Each year, Mr Wolf goes on holiday with a bag full of books which he intends to read as he shivers and chitters on a windswept Hebridean beach. Many remain unread at the end of the holiday, but here are some highlights from the rear covers of their dustwraps:
Scotland’s Greatest Living Architect
In this rags-to-riches biography, the biggest name in Scottish architecture recounts how they rose from humble beginnings in Edinburgh’s upper-middle class to become Scotland’s Greatest Living Architect. We learn about many highs and lows along the way, including a disastrous entry to the Scottish Parliament competition, a dangerous feud with the paramilitary wing of the Scottish Ecological Design Association, and how they narrowly lost out on the Stirling Prize due to some dodgy shadow gap detailing. This book is moving, touching and gripping. I implore you to buy a copy today, and you too will discover that SGLA’s ghost writer did a great job.
Up in Flames: The Inside Story of Glasgow School of Art
This is a searingly honest and powerful account of how Glasgow School of Art burned down, twice. The second fire destroyed any hope of seeing the School of Art rebuilt within our lifetime, and it also destroyed the careers of everyone involved with the institution. The author, Bernie Matches, is an insider with access to everyone who used to matter at GSA, yet despite his personal bitterness and a burning desire to settle scores, he’s managed to write with obvious affection for the old place. The world described in Up in Flames is unlike anything you’ve ever read before, which make this book a real page-turner.
Middle Class Welfare: How to fix Scotland’s broken public sector
Written by the self-confessed portly traveller of Scottish architecture, Middle Class Welfare pulls no punches and takes no prisoners. It’s nothing less than a manifesto for fixing Scotland’s broken public sector, ripping into corrupt councillors, inept planners, feckless Building Control Officers and jaundiced policy wonks at Victoria Quay. As the blurb on the back cover (written by FatBOT’s cousin, Portion Control) claims, “From the opening sentence, I knew that Fat Bloke on Tour was a powerful new voice in Scottish architectural criticism. I loved his rawness and honesty, and the poetry of his coruscating prose.” Who could argue with that?
How to Write a Mission Statement
Practical tips from Gorgie Tony on how to write a blurb for the home page of your website. It offers a checklist of simplistic clichés to ensure you remain “on message” whilst avoiding howlers and pratfalls. Here are some pointers:
• Our award-winning studio specialises in delivering thoughtful/ responsive/ timeless/ well-crafted/ humane/ sustainable solutions for our clients. * - delete as applicable.
• No matter the brief, we bring rigorous integrity, impeccable detailing and good vibes to every project.
• While we’re generalists, we have specialist expertise – and although we’re traditional, we’re also innovative.
• We’re intensely rooted in designing local architecture for local people, yet we’re also sophisticated cosmopolitans who work internationally.
• Our architecture shapes places, enriches people and uplifts the soul. We especially like the enrichment part.
It’s a tough business, property development, and building housing in Scotland is toughest of all. The Scottish Government imposed rent controls on privately-rented flats and houses in 2022, and almost overnight the pipeline of new Build-To-Rent (BTR) developments in Scotland dried up.
Caps on rent were introduced by the Scottish Parliament in response to the post-Covid “Cost of Living Crisis”, so let’s start with a few propositions which most folk will hopefully accept. It’s reasonable to ensure that rents are affordable, and don’t rise exorbitantly during a tenancy. We don’t have enough decent rental housing, so we should encourage the construction of more. We should accept that developers and landlords make a modest profit; otherwise why would they bother?
Rent controls are regressive: not because they constrain rental increases to around 5% per year, but because their consequence is that development work has come to a standstill in the middle of the “Housing Crisis”. The controls were put in place by politicians, and although they’re pitched as a way to improve fairness, they're actually the re-assertion of a Marxist dogma: pitching the proletariat against the rentier class or “rent extractors”.
I wonder if the Scottish Government consulted on rent controls beforehand with tenants, landlords, developers, financiers and housing associations – or just their political wonks and SPAD’s (special advisors)? I also wonder whether they studied the interplay of housing at social rent, mid-market rent, open market rent, shared tenure and owner-occupiers. It seems obvious that demand and capital flows between them – observe how Springfield Group, Scotland’s largest listed house builder, has recently pivoted towards affordable housing.
We’re told that a consultation on how powers within the Housing (Scotland) Bill could be used to exempt certain types of properties, such as the Build-to-Rent sector, from rent control is currently underway – but that’s a bit post-facto. The damage has already been done.
The experience in Scotland, closely studied by agents such as Retties and Savills is that rent controls increase the cost of new leases and at the same time reduce the rental stock by driving landlords out of the market. According to the Office for National Statistics, Scottish rents increased by 10% year-on-year in April 2024, compared to 8.9% growth in England. According to Savills, after the government introduced the rent freeze in 2022, BTR transactions in Scotland fell by £224 million to around £60 million in 2023, then virtually none in 2024.
But I thought we wanted to keep rents reasonable, and to increase housing construction?
Build-To-Rent was the last in a carousel of investment cases for inner city sites in Scotland’s larger cities. Over the past 10 or 15 years, private developers have stuck to four options: Grade A offices; purpose-built student accommodation (PBSA); hospitality, in other words hotels and short let apartments; and Build-To-Rent (BTR) flats. Each of those has been knocked on the head, by a combination of the Covid-19 pandemic; working-from-home, the university funding and recruitment crisis; and now rent controls.
Although it will stick in the craw of political agitators, Build-To-Rent demonstrates that property developers serve a social good. It’s staringly plain that councils and housing associations can’t provide enough properties at social and mid-market rents, so you need private developers to build more capacity for open market rental as well.
There are other, arguably better, ways to make renting affordable than applying rent controls. Increasing the supply of Build-To-Rent property means that scarcity decreases, and that should eventually mean cheaper rents. In order to get BTR developers building, you could use the carrot of investment allowances and tax relief, and you could also use the stick of a land tax on idle sites which have been zoned, optioned, purchased or approved for housing, but not built out.
If you simultaneously increase the supply of private housing for sale as well, you’ll achieve a second-order effect as some people move from rented to owner-occupied property, which frees up capacity. Another possibility is setting up a government-backed property investment bank which buy-and-hold developers could use for finance, which harvests part of the profit then ploughs it back into funding new developments.
In parallel, we're told that Edinburgh’s war against AirBnB landlords is superficially about freeing up flats for long-term rent rather than short-term holiday lets – but I suspect it’s driven by trying to appease owner-occupiers who are unhappy about a steady stream of tourists, especially around Festival time. AirBnB’s are bad neighbours, just like student HMO’s, and the council has caved in to NIMBY-power, just as national government does when motorways, railways, wind farms and power lines are proposed.
These are separate issues to fairness, and we probably shouldn't confuse them. There are two sides to the supply side/ demand side coin, and if there’s an affordability issue with housing rents, perhaps we need to look at raising the living wage so that folk earn enough to afford a roof over their head?
To improve the balance between renters and owner-occupiers, the government could act on property valuation, which hasn't been reviewed for at least 30 years, perhaps adding extra council tax bands at the top for the largest properties. It could look again at Schedule A Income Tax, which was scrapped in the 1960’s – that taxed homeowners for imputed rent, in other words the money they saved from not having to pay a rental premium over the cost of their mortgages.
You could also hypothecate property taxes, then plough them back into the construction of new housing. One of many reasons that people hated Thatcher and her “Right to Buy” scheme was that council houses were sold well below open market value – then the receipts went into council coffers, rather than being used to build new social housing. In fact, you can make a case that today’s ‘Housing Crisis” is partly due to the dead hand of Thatcher's policies.
Another factor reducing housing supply is the continuation of VAT on refurbishment work, which encourages local authorities to demolish 1960’s and 70’s blocks, rather than renovating them. Aberdeen is an exception, but Glasgow, Dundee, Lanarkshire and many more authorities are still merrily demolishing flats. Yet another problem is National Planning Framework 4 (NPF4), which has a profound impact on newbuild housing: NPF4 Policy 16(f) states that only applications on land already allocated for housing will be supported, except in very limited circumstances.
In truth, Scotland’s housing stock needs all the help it can get – wherever the investment comes from – and rent controls aren’t helping. Given everything that the Westminster and Holyrood governments are doing to discourage housebuilding, it’s no wonder we’re in a crisis.
In the face of all that evidence, I reckon that Politics is the problem. I’ve believed for a long time that lots of things, including how we deal with the balance between private and public in housing, health and education, plus the funadamental of how Scotland is governed, should be supra-political, in other words lifted above party politics. The issues with rent controls and Build-to-Rent development emphasise how under-equipped our politicians are to deal with the things that we voted them in to deal with.
It also underlines how that slippery and elusive concept called “fairness” or “social equity” has been hijacked by political activists. In Scotland, and the UK generally, property development and a belief in the system which underpins it, private enterprise, is thought by many to be suspect if not downright toxic.
I had personal experience of that during a stint of consultancy, during which I worked in the third sector and was seconded into the public sector. I encountered lots of people who wanted nothing to do with the business world. With the exception of one person – an idiot savant who was convinced he’d become a millionaire before he was 40 years old, by investing in penny shares – the rest were more interested in overthrowing Capitalism and reversing economic growth.
That would be fine – if we didn't need to build houses, schools, hospitals, railways and so forth.
Another example springs to mind. In the late 1990’s, I bought a couple of CD’s from bands on the Scottish indie record label, Chemikal Underground. I joined their mailing list, and occasionally received newsletters – until one day in the late 1990’s I received a flyer from them which said something like this: “Are you still interested in receiving updates from us? We realise that people change, and nowadays you might be more interested in the stock market than rock’n’roll.”
That stuck in my mind, because it offered such a strange antithesis. For one, your musical allegiances may have changed, so now you’re buying albums by the Jurassic 5 rather than the Delgados (that was me). But why couldn't someone be interested in capitalist business and rock music as well? The irony lost on the people who ran Chemikal Underground was that they ran the record label as a business, not as a co-op or community interest company, so they were in fact little Capitalists themselves. They were living proof of the system they claimed to despise.
Meantime, a Scottish Parliament committee decision in May 2025 to extend rent control powers to include Purpose-Built Student Accommodation (PBSA) is likely to torpedo even more investment in Scottish housing. You couldn't make this stuff up.
While working on my piece for the next issue of UR, the flow of ideas was interrupted by a loud boom from a few miles away. That was the sound of the University of Dundee’s finances imploding, causing several hundred casualties – although the captain had already scuttled the ship and escaped in his golden lifeboat.
Distracted by memories of university, my mind drifted to a summer school I won a place at twenty years ago, then further back to a student award I was invited to enter at the end of fourth year.
Around this time in June, architecture students from across Britain brought their work to the dungeons under the Royal Academy in London. We’d each been allocated a space, and I pinned up next to a student from the Bartlett. We shared a brick vault in the middle of the labyrinth, and I recall he was particularly keen to let me know that he'd just bought an Apple PowerBook, and that his father worked at CERN in Geneva.
I was more interested in the tall, thin drawings he’d hung as a pair of triptychs. His scheme had a hybrid brief – something along the lines of a heliport for VTOL aircraft, perched on a tower of hydroponic gardens, with a videotheque at the bottom. All very 1990’s, and the programme was wrapped in a cluster of parasitic towers of the sort which Kevin Rhowbotham’s students usually produced.
For scale, each drawing included a couple of figures from Tank Girl, which dates it even more accurately. TG and her kangaroo Booga were the work of Jamie Hewlett, who produced a strip in Deadline magazine long before the Gorillaz were born. Meantime my own scheme was a portable auditorium, which folded out from an artic trailer like a clunky lotus flower made from fibreglass panels and carbonfibre strakes.
After hanging around eating nibbles while judging took place, we each received a certificate, then hung around some more. As time passed, I looked at my watch and shifted awkwardly from foot to foot. By 5pm I realised I needed to go, immediately, if I was going to make it back to Kings Cross for the last train that would get me back to Scotland that night.
After some hassle from the frosty woman running the awards – who evidently didn't need to get back to Scotland – I pulled down my drawings and fled towards the Piccadilly Line. I ran past clusters of red phoneboxes, which in those days were plastered with the lurid calling cards that you saw along the Euston Road and other down-at-heel parts of London.
With anxiety rising in my gorge, I managed to go through the wrong turnstile at Kings Cross Underground. I was rescued by a cheerful Glasgwegian in LT uniform who unlocked the gate with his universal key and laughed, “Well, ye’ll no dae that agin!” But I made it, clambering aboard an Intercity 225 with ten minutes to spare. Despite the bad press the pre-privatisation British Rail receive nowadays, the whistle blew on time and I was glad to discover there was food on the train, too. My pulse settled and I slowly calmed down.
The last train of the day terminated at Waverley, so my Dad had arranged beforehand to collect me. As I recall, he parked initially on Market Street, but told me that he didn’t like the look of the area; I realised later that was a euphemism. The south side of Waverley was a grimy backwater where ladies in short skirts loitered under the streetlamps. Maybe they still do.
Instead, a railwayman let my father drive down the ramps into the heart of the railway station, to wait for me on the concourse. Nowadays that wouldn’t happen, with all the terrorist barriers, tank traps and ANPR cameras which have turned one of Europe’s great railway stations into a fortification. The train pulled in to a far platform, more or less on time, and its passengers dissolved into the surrounding streets. By now it was almost midnight; it had been a long day.
Casting my mind back to that university trip, I enjoyed a moment of golden reflection which soon turned to a mixture of sadness and anger. As a graduate of Duncan of Jordanstone, I feel bitter that the university’s name is being dragged through the dirt, due to a £40mn funding deficit – just as I imagine graduates of Glasgow School of Art feel betrayed by the chaos which has ensued since the Mackintosh Building burned down, not once but twice.
The obvious question is – why are the people who run Scotland’s universities incompetent? Why do university courts appoint low calibre principals? Why are the financial leaders financially naïve? Why do university managers mismanage budgets and contracts? In most cases, they’re not academics, nor entrepreneurs, nor people who are exceptional in any way.
Instead, I reckon that the university’s so-called leaders are an example of what the political theorist Maurice Glasman calls the “lanyard class”. They’re a cadre of mediocre, middle class professionals who practice a sort of officious managerialism, and whose only loyalty is to themselves. Go on, prove me wrong.
The recent grilling in the Scottish Parliament demonstrates that the deficit is down to a lack of financial probity. The lanyard class believed that the universities were “too big to fail”, just like the major clearing banks were during the financial crash of 2008, so they tried to cover it up, in the belief the government would step in to bail them out if things got worse. And that’s exactly what happened.
I’m no fan of Douglas Ross, but I admire how he wrung an admission of incompetence from the disgraced former principal of the University of Dundee, Iain Gillespie. Hopefully action is now taken to claw back all the golden parachutes, bonuses, expenses for overseas flights taken in First Class, and superannuation schemes which Gillespie and his cronies gained from.
Meantime, what links my trip to London in 1994 with the current débacle is the contrast between public probity and private vice. During the 1990’s, the vices in London and Edinburgh were on public display when you passed through the low-class parts of town. Today’s vices in Dundee and Glasgow are hidden in university boardrooms. Great effort has been taken to keep them out of public view, until now, so that public money continues to churn through the system, benefitting the lanyard class while the students and lecturers suffer.
As a friend said to me recently, pity help the current generation of architecture students who have watched their buildings burn down, followed by financial scandals causing cuts to the teaching staff.
Surely this can’t go on?
Eventually there comes a moment when you come to face-to-face with yourself, realising that your brain has been re-wired by using computers for too long.
If we go online, we become part of the attention economy where global megacorps vie for the means to distract us. It now seems radical to do things in the real world, with flesh and blood people, rather than watching simulations on the screen. Machine learning will likely make things much worse.
A few years ago, a band called Everything Everything recorded a wonderful song, “Regret”. Its structure is clever, both the time signature and melody are complex, with several key changes thrown in for good measure, but the lyrics are strikingly simple:
Maybe I'm a human
The "trying to click 'undo' man"
Or maybe an automaton
Oh how'd it all go so wrong?
That’s exactly what happens, after decades of using computers. Let’s say you take a break from the screen to sit sketching with a propelling pencil, then realise that a minute’s worth of lines are squint – so you intuitively reach for the ⌘-Z keystroke to wipe them out. Your fingers have the Undo command encoded into muscle memory.
It takes half a second to feel stupid, then realise you’ve been institutionalised by technology. You put that right by reaching across the paper for the Rotring eraser then take out your frustration by rubbing aggressively against the paper, until you rub right through it and create a hole. You’re proud of your self-knowledge, and perhaps even think you've accomplished some degree of self-mastery: you reckon you know how your own brain works – but here’s proof that you don’t.
Thanks to what I’m currently working on, I’ve been freed from AutoCAD for the past year, but I’m using CaptureOne and Photoshop much more intensively. Although computer geeks will scream in disagreement, I realise that there’s no real difference between vector and raster graphics programmes: they both use the brain–eye–hand–mouse interface, and over time you come to rely on keystrokes. The more you make the keystrokes, the more they become embedded in the subconscious until you can’t imagine a life without laptops.
That world was just as Robert Hughes wrote in 1995 regarding an early invention. “I have no idea what it is like to spend a childhood in front of a TV set, to have my dreams and fantasies administrated, at an early age, by the Box. What did we do? We had to manage with those portable, low-energy, high-density information-storage-and-retrieval systems known as books.”
Sometimes I wish that the laptop would fold in upon itself and implode, like the haunted house at the end of “Poltergeist”… and don't get me started on iPhones. Meantime I’d better finish this blog post, save it to drafts, then click “Publish” before I accidentally ⌘-Q.
While Mr Wolf was working on the hotel at Deer Island, he became fixated with modular carpet tiles. It wasn't the same as designing epic space for a living, granted, but whilst leafing through binders to select a suitable carpet, he discovered the work of Global Carpetco. It was a $5 billion turnover company from the US, but rather than being impressed by its vast scale and enormous profits, he became fascinated by the kitsch patterns that someone inside its HQ in South Carolina dreamed up.
What was going on inside the designer’s head? Was it all just a swirling pool of colours and funfair sounds? They were clearly a visionary – or perhaps delusionary, tripping on acid.
His clients at the Deer Island hotel had selected a mad pattern, but he deflected them by explaining that he wasn’t keen on its aesthetics. It reminded him of the scimitars in the Turkish Delight advert, and the trihelions of the biohazard symbol. Mr Wolf suggested that other people might draw the same parallels. He needed to check, for appearances’ sake and the client’s benefit, whether he could find a better pattern.
The main advantage of the tile was that Global Carpetco had a very nice Scottish sales rep, with a lovely smile and a powerful AMG Mercedes estate car which she drove like Colin McRae used to do. Except that a rally champion wouldn't have carried carpet tile samples in the back as ballast; when McRae gave it 110% over a yump and his Impreza became airborne, so would the carpet samples.
The tiles themselves came with a lifetime guarantee, which was once unheard of on this side of the Atlantic. They also offered custom patterns and Mr Wolf realised that he was fortunate, in an age of assembling buildings from catalogues, to get the chance to design something bespoke. It was “Arts and Crafts fabricated by machine”. He sketched out a subtler pattern and emailed it to South Carolina, then breathed out.
Back home, Mr Wolf picked up the paperback he was reading, Alfred Bester’s The Demolished Man. “If a man's got talent and guts to buck society, he's obviously above average. You want to hold on to him. You straighten him out and turn him into a plus value. Why throw him away? Do that enough and all you've got left are the sheep.”
Sheep? Mr Wolf didn’t like the sound of that. Sheep are best when made into carpets.
* * *
Above the new dining room at the hotel, the roof formed a prism with six parallam beams which came together at a steel node. Having sorted the carpet, next on the list was the node which was to be fashioned in a machine shop on the mainland using a four metre high computer-numerical-control (C.N.C.) milling machine.
Mr Wolf visited a metal-bashing factory in the old, grimy part of the city to watch, enrapt, as a Butler Elgamill worked on the structural node. The computer-guided machinery was carving it, millimetre by millimetre and very slowly, from a solid forging of stainless steel. Streamers of swarf emerged, just like the sparkling ribbons cast aside when Christmas wrapping is ripped open.
There are only two ways to make something like this. You can do it reductively: machining it from a forging or billet, and just like a sculptor carving marble you start with a lump of material and render it down. Or additively: where you start with a male pattern you’d like to replicate, form a female mould from it, then use that as a lost wax model where molten bronze or iron is teemed into the cavity.
Although there long existed tools whose only function was to make other tools, machine tools are unique: they’re machines which make other machines. Initially, those machines were built by hand, but at the start of the 1800’s, they grew accurate enough to replicate things by themselves.
While the structural tree was being fabricated, Mr Wolf listened to the managing director of the fabrication firm holding forth. Slowly and surely he began to remind Mr Wolf of his own father, who had also been in the machine tool business, and who also proselytised whenever he had a captive audience.
“The very first machine tool was invented in Scotland, by a firm called Craig & Donald in the town of Johnstone,” the MD explained to Mr Wolf, who nodded. “They eventually became part of the Scottish Machine Tool Corporation, which doesnae exist any more. Where their factory stood is Johnstone Town Hall nowadays. A wee bronze plaque records what went on there. That’s all that’s left.”
He shook his head and paused, trying to judge Mr Wolf’s reaction before continuing, “Fancy that, replacing practical men who make things with a bunch of super-annuated stuffed shirts. I always wanted to make things,” he went on after another pause, “I believe that folk in countries like Scotland should make things. I'm part of the culture that says you are what you do; that goes back to Socrates. Socrates!” he reiterated for effect.
“I’ve never subscribed to the view that fabrication is a Luddite craft activity. There's no future in that. It's no’ a question of sitting there polishing the stone for another ten years.” He pronounced Luddite, as he had Socrates, with real vehemence.
Mr Wolf was very pleased with the structural node, but less sure about machine tool zealotry.
* * *
Mr Wolf’s final lesson was on the worst blockwork in the world. The main contractor on the hotel contract was struggling, so he'd rounded up a few lads from across the North Channel, whose company was called The Cherry Orchard or something along those lines. They owed little to Chekhov other than the tragedy of how bad their blockwork was, and Mr Wolf wondered whether his clients would have to auction off the hotel in order to afford a replacement team of brickies who could actually lay blocks.
Having previously pulled them up on a lack of ties in the cavity (which they’d filled with mortar snots instead), and lengths of Ancon starter rail that weren’t tied into anything, he was horrified to find a massive pile of rubble on the floor slab, and blocks being chopped up using a bolster rather than a Stihl saw. By this point Mr Wolf had almost given up.
There was nothing to do other than condemn the wall, then try to get the sub-contractor removed from the contract. Just then, the late afternoon sun hit the wall, emphasising how the faces of the blocks didn’t run through, and highlighting how the courses wandered and how the perpends were randomly uneven. Mr Wolf swore under his breath and turned on his heel.
As he started pondering which SBCC clauses he could use to eject them from the project, the brickies ran out of mortar, so the little putt-putt mixer was fired up. Then they started up their old Thwaites dumptruck, which sounded like a 150kg warthog defecating in a bucket. The site was too noisy to think in, so Mr Wolf left, convinced that he’d avoid wet trades in future, at all costs, even if the effort killed him.
ps. These anecdotes are based on real events, with names and locations changed to protect the identity of the guilty.
It’s 11am on a Tuesday morning early in 2025. We sit at the dining room table with our laptop unfolded, waiting for the Teams call to start. As we wait, we glance around the untidy room: wondering whether to buy a rug from John Lewis because our feet feel cold, or to buy some new pictures for the walls since we’re fed up looking at that hipster Brutalism poster, or hoping that Tesco won’t arrive with a grocery crate in the middle of proceedings.
Once the Teams call starts, our minds turn firstly to the latecomers, the folk whose connection has dropped, then to the meeting agenda. But as the call drags on, we start to play Bullshizzle Bingo, waiting for someone –
To reach out,
or to push back;
to suggest taking it offline,
or accept that it is what it is, and we are where we are;
to leverage our expertise in order to manage expectations,
so we do some horizon scanning, then see the view from 30,000 feet –
and finally, after taking a straw poll, we commit to the plan on the paper.
Eventually, we drift into a micro-revery on whether the death of the office has been exaggerated. In the age of flexible working, home working and co-working, have we forgotten what the institution of the office meant during the 20th century? Covid-19 left swathes of Grade B office buildings lying empty, then co-working spaces opened in the backs of coffee shops, and for a wee while, Wework offered beanbags and pool tables and even taps dispensing free beer.
Now there’s a push to get people back into the office. Jamie Dimon, the big boss at US bank JP Morgan summed up his feelings about remote working and video conference calls recently –
“A lot of you were on the f------ Zoom ... and you were doing the following: looking at your mail, sending texts to each other about what an a------ the other person is, not paying attention, not reading your stuff. And if you don’t think that slows down efficiency, creativity, creates rudeness – it does.
“When I found out that people were doing that – you don’t do that in my goddamn meetings. If you’re going to meet with me, you’ve got my attention, you’ve got my focus. I don’t bring my goddamn phone, I’m not sending texts to people. It simply doesn’t work. It doesn’t work for creativity. It slows down decision-making.”
As we know from feature films like The Wolf of Wall Street, profanity and foul language go with the territory when you deal with American bankers, but perhaps Mr Dimon has a point. Maybe remote working and work-from-home-Friday will be dumped, and employees will end up back at the office five days a week. Good for workspace designers and office fit-out companies, perhaps, but less flexible for employees.
Meantime, I bought the attached images as part of collections of old photos for pieces which I wrote in another magazine. Most shots were published, whereas this handful were left over, but they’re too good not to share. The feeling of places left behind by time is enhanced by the antiquated technology, and it underlines how the accelerating pace of change continues to change the way we live and work at an ever more rapid pace.
The office environment here would have been alive with people talking like Huw Weldon does in 1960’s arts programmes on the BBC – plus the clatter of comptometers, typewriters, a telex machine and the ticking of a Gents of Leicester electric clock above the door. Each workstation comes with the latest technology: a push-button phone, Selectric typewriter, Rolodex card file, and of course an ashtray. Whereas, here we are today, with all the CGI software that money can buy, and desks full of screen.
So, why wouldn’t you want to return to the office?
A few weeks into 2025, it seems we’re on the cusp of inexorable change. We sit uncomfortably on the threshold between how things used to be and a new way, which is forever a work in progress.
I recently went for a wander around a sprawling Brutalist building beside the Forth. I took a 35mm camera and a couple of rolls of film with me. I’d made a sketch plan of the building and approaches beforehand, so I had a rough idea where I was going, and I listened to a Hüsker Dü CD in the car on the way there. This is exploring the way I used to do it 20 years ago, quietly, low key – before internet forums and Facebook groups, then YouTube and Tiktok emerged. After that, fools on social media constantly had to weigh in on The Topic.
The M.O. employed today is to take only an iPhone with you. You can listen to Soundcloud on the way there, through your earbuds, and use Google Maps to navigate with. Once you’re inside, you just snap away with the phone camera, switching between the x1 and x0.5 lenses. If you’re more ambitious, you might pack a Mavic drone as well, to scout the site then try (fail) to recreate in a single take the epic opening sequence from The Shining. You know the one, a panorama of the Canadian Rockies shot from a helicopter using a gyroscopically-stabilised movie camera called a Steadicam.
As I was wandering through the floorplates, it struck me that not only was the building in an ephemeral state – caught for a few months between use and demolition – but the process of exploring our built environment is, too. That in-between state has been called “liminality”, or something which exists on the boundary between two conditions. It usually describes buildings which find themselves temporarily without people, imparting a sense of eeriness or the uncanny. Liminality was popularised by 4chan, which is where all internet memes originate: LOLcats, Rick-rolling, ROFLcopters and so forth.
Liminality has company. In the ultimate irony, the deserted and abandoned has become the 21st century’s most popular destination. There are countless books titled Hidden, Secret, Unknown and Undiscovered – but by definition, their subject matter is none of these things, otherwise the authors couldn't have found it in the first place. The books are accompanied by a slew of student dissertations which dress up having a mooch around an empty building as exploring liminality. I suspect they’re written by the type of booksmart show-off who likes to take a photo with their phone which captures a camera showing a preview image on the screen – then captioning it as “meta photography”.
Setting that aside, the Brutalist building was worth the journey. Each time I’d driven past in 2024, high reach excavators had been parked alongside, but the demolition plant has disappeared off site, and I discovered much remained intact. Inside the reception area is a high relief sculpture that’s four storeys tall. It appears to have been cast in bronze, but I investigated and discovered it’s actually made from brown fibreglass. It looks vaguely as if a totem pole has been re-styled by William Gear; it was actually sculpted by someone called Charles Anderson, and it will supposedly be saved from destruction.
Further inside, the building is pure 1960’s. The rosewood-veneered doors are fitted with original Modric hardware, and I paused a few times to admire the blocky Sixties typeface on the Fire Door Keep Shut discs. On the main accommodation stair, the hardwood handrails have been steamed into compound curves where they reach sweetly around the half-landings – but the first thing I noticed were the open riser flights, carried on concrete spine beams. I don’t even remember a time when you could use open risers in a public building, but the 1960’s is another country.
Beyond the 1960’s wing lie the 1970’s extensions, which stretch out like tendons from the original block. The process of soft stripping has begun, and this sequence of un-building fascinates me just as much as the construction process does. The casings have been stripped off the reinforced concrete columns and the suspended ceilings have been dropped, to reveal an in-situ slab with a coffered soffit. All the half-century-old concrete work looks like new. The raised floor panels have been pulled up – leaving the pedestals in place, and busbars exposed for the copper wombles to gather up.
As I worked my way around the complex, a strange thing happened. The space no longer felt liminal. I wasn’t projecting an internet meme onto my own experience; instead, I was dissecting the design and construction of the building. I couldn’t help myself thinking like an architect, rather than a poster on 4chan. I spent several hours wandering through the deserted building, and I was able to focus on the building and just being there, so I recaptured the feeling from 20 years. It made me very happy.
As to posting status updates for legions of dedicated followers on Insta, 2025-style? Plz add to the map thx. Access deetz plz. Time capsule building: everything left behind? Not quite. The legions will be left waiting, because the rolls of Ektar 100 have just been sent away to the lab for developing and it will be a few days before they come back, with scans burned onto a CD, 2005-style. But that’s fine, because I took the photos for me, rather than for Like, Share and Subscribe.
If you’re interested in the aesthetics of decay, with mentions of Detroit, Chernobyl and Spreepark in Berlin, this clip from Radio 4’s Sideways programme is worth listening to – https://www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/play/m0027ctg
The process of re-badging and re-launching goes on, relentlessly. A few years ago while I was working on buildings for mental healthcare, I studied the evolution of asylums for the insane. It’s a specialist field, with lots of expert knowledge which I barely touched on, but it has produced a fair number of under-appreciated buildings including MacMon’s beautifully-designed facility at Murray Royal in Perth, which was completed a few years ago.
One of the most striking things I discovered was the continual renaming of places for people who have psychiatric issues. Insanity became mental illness, asylums became hospitals. The names changed many times, from madhouses to lunatic asylums and idiot colonies, then institutions for mental defectives, hospitals for the mentally handicapped, then psychiatric units and now mental health facilities. Changing the names made little difference to patients – it was a matter of semantics for politicians and administrators – but improving the buildings in which they’re cared for did. I can see a parallel in today’s sustainability movement.
As Michael Pawlyn wrote in the RIBA Journal in 2019, signing up to Architects Declare signed you up to “Regenerative Architecture” – but what is it and how do you achieve it? He quickly admitted that, “For those of us who have been involved in sustainable design for 30 years or more, it is painful to accept how badly sustainability has failed to prevent the multiple environmental crises from worsening.” That gets close to the truth of why Sustainability (which used to be known as Eco-friendly Design, and before that as Green Architecture) has been re-badged as Regenerative Architecture.
Architects Declare and their allies believe Sustainability has failed – so they’ve decided to rebadge it. But that’s a misconception. Sustainability hasn’t failed; it’s a multi-decade project and still a work in progress. Buildings today are far more sustainable than they were thirty years ago. Sustainability has achieved a great deal – albeit not the total overthrow of capitalism, which Extinction Rebellion and their fellow travellers would like to see.
Meantime, “Regenerative” in this context reveals breathtaking arrogance and ignorance within our profession about what regeneration means. For example, one of the few specifics Michael Pawlyn provides is to suggest building with materials made from atmospheric carbon: he cites wood as an example. But chopping down trees is De-Generative, because it reduces the natural world’s ability to absorb stormwater and CO2. Only by planting more new trees than you fell can you regenerate the ecosystem’s ability to absorb. That's a crucial caveat.
Then you have solar panels, which are a red herring when it comes to Regenerative Architecture. They’re certainly helpful to generate some electrical power for buildings, which may mean using less coal- and gas-powered generation; but that’s a non-issue in Scotland where almost all our electricity is generated by hydro stations and wind turbines, and nuclear power. Regardless, solar panels can’t regenerate the natural ecosystem in the way that planting shrubs and herbs creates a habitat for insects and helps to absorb water and CO2.
Biophilia and biomimicry have also been offered up as examples of Regenerative Architecture. In the early 2020’s, they became fashionable among the mega-consultancies which offer workplace design to the multi-national corporations which fill up Grade A space in our big cities. For them, supposedly regenerative design followed a formula of including some raw timber, rather than painted finishes. Living walls, often using reindeer moss or something similar, or fake green walls which approximate a living wall. A view to the outside, if you’re lucky enough to have one from your deep plan floorplate; or artificial lighting which follows circadian rhythms, if you’re not that lucky. Plus a few pot plants.
But no-one from Architects Declare has explained how a newbuild central London office tower can help to regenerate the natural ecosystem, so Regenerative Architecture joins a series of straw men and pails of greenwash which practices parade on their websites. The RIBA 2030 Climate Challenge, B-Corp, Article 25 and so forth. The whole scene is rather like a ceremony in the Wacky Races cartoons: each time Dick Dastardly needs to motivate Muttley, he gives him a medal which is proudly displayed on the dog’s puffed-up chest. Re-badging is a distraction which misses the point of what the term Regenerative actually means.
For once, I can speak from direct experience. All the generations that preceded me worked the land, but while some were farmers, my direct ancestors on Dad’s side were mostly market gardeners. During the 18th and 19th centuries they relied on horsepower for ploughing, crop rotation to keep down diseases, and animal manure for fertiliser. My grandfather was the first to buy mechanical tractors, motor lorries and use chemical fertiliser.
Market gardening isn’t like farming. The latter is extensive agriculture, whereas market gardening is intensive horticulture – in other words, using a few hectares to grow higher yield crops like fruit and vegetables, rather than a few hundred hectares to grow cereals, or grass to support grazing sheep and cattle. My family grew vegetables like carrots, turnips, tomatoes and salads; fruit like strawberries and apples; and flowers like chrysanthemums and helichrysums.
My Grandad, and my Dad after him, saw the introduction of NPK fertilisers (nitrogen, phosphorus, and potassium) and chemical insecticides like DDT and 2,4D, along with pre-emergence weedkillers make a big difference to crop yields. DDT was introduced when Dad was a teenager, and it was a tremendously effective insecticide. By the time he was in his 30’s, DDT had been banned, along with many others like Aldrin and Deldrin. We now understand that these toxic chemicals are biocides: they don’t just harm the species we’ve decided are “pests”, they also also kill helpful pollinators and destroy friendly bacteria in the soil.
These chemicals, which made post-War horticulture less back-breaking and more profitable, were counter-productive. The latest agri-chemicals to be banned (just the other week) are neo-nicotinoid pesticides, but none of this is news. For example, Strawberry Cultivation, written by Edward Hyams in the early 1950’s, was one of my Dad’s favourite books. Its opening lines read, “If man ever has to give an account of himself as chief tenant of the planet, he will be hard put to it not to show himself deserving of severe censure. He has destroyed forests, befouled rivers and seas, created deserts, hunted, tortured and even exterminated many of his fellow species, all with complacent self-satisfaction.”
My Dad and Grandad observed a cycle where most of the wonder chemicals introduced during the 1940’s and 50’s were banned during the 1960’s and 70’s: but meantime an alternative had opened up in the US. A movement called Conservation Farming emerged, which was a form of permaculture later called Regenerative Agriculture. By coincidence, one of the companies which contributed to it was Allis-Chalmers, an engineering firm in Milwaukee which was founded by a distant relative. He escaped from a life of tenant farming in Angus by emigrating to Chicago in 1841, and decades later his company had grown into one of the biggest of its kind in the world. I mentioned one of their earthmovers here.
A-C is credited with designing, manufacturing and selling the first commercially successful no-tillage planters, in 1966. The principle is really simple. Rather than driving a tractor through the field four times – once with ploughs, then with harrows, then with fertiliser, then a final time with seeders – No-Til barely disturbed the soil, and did everything in one pass. That saved time, money and fuel and most importantly it didn’t open up the soil which would have allowed nutrients to leach away. Thanks to No-Til, natural nutrients and moisture were retained and the topsoil was able to regenerate itself, naturally. By contrast, conventional ploughing degraded the soil, which meant more artificial fertilisers and chemicals were needed.
Trademarked as the Allis-Chalmers No-Til system, three toolbars were carried behind the tractor. The first had a series of coulters developed by A-C engineer Maynard Walberg, which sliced through crop residue or sod to prepare a narrow strip of soil, rather than churning up the whole field. The second toolbar carried fertiliser boxes which sprinkled a small amount of fertiliser only where it was needed, in the seedbed. Planter units were attached to the third toolbar. As an aside, the story of how Allis-Chalmers developed the No-Til planter and pioneered regenerative farming is a powerful argument for the good that enlightened capitalism can do, too.
Leaving the soil as undisturbed as possible is truly regenerative: and perhaps only foresters, ecologists, farmers and market gardeners, and conservationists can help to regenerate the natural environment in a true sense. By comparison, architects are kidding themselves: the glass and stone and steel and dead timber which we make buildings from can’t regenerate communities of plants, animals, birds and fungi. Misunderstanding what Regenerative means isn’t just semantics – it’s crucial to understanding the issue, in exactly the same way that the so-called “fireproof” insulations used at Grenfell Tower weren’t Class A1 rated, so people died. “Car-free” developments aren’t really car-free, if residents just park their cars on adjacent streets.
I hate to make predictions this early in the New Year, but I can see the current generation of dogma-driven architects repeating the mistakes of their predecessors, just in a different way. What was labelled as the worst of 1960’s architecture – such as Sam Bunton’s Red Road flats and Basil Spence’s Hutchie C tower blocks in Glasgow, T. Dan Smith’s masterplan for Newcastle, the Hulme Crescents in Manchester, and Ronan Point in London – was blamed for destroying inner city working class communities and creating brand new slums. Likewise, claiming that we can regenerate the earth by building on it is intellectually dishonest and plain wrong.
In the 1960’s, Modernism promised to remake the world, by adopting a new paradigm. We replanned cities to eliminate slums, then housed people at high density in tower blocks and deck-access slabs, prefabricated these buildings in precast concrete factories, and made it easier for cars to get around. But the streets in the sky turned into wind-blasted nowheres, precast large panel systems turned out to be difficult to assemble accurately on site, and electric underfloor heating turned out to be too expensive to use. Some buildings leaked, others were poorly insulated, some were structurally unsafe.
In the 21st century, Sustainable architecture promised to remake the world, by adopting a new paradigm. We replanned cities to eliminate private cars, then tried to raise inner city densities by prefabricating medium rise buildings in SIP factories. However, the combinations of membrane which make them airtight but vapour permeable rely on faultless workmanship on site. When mechanical ventilation with heat recovery (MVHR) systems fail due to poor maintenance, when external wall insulation (EWI) systems fail due to being poorly applied, and when heat pumps are incorrectly installed in poorly-insulated, leaky old buildings – they don’t work.
I’ve got personal experience of MVHR problems and modern EWI systems which failed in the most dramatic way – I was a small part of a team brought in to rectify the problems. That underlined to me that Sustainability is a work in progress, rather than something to discard. If we don’t recognise the limits of our competence and show some humility by doing simpler things more effectively, the results will be just the same as during the 1960’s: cold houses where old people live miserably through winter, and damp houses where children develop breathing disorders.
Before we ditch sustainability in favour of a new badge, we need to get the fundamentals right. Aim for Fabric First, rather than bolting on complex heat recovery systems in order to scrape through the SBEM calculations. Demolish as little as possible, instead upgrade everything we can – and push Westminster to abolish VAT on refurbs in order to encourage that. Finally, specify Scottish products and materials every time – not imports from China for “value engineering”.
The concepts behind sustainability are often misunderstood – sometimes wildly so. It’s been tough enough to master sustainable materials while we improve U-values and airtightness, without starting again from scratch with Regenerative Architecture: a mixture of misconceptions, extravagant promises to save the world, and greenwash.
That notwithstanding, Happy New Year. :-)
Over time, you lose track of most people you’ve ever known. If you’re lucky, you might keep up with some colleagues from previous jobs, a few from architecture school, a handful from secondary school, and perhaps one from primary school. Friendships which go back that far are scarce, and it came as a jarring blow to discover that Mhairi was no longer around.
I remember her at this time of year, when I make Christmas cards, and whenever I hear The Eurythmics on the radio. At primary school she stood out thanks to her auburn hair: but Mhairi was bright, articulate and radiated personality. That stood out more. Her childhood was split between Dundee and Aberdeen, which was something we had in common, then her parents relocated again and she went to secondary school in St Andrews, followed by Ellon Academy.
As an adult she threw herself wholeheartedly into everything she did. After university in Aberdeen she made a successful life in London, between work and supporting the London Scottish rugby club, before moving back to Scotland. She jokingly referred to herself as a “rugby meer”, and we reconnected thanks to Friends Reunited: pretty much the only time that social media has fulfilled its promise to be useful.
That link went back to childhood, to Mrs Ramsay and Japanese larch trees and Adrians, to Rotork pens and The Secret Garden and bathroom doors with keyholes. Even though it can feel strange to pick up a friendship again after a gap, discovering the adult version of a person you remember as a child, then reconciling it to impressions formed when you were also a child, is a gift which we’re given only a handful of times over the course of life.
Similarly, memories of people we knew sometimes become conflicted due to things they did or said; but not with Mhairi. Her life ended at 44 years old, and its unfulfilled potential brings to mind the line from Philip Larkin, “There swelled/ a sense of falling, like an arrow-shower/ sent out of sight, somewhere becoming rain.” Larkin saw that the course of a life is like the flight of an arrow, fired at birth towards an unknown destination. It follows a random walk of chance: nothing is fixed, nothing is forever.
The end of the year is for remembering, as well as celebrating. Happy Christmas, Mhairi Gillanders, wherever you are now.
Compared to its dysfunctional cousin south of the Border, the Building Control system in Scotland is more stringent. You’ve never been able to build high rise blocks with only one means of escape in Scotland, and our Building Warrant process wasn’t hived off to the private sector by Thatcher.
In my experience, Building Standards departments communicate well with architects: those I’ve dealt with recently in Aberdeenshire, the City of Aberdeen and City of Dundee organise updates and seminars for architects, explaining changes to the regulations and asking for our feedback. We attended an update session a few weeks ago, when the Team Leader at Building Standards ran through upcoming revisions to the Technical Standards.
Three things stuck out: the reversal of the wood-fired stoves fiasco, the long-term implications of the Grenfell Tower fire, and the need to remove politicians from the room when procurement and construction are discussed.
Firstly, fitting wood-fired stoves in new builds is no longer banned. I could go into a political rant (at the risk of death by boredom) about the misguided impulse behind the proposed ban, but just like scrapping the target to reduce greenhouse gas emissions by 75% by 2030, it demonstrates that the folk who come up with these policies aren’t talking to those who have to implement them. Between them lies a yawning gap between declarative statements and practical action – a gap traditionally occupied by politicians.
In this case, while policy-makers thought they’d found a clever way to penalise rich folk who build fancy houses, most of us saw the ban as a first step towards the eventual banning of solid fuel stoves, back boilers, and open fires. The reality is that solid-fuel stoves and open fires are used by many people in the overlooked 95% of Scotland’s landmass – the part beyond the big cities which is called the countryside. People there have to be pragmatic about how they heat their houses, because you still get deep snow up the glens and in the Highlands: sometimes the LPG tanker, or coal lorry, or oil tanker, or even the heat pump repair man, can’t get through. So you need to have a back-up, such as solar panels, or open fires, or a solid fuel stove.
The only experience I have of solid fuel was at my grandparents' house in an Aberdeenshire village. There were fireplaces in several rooms, but I only remember a couple downstairs being lit in winter – you can imagine that the house was a bit chilly, but my grandparents were hardy and didn't seem to notice. They had a shed for coal, and another shed for logs, but no central heating – the village had no mains gas. They heated their house the way several generations of Essons had done before them.
Secondly, Building Standards introduced us to a new role, the CPM or Compliance Plan Manager – a new acronym, confusingly similar to but distinct from CDM or CPD. Unlike the earlier Planning Supervisor, CDM Coordinator and Principal Designer roles, this one carries heavy consequences for getting it wrong: likely up to a £50,000 fine and two years imprisonment. After the presentation, I asked the Team Leader whether the Scottish Government foresaw that architects could fulfil the CPM role. He believed yes we could, but we both agreed that the liabilities and hence the professional indemnity insurance premiums could be off-putting.
Is the CPM another opportunity for architects to retain part of their traditional role, which has gradually been chipped away by project managers, Planning Supervisors and CDM Coordinators? Or is it a poisoned chalice, which will see CPM’s in the dock when something tragic happens on site or years later when the building is in use? Time will tell.
Finally, the repercussions of the Grenfell Tower Report were discussed at length. While the report heaps criticism on the architect, Building Control, K&C Council, the contractors and suppliers such as Kingspan, Arconic and Celotex – it’s also notable for not tackling the political and legislative failures which resulted in Grenfell Tower being designed and built the way it was.
For example, who allowed English tower blocks to be built with a single means of escape? In Scotland, all tower blocks have two separate means of escape. Architects and contractors can only follow the rulebook they’ve been given. Who allowed plastic foam insulation to be used in over-cladding tower blocks? Surely any insulation used in construction, especially on mid-rise and high-rise buildings, should be Class A1, in other words completely non-flammable? Shouldn’t plastic foam insulation be blacklisted, like RAAC and the structural use of woodwool slabs were?
Most of all, who allowed the public sector to procure construction work using Design & Build contracts? Most people I’ve spoken to feel that’s a fundamental problem, the root cause of dangerous buildings. The client asks for a safe building, the architect designs a safe building, but once he or she is novated to the contractor, cost rather than quality and safety becomes the driver. Whether or not an architect is “reasonably competent” or “suitably experienced” or whichever description the construction lawyers select – once they’re working for the contractor, architects can only argue so many times about quality and specification before they’re slapped down.
To make matters worse, in many cases the D&B contractor’s cost savings don’t benefit the client – due the way that the contracts work, unless there’s an explicit clawback mechanism which shares the value engineering savings between client and contractor, they go straight onto the contractor’s margin.
Government is in charge of legislating on Building Standards – so perhaps they should shoulder some blame for allowing English tower blocks to be built with a single means of escape. Government is in charge of legislating on building materials testing and classification across the UK – so they should shoulder some blame for plastic foam insulation being used. And most of all, government is in charge of public sector procurement – surely they must shoulder blame for allowing Design & Build contracts to be used on tower block refurbishments?
We may not work south of the border, and we might not be working on tower blocks (although I’ve done both at different stages of my career) but the shockwaves of Grenfell Tower are being felt across Scotland’s Building Standards system, too. For what it’s worth, I think we should be listening to the advocates of Fabric First, and rapidly upgrading as much of the existing building stock as we can, using much non-flammable insulation and improved airtightness. That way, the heating loads of buildings will shrink to the point where their CO2 emissions are less of an issue than they are now, and people’s energy bills will shrink, too.
As to fixing political meddling in the construction industry – good luck with that.