its summit could be TV, radio or cellphone. In reality, they carry air traffic control and military communications relays: investigative journalist Duncan Campbell revealed that the mass of aerials on Craigowl formed the northern end of Backbone, a microwave communications network which would come into its own during wartime. There are many electronic antlers on top of Craigowl, but you wouldn’t know exactly what each one is for unless you interrogate the fachidiots, as Campbell did.
Telehouse and Craigowl are part of a trend towards anonymity, and the guiding impulse of the fachidiot to make things ever more opaque. Years ago, British Telecom came in the shape of a bright yellow cartoon bird called Busby, and hundreds of those chubby yellow Dodge vans which were stabled at a depot in the Longtown industrial estate. During the 1980’s, it was relatively easy to identify parts of the BT network – most of which dated back to GPO telephones days – thanks to the Busby-yellow vans parked outside their buildings. I don’t know when they started disappearing, but one day BT’s livery changed and the vans were around no longer. 
While the Post Office Tower is a good example of public works architecture, arguably Telehouse, Craigowl and the workings of the BT network were conceived by fachidiots. They ignore the self-evident truth that everything which isn’t private becomes public. Everything built by the state or corporations is public, (although they might argue against that), since the taxpayer and the shareholder paid for it. We are the beneficial owners. A vanishingly small proportion of each of these secret places belong to each one of us, through our income tax, or pension scheme.
The blank facade, the anonymous box and the fenced compound are the antithesis of an architecture parlante, and while these places provide fodder for conspiracy theorists, they also provide a hidden dimension to the city. Finding out their purpose isn’t so much hard work, as finding a way past the fachidiots to perceive a Dundee streetmap which has been redrawn.
The motor car has almost completed its journey. It started off as a means of transportation, then become a social signifier, and gradually an extension of your personality. Soon, it might become little more than white goods on wheels, a commodity plugged in each night and recharged like an electric toothbrush. Having taken the train to work for several years, I appreciate the contrast between personal and public transport and also realise – ignoring the cost of fuel, the bane of traffic congestion, and punitive road tolling – that mass-produced design is still a magical thing.
I recall that Manchester architect Ian Simpson was Alfa Romeo’s first customer for the new “8C” a few years ago, and that prompted me to speculate not so much on which cars designers drive, but the subtle forces which inform their decisions. There are the personal associations we make with certain types of car, and then there is the role of the ad men, those pluggers, promoters and hucksters who push things in our direction. Years ago, a book called The Hidden Persuaders was written about them, and if anything their influence has become ever more pervasive.
A Herald Vitesse, from an era before lifestyle was codified
Where driving was once celebrated for its own sake, advertisers have shifted their emphasis towards pushing “lifestyle”, that cliché which is a greatly debased version of Alfred Adler’s original concept which encapsulated how we approach living in general. Interestingly, Adler is better known for coining the term “inferiority complex”, which is something else the ad men play on when trying to shift tin boxes… As originally conceived, lifestyle was a holistic term, whereas it now means appealing to our materialist side by fitting cars with aircon, MP3 players and Satnav by integrating them into our emotional gestalt – then emphasising those features over handling and road-holding.
Designers, on the other hand, are a superficial breed and it should be easy to market cars to them on the basis of appearance. Right?
Well, it worked for Audi. The Audi “TT” was launched over a decade ago, and immediately reached out to those who like to think they appreciate good design. Efforts were made to align the TT with the Bauhaus, yet arguably Audi didn't use Bauhaus design principles to design a car which ended up looking like the TT, because the purity of its aerodynamics was compromised (ironically) in the effort to make it resemble the Porsche 356 or a pre-war Auto Union racing car. They tied themselves in unreasoning knots. That the Bauhaus was mentioned repeatedly in press releases was down to the advertising men: Round One to the Hidden Persuaders.
The issue becomes ever more interesting when you realise that the Porsche 356 *was* designed, or perhaps more accurately, engineered, in accordance with the principles of the Bauhaus. It held with the Form follows Function credo, and arose from a strict economy of means plus a close study of the nature of the materials. It’s said that the Bauhaus invented industrial design as a discipline, but as far as I’m aware, no production cars were created there. 
Group B rally Quattro
Porsche isn’t Audi, either, yet the Audi company had a recent archetype which certainly did follow Bauhaus precepts: the original Quattro (which motoring journalists amusingly refer to as the Ur-Quattro), penned by British designer Martin Smith. Whereas the TT apes the curves of Ferry Porsche’s 356, and the VW Beetle before that – the Quattro is a far better approximation of the “severe, geometric, undecorated” form which the Bauhaus proposed. It was also built to do a job: win the World Rally Championship, so those big intakes and blistered arches naturally followed its function. It’s ironic, then, that non-car designers (and hairdressers, apparently) prefer the TT…
I’ve known several architects who drove Scandinavian cars. One owned a classic Saab 99 which had covered an interplanetary mileage and whose flanks were scabbed with rust, making the car look as if it had been strafed. Saab, which went out of business last year, was known for its idiosyncratic designs: the ignition lock was set into the transmission tunnel, the wraparound windscreen follows a tighter radius than other cars’, and the long overhangs with a very short wheelbase made their cars unlike anything else on the road. The firm began as an aircraft company, and during the ‘80’s and ‘90’s it was particularly good at marketing its cars as aerodynamic, bred from its Viggen jet fighter.
A classic Saab 99 with Minilites…
As with Audi, it had a great heritage in rallying, but instead the Hidden Persuaders latched on to the dual sheep/ wolf mentality of designers – and architects are no different in that regard. Whilst you may need to stand out, as a lone wolf who markets himself as a designer with recognisably individual solutions, you don’t want to stand out too much, otherwise you’ll part company with the design flock. In comparison to Audi’s Bauhaus spiel, Saab’s appeal perhaps lay in its predictable idisyncracy: just different enough to the norm to satisfy the conformal individualist.
Old-school Citroëns once attracted the same clientele. I recall attending a Dundee Motor Show in the early 1980’s, when it was held in Douglasfield Works, an enormous spinning mill built by Jute Industries in the late 1950’s, then abandoned and demolished around 1985. Edward & Stewart, the local Citroën dealers, had a stand, and under the white banners with italicised red Helvetica branding, there were pocket-sized brochures with moody photography in lush colours. I later found out that Sarah Moon had worked for Citroën, from the “SM” onwards, and her high art/ fashion pedigree showed. It had emotional appeal, rather than the colder, mechanistic design of the Saab.
Anyhow, if the beautifully-marketed cars were one facet of the company’s appeal, the cars themselves offered many things. The landmark model was the DS, which brutalist architect Alison Smithson even wrote a book about, and it was followed by the CX and latterly the XM. Each had a little less Citroën magic about it – but with distinctive styling, a low ride height achieved with fiendishly complex pneumatic suspension, and headlights which swivelled as you steered, many big Citroëns were bought by the architectural faction, from the Smithsons to Jonathan Meades who travelled around Britain in an XM. Like the Audi, or the Saab, they were a statement car.
Citroën SM promo photo
However, the country whose cars have real design allure is Italy. Given exotics like Ferrari, Lamborghini and Maserati to work with, the ad men have an easy job to convince you on style, flair and formal innovation. Other marques interpret Italian design differently – but the trick is to allude to supercars whilst shifting larger volumes. Lancia and Alfa Romeo succeeded partly thanks to something unique to the Italian car industry, the styling carrozeria such as Pininfarina, Ital Design and Bertone. While they built show cars and prototypes on aluminium spaceframes, they had to engineer production cars using the monocoque structure which 99% of cars are pressed from. The invisible rift which grew up between the Italians’ detail and structural designers is worth exploring.
It’s said that there are only seven stories in the world – each one we tell is a variation on one or other of them. Similarly, people are often characterised as belonging to one of a handful of archetypes, which have fuelled psychological theories for the past century and a bit. Designers are likewise typecast as having a head either for structure, or for detail. While product designers like Alessi and Memphis are biased towards the details, we may believe the carrozeria have to concentrate on structure: as with couturiers, the cut and hang of the garment is all…
Alfa Romeo Brera
Anyone who sets up this proposition is asking for it to be demolished. Cars are complex, and none can exist exclusively in the realm of either detail or structure – we need to experience both the micro scale, and to understand the overarching macro arrangement. Likewise, in order to write a piece like this, I need to be talk about detail, yet become steeped in structure. All this mucking around with concepts, facts and opinions needs to be organised within a logical framework. A formal structure is the obvious way to do that. So should I eat, drink and breathe structure, like a Doozer?
No. Wrong. Bad. Mistake.
The proof of this misconception lies in the most detailed of detail things – the car key. Alfa Romeo “do” car keys particularly well, because they realise that the things which you come into contact with most (door handles, steering wheel, gear knob) are crucial in shaping your opinion of the car as a whole. The material and tactile details of the key, transponder and fob tell you all about the quality of the product. The Hidden Designers realise that selling cars to the design-conscious sometimes hinges on little more than making them feel good, using leather, chrome and enamel.
Aston Martin Bulldog, a one-off designed by William Towns
Of course, car designers themselves still dream of creating a modern Tatra – a wide, sleek saloon with a rear-mounted V8. Peugeot created a 908 RC concept car which excited fellow car designers, but would have sold in tiny numbers had it gone into production. Or perhaps they hope to be given the unique chance which William Towns was given, when he designed the Bulldog for Aston Martin – the most uncompromising car to emerge for decades, and most likely the utter polar opposite of what a Bauhaus designer would have come up with…
My next piece for the printed edition of Urban Realm will be contribution to the debate on Scottish identity … and after that perhaps a sidelong glance at the architecture of our car-making industry.