Posts Tagged Scotland
Isi Metzstein obituary
Posted by The Sheet in Architecture News on January 23, 2012
Innovative architect who designed some remarkable postwar British buildings
Isi Metzstein, who has died aged 83, was jointly responsible for some of the most remarkable and distinguished modern architecture in postwar Britain. Under the umbrella of the Glasgow practice of Gillespie Kidd & Coia (GKC), for whom he worked throughout his career, he and his colleague Andrew MacMillan designed a series of striking churches in and around Glasgow, as well as school and university buildings further afield, including Robinson College, Cambridge. They were also the architects of St Peter's Seminary at Cardross, Argyll and Bute, once widely regarded as the finest modern building in Scotland but now a derelict ruin.
Metzstein was born in Berlin, the son of two Polish Jews, Efraim (who died in 1933) and Rachel. He escaped Germany in 1939 under the Kindertransport scheme. The boy, his siblings and their mother were scattered all over Britain until the family was eventually reunited. The young Isi had been taken in initially by a family in Hardgate, Clydebank, and he remained in Glasgow for the rest of his life.
In 1945, having left school, he decided he wanted to become an architect, and a chance connection led to an apprenticeship with Jack Coia, the sole surviving partner of Gillespie Kidd & Coia, the firm he had taken on in the late 1920s. At the same time, Metzstein enrolled for evening classes in architecture at the Glasgow School of Art, where he met MacMillan, whom he brought into the firm in 1954. Together, they were to transform the practice and, as "Andy and Isi", became a celebrated double-act, as designers, teachers and talkers.
Coia, the son of Italian immigrants, had reopened the office after the second world war and resumed his association with the Roman Catholic archdiocese of Glasgow, having built a number of churches in the 1930s. The archdiocese was about to embark on a programme of churchbuilding. At first, Coia's archi tecture continued in the manner of his prewar work, but soon the influence of his two and open-minded assistants became evident, familiar as they were with avant-garde buildings in continental Europe, in particular the work of the Swiss architect Charles-Édouard Jeanneret, better known as Le Corbusier.
The turning point was the church at Glenrothes, a new town in Fife, which was completed in 1957. With its tapering, open plan, austere aesthetic and white exterior, this was clearly the creation of different hands. Henceforth, Coia's task was to secure the commissions, while the work was carried out by his young and expanding office. Although GKC were responsible for schools and some housing during the late 1950s and 60s, what stood out was the series of bold and inventive churches. It is ironic that, while the Roman Catholic hierarchy believed the architect to be the almost mythical Coia, the designing was in fact carried out by a Jewish refugee from Berlin and a Glaswegian of Highland Presbyterian ancestry.
Metzstein, who described himself as a "lapsed atheist", had a strong sense of the numinous, achieved in his churches by the dramatic handling of light in dark interiors. Some of the churches were in the tradition of tall and powerful brick boxes, such as those at East Kilbride (1962) and Kilsyth (1964). Others – St Benedict's, Drumchapel (1970), Our Lady of Good Counsel, Dennistoun (1965) – had highly inventive plans and unconventional internal spaces.
However, their masterpiece was undoubtedly St Peter's (1966), where neo-Corbusian ranges with a brilliant stepped-section were disposed around an existing Victorian mansion.
The work of GKC stood out from that of their equally modern-minded contemporaries in England. As Metzstein explained: "We got the unique opportunity to design modern buildings that were not modern programmes – churches, convents, seminaries … We were relatively young and more excitable, maybe … We were designing churches, which are one-off buildings with an emotional and religious context."
By good fortune, the firm never jumped aboard the high-rise, system-building juggernaut. Metzstein and MacMillan were also unusual in having a serious interest in history, appreciating the character of Glasgow's urban fabric of stone tenements and extolling the merits of the work of the city's great architects of the past, Alexander "Greek" Thomson and Charles Rennie Mackintosh, at a time when it was either ignored or under threat.
In 1969, when Coia was awarded the Royal gold medal for architecture, he asked that his two partners be associated with the honour. But by then things were beginning to go wrong. The patronage of the archdiocese was coming to an end (although new jobs appeared in England) and problems were emerging with the firm's experimental buildings. As with Frank Lloyd Wright, stories abound about leaking roofs and structural problems. The campanile at the East Kilbride church was taken down and in 1991 the wonderfully dramatic church at Drumchapel was summarily demolished a few days before it was due to be listed. As for St Peter's, which was superbly constructed (unlike some of the churches), it was rendered almost obsolete as soon as it was finished by the new policy, after the Second Vatican Council, of training priests in urban settings. It was abandoned by the archdiocese in 1980 and fell prey to vandals. Despite its grade A listing by Historic Scotland and its inclusion on the World Monuments Fund's list of sites most at risk, the structure remains a ruin.
Metzstein later announced the foundation of the Macallan club (named after his favourite whisky), whose members are the architects of buildings "demolished or mutilated without the involvement of its designer" and who, "the victims of brutal, premature 'scrap-heaping', are witnesses to the fragility of permanence which characterises [the] century". This may have been a joke, but it all hurt – deeply.
The firm's last building was Robinson College, an complex and inventive redbrick response to the growing reaction against the Modern movement, which was completed in 1980. Metzstein then devoted himself to teaching and lecturing, at the Mackintosh School of Architecture at the Glasgow School of Art (of which MacMillan was head), at the University of Edinburgh (where he was professor) and elsewhere.
He was held in great affection and respect by architects all over Britain, and was both revered and feared for his incisive and often devastating criticism of student work. It was annoying that recognition – and a growing admiration for the work of GKC – came so late. When Metzstein and MacMillan were presented with an award by the Royal Institute of British Architects for their teaching in 2008, Metzstein noted that "it would have been even better to receive this while we were still alive".
He remained until the end the conscience of a rational modernity, and was "allergic to 'starchitects' whose work fills the magazines". He much disliked the posturing arbitrariness of such buildings as Daniel Libeskind's Jewish Museum in Berlin, "which I can't take, both as an architect and as a Jew born in Berlin".
Behind Metzstein's acerbic wit, uttered in his guttural accent – a distinctive combination of German and Glaswegian – was a warm and generous personality. For an architect, he was unusually well-informed, intellectually curious and cosmopolitan in outlook.He lived with his wife, Dany, also of central European Jewish origin, and his family, in Hillhead. At home he created an ideal city made of metal tourist souvenir models of buildings which his many friends would send him from all over the world.
He is survived by Dany, his children, Mark, Saul and Ruth, and his brother and twin sister.
• Israel Metzstein, architect, born 7 July 1928; died 10 January 2012
Constructive criticism: the week in architecture
Posted by The Sheet in Architecture News on January 16, 2012
Blackpool gets its very own Vegas-style register office, a Scottish giant goes to the great studio in the sky, and the sad demise of two close-knit London housing estates
A week of happy beginnings and sad departures. On Thursday, Simon Garrick and Kelly Goudie from the Fylde, Lancashire, were the first couple to get married at Festival House, a dazzling new gold register office on Blackpool's Golden Mile. The £2.7m building, designed by dRMM, is one glittering part of the seaside town's £250m improvement plan that has already seen the refurbishment of the 158m (518ft) Blackpool tower and the extension of Blackpool Central Library by Bisset Adams architects.
Blackpool's "Tower of Love" register office is a British take on the kitsch wedding chapels of Las Vegas. The structure is clad in gold stainless steel shingles – it's very hard to miss when the sun's out – and boasts a tall window framing pretty much the entire length of Blackpool tower. There is quite possibly some Freudian symbolism at play here.
The chapel of the once-beautiful seminary of St Peter's at Cardross near Glasgow, consecrated in 1966 and abandoned in the early 1980s, is sadly a ruin today. This week saw the death of Isi Metzstein, co-designer of St Peter's and one of Scotland's greatest modern architects. Born in Berlin in 1928, Metzstein came to Scotland not a moment too soon: just before the outbreak of the second world war. He joined Gillespie, Kidd & Coia, the long-established Glaswegian firm he was to run with Andy MacMillan; together, Metzstein and MacMillan designed some of the most challenging and profound churches in Europe.
Saddam Hussein's "super mosque" is a religious ruin in a very different mould. Work began on this vast 11-acre complex close to Baghdad airport not long before the Iraqi dictator was toppled in 2003. The convoluted story of the three huge mosques Saddam was building at the time of his fall can be found online. Here is a telling chunk:
"The Umm al-Mahare ['Mother of All Battles'] mosque on the outskirts of Baghdad has four outer minarets shaped like Kalashnikov assault rifles, and four inner minarets shaped like Scud missiles. The surrounding reflecting pool is shaped like the Arab world. The mosque also featured a Qur'an written in Saddam's blood (28 litres, said to have been donated over two years) … Al-Rahman ['the most merciful'] mosque featured no fewer than 14 domes and was scheduled to be completed in 2004. The Saddam the Great mosque was a construction site with skeletal columns, and was schedule[d] to be completed in 2015."
The site of the last of these is to be the home of the new $100m Iraqi parliament building. A shortlist of designers has been drawn up. This includes architects Assemblage, with Buro Happold and Al Khan as engineers – though Assemblage's Peter Besley tells me he has no idea who else is in the running as "the ministries [in Baghdad] are notoriously hard to get this kind of information from".
Isi Metzstein's finest buildings have often been labelled "brutalist", a term coined by the critic Reyner Banham in the mid-1950s. Now, one of the most famous – or infamous – brutalist monuments, the long-threatened Robin Hood Gardens estate in east London, designed by Alison and Peter Smithson, is finally on the verge of demolition. While some might cheer, the replacement housing is not exactly a cause for celebration.
Home Sweet Home, meanwhile, is an exhibition opening tomorrow that tells the story of the 1960s-era prefabricated concrete Ferrier estate in Kidbrooke, south London. Now that its denizens have been moved out in the name of "regeneration", and 4,398 new homes are moving in, what happens to former residents' sense of community? To their hopes, fears and memories? It was home to thousands of people – even though, as the curators point out, the Ferrier estate "came to be seen as the problem it was designed to solve". The curators of this moving show are photographer Anna Batchelor and designer Sarah Colson.
This week also saw the opening in Boston of the latest design by Renzo Piano – yes, the Shard guy. This is the $118m extension to the Isabella Stewart Gardener Museum. The modest, low-lying new building provides space for temporary exhibitions, concerts and education programmes. The original building, dating from 1903, was designed by Willard T Sears in the style of a 15th-century Venetian palazzo, for the collector and philanthropist Isabella Stewart Gardner. It's awash with art of all kinds, from Botticelli to John Singer Sargent. Although this is prohibited, both the old and new buildings would make glamorous wedding venues, if not quite in the inimitable style of Las Vegas ... or Blackpool.
• This article was amended on 16 January 2012. The original used the term registry office. This has been corrected.
Constructive criticism: the week in architecture
Posted by The Sheet in Architecture News on September 30, 2011
All aboard! Our transport special schedules an Olympic facelift for Euston station and a psychedelic stop on the Naples metro
News earlier this month that Zaha Hadid, Norman Foster and Richard Rogers are competing to design the world's largest airport at Daxing, southwest of Beijing, makes this week's transport-related architectural stories seem little more than the stuff of "news in briefs" tucked into the corners of news pages.
Even so, the 90,000 passengers who use Euston station every day may well be pleased to learn that the London terminus is about to be given a makeover by Aedas Architects. The polished black granite 1960s station, opened by the Queen in 1968, replaced the original terminus, which dated from 1837. With its handsome train shed by Charles Fox, a magnificent entrance – the Euston Arch – designed by Philip Hardwick to mimic an ancient Greek propylaeum, and a sumptuous Great Hall (England's noblest waiting room) drawn up by Hardwick's son, Philip Charles Hardwick, the original Euston station was admired worldwide. Sadly, all this was churlishly demolished in 1961-2.
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The current 1960s building has never been popular, and not just because of the loss of the Victorian station: nearly half a century on, there is still nowhere to sit in this airport-style "terminal" while waiting for trains that are strangely hidden out of sight.
The Aedas team will clear the station's clutter, add a mezzanine with new cafes and somewhere to sit overlooking the concourse, and generally make the building feel crisp, clear and clean. The project is meant to be temporary, although this turns on whether or not HS2, the new high-speed line from Birmingham to London, goes ahead. If it does, Euston may yet be rebuilt completely. But don't hold your breath: big talk in 2008 of an ambitious new station masterplanned by Allies and Morrison, designed by Foreign Office Architects, developed by British Land and with the Euston Arch brought back to life, came to nothing. Aedas's revamp may end up lasting a very long time.
If the renovation of Euston is, in part, being encouraged by the London 2012 Olympics, the redevelopment of Glasgow Queen Street station is being prodded on by the 2014 Commonwealth Games, although work on this Victorian station is not expected to be complete until 2015. A 1970s office block fronting the station will be demolished and the terminus will refaced with a glazed atrium and a direct link to the Buchanan Galleries shopping centre. If it was fashionable 50 years ago to turn railway stations into faux airport terminals, they are now on their way to becoming shopping malls, with eye-wateringly expensive trains attached.
Alejandro Zaera-Paolo of AZPA, a former partner of Foreign Office Architects (disbanded since the 2008 Euston plan), is in the running to design one or perhaps two stations for the new Galicia extension of Spain's high-speed AVE, at Ourense and Santiago de Compostela. Zaera-Polo's rivals at Ourense are Norman Foster, Richard Rogers and Eduardo Souto de Moura, while the shortlist for Santiago de Compostela includes David Chipperfield.
Biarritz station is quite some walk from the city's seafront on the Bay of Biscay. Here, the world of commuters gives way to sailing boats and surfboards and to the curious Cité de l'Océan et du Surf, opened this summer. Designed by Steven Holl with Solange Fabião, this museum of the sea is a poetic place where the architecture blurs into the waves and where you'll find a surfers' kiosk and a semi-enclosed space for performances and festivals. The building has just won a 2011 Emirates Glass LEAF award, an international prize for the world's best new buildings.
The Leaf awards' special commendation went to the gloriously colourful and playful University of Naples metro station (below), designed by Karim Rashid. These interiors will certainly take anyone's mind off the woes of commuting. Every staircase is an artwork, with each step offering a fraction that builds up to a whole, flight-long picture. Pop imagery abounds; it's like the psychedelic art shows of the 60s, at the time the new Euston opened. And very radical for a Metro station, even five decades on.
We've had trains and surfing, and now here's something for cyclists. The 2012 Olympic velodrome by Hopkins Architects is the favourite to win the RIBA Stirling prize. The winner of what the judges believe to be the best new building designed or built in Britain by a British-based practice is announced at a slap-up dinner at the Magna Science Adventure Centre, Rotherham, on Saturday night. The local train station has just been rebuilt by Aedas. From Euston, change at King's Cross and Doncaster.
Constructive criticism: the week in architecture
Posted by The Sheet in Architecture News on September 23, 2011
Do we love or loathe modern architecture? While Scotland demolishes 1960s tower blocks, Will Alsop tries to win us over with his new practice ALL Design
Blowing up 1960s tower blocks seems to have become something of a national sport in Scotland. This week, Edinburgh has been preparing for Sunday's big bang in Sighthill. Lucky Lewis Reynolds, a nine-year-old local schoolboy,who designed the winning entry in a poster competition for the demolition of three multi-storey housing blocks – Glenalmond, Hermiston and Weir Court – will press the plunger and blow the buildings to kingdom come.
"The demolition marks a new era for regeneration of west Edinburgh", says councillor Norman Work in a press release from the city of Edinburgh, "and is part of our wider strategy for the future of social housing which will create new properties fit for the 21st century."
Older housing has already been demolished in other suburbs including Gracemount, Pennywell and Muirhouse – and perhaps Lewis is old enough to remember 21 September 2008, the Sunday Edinburgh city council dynamited the 10-storey Broomview House. It's all good fun, supposedly. If you can't be there for the Sighthill explosion on Sunday, you can watch it live on the Stevenson College website or replay the event on the council's YouTube channel.
For those of you who believe that modern housing estates are the spawn of the devil (or of poor, misjudged Le Corbusier), look here to see what happened to Scotland's best-intentioned modern concrete housing. This was Basil Spence's Hutchestown C, or the "Hanging Gardens of Hutchestown", a sculpted architectural monument that, had it survived, might well have been turned into fashionable housing as Park Hill in Sheffield has.
Channel 4 once based an entire TV series, Demolition, on the premise of blowing up buildings viewers claimed to hate. Number one on the list was Scotland's Cumbernauld New Town, while the brand new Scottish parliament building made number eight. Park Hill came fifth.
Mad stuff, modern architecture, eh? Leave Scotland alone and build it somewhere far away instead, like Mongolia. Funnily enough, the dramatic new Art and City Museum by MAD architects opened this week in Ordos, Inner Mongolia, a city of 1.5m people where you can hardly move for new tower blocks, although MAD's shell-like building offers, say the Beijing-based architects, "a moment of pause in a city which has seen no end of construction."
Perhaps the National Trust should recommend sending George "Concrete" Osborne there to reconsider his views on planning as the nation struggles to come to terms with the government's developers' charter that will turn great tracts of Britain into our very own Ordos (although without the Art and City Museum).
If you find functional new buildings too ugly to look at straight in the facade, why not disguise them? Perhaps if Basil Spence had dolled up Hutchestown C in gothic fancy dress it might have been loved after all. At Roath Basin in Cardiff, the BBC has unveiled the new and highly decorative 260-metre long facade of its £30m "production village" designed by FAT with Holder Matthias Architects. This colourful, cookie-cutter design, says FAT, uses "motifs which reference the dock warehouses, wave forms and the gothic architecture of Cardiff." I wonder how Cardiff will come to terms with its playful new architecture.
One way of coping with modern architecture you find challenging is to look at it as if through the wrong end of a telescope. If Cumbernauld or the Scottish parliament building were Lilliputian in scale, even the citizens of Sighthill might be persuaded to stay their hand on the plunger. This week, Modernism in Miniature: Points of View opened at CCA (Canadian Centre for Architecture) in Montreal. This fascinating, Honey-I-Shrunk-the-Bauhaus show reveals the many ways in which the photography and presentation of models of modern buildings have been used by architects to express the ideas behind their work and to communicate these to their peer group and the public.
Forever the optimist and big player on the public stage, the architect Will Alsop is setting up a new practice, ALL Design with Scott Lowrie and 15 architects from RMJM, the global firm Alsop has worked with since March 2010. Based in Battersea, south London, ALL Design says it's happy to work on anything from a teaspoon to a city and aims to do so with friends drawn from many creative disciplines, from fashion and fine art to structural engineering. Until 1 October, ALL Design is presenting a show of collaborators including Vivienne Westwood, Nigel Coates, Bruce McLean and Atelier One to the public at its Testbed1 gallery. The more we understand contemporary architecture, the thinking goes, the less likely we are to want to blow it up.
Antonine wall fills gaps in story of Roman occupation of Britain
Posted by The Sheet in Architecture News on September 20, 2011
Wall that once marked Roman empire's border in Scotland will give up some of its secrets for Glasgow's Hunterian museum
One of the Roman empire's most enigmatic monuments – the Antonine wall between the firths of Forth and Clyde in Scotland, which briefly marked the northernmost point of the empire between the 140s and 160s AD – is set to reveal some of its secrets.
The elaborately carved sculptures from the wall, brought together for the first time, form the centrepiece of a new gallery at the Hunterian Museum in Glasgow, which has reopened after two years' refurbishment.
The Antonine wall was built early in the reign of Antoninus Pius, Hadrian's successor as emperor, who pushed the Roman border north from Hadrian's wall in order to secure a military victory that would play well back in Rome. According to the director of the Hunterian, Professor David Gaimster: "It was an act of propaganda by an emperor who had not held any significant military command, and its success ensured his position."
The soldiers of the II Augusta, VI Victrix and XX Valeria Victrix legions who built the mighty turf wall – many parts of which can still be seen – carved elaborate "distance slabs" commemorating the sections they had built.
The sculptures are, in general, more elaborate and richly decorated than their counterparts on Hadrian's wall, featuring such scenes as Victory placing a laurel wreath on a Roman legionary standard, and the distinctive mascots of the soldiers' legions: a running boar for the XX; a Pegasus and a Capricorn (after the Emperor Augustus's star sign) for the VI.
The sculptures also clearly project the move north as a splendid military victory: several depict Caledonians being trampled by Roman cavalry, or simply crouching in submission, bound and naked.
The northernmost tip of the empire is frequently imagined as an inhospitable, barbarous zone for its occupiers – but that image is far from the truth, according to Gaimster. The occupiers were, he said, enjoying "as sophisticated a Mediterranean lifestyle as legionaries would have done anywhere else in the empire".
For example, there were bathhouses along the wall, including in what is now the Glasgow suburb of Bearsden, where research has shown the occupiers were eating a diet including olives, figs and wine. Also in the new gallery are fragments of a richly decorated mausoleum found near Kirkintilloch, carved with images of togaed figures reclining on couches. Other objects include precious fragments of glass, delicate intaglios, red Samianware for dining, and – as fresh as the day they were made – adult and children's leather sandals. There is also a hint towards the multi-ethnic makeup of the Roman occupiers: a 15-year-old Middle Eastern boy called Salamenes died near Kirkintilloch, and his tombstone was erected by his father. A single woman – Verecunda – is recorded by her tombstone.
Indeed, the indigenous aristocracy seemed to be enjoying prestige goods from the Roman world before the area was annexed. An Iron Age settlement at Leckie in Stirlingshire has yielded finds of Roman Samianware, glass and a delicate mirror.
Sixteen of the 19 surviving distance slabs have been put on display. The missing three – one is in Edinburgh's National Museum of Scotland, one at Glasgow's Kelvingrove art gallery, and one, having been sold to America, perished in the 1896 fire in Chicago – are represented by casts.
They have all had a richly varied history since their brief service for Rome in the second century. Several were acquired by Scottish antiquaries, and given to the University of Glasgow as early as the turn of the 17th and 18th centuries, before the Hunterian was founded in 1807. One was seen built into the side of a cottage in 1603, and another turned up in a farmer's field in 1969, and Emeritus Professor Lawrence Keppie, an expert on the wall, remembers one of his first jobs at the museum: cleaning off the whitewash with which had been splashed during its sojourn in the farmyard.
Scotland’s creepiest building in £10m restoration scheme
Posted by The Sheet in Architecture News on September 17, 2011
St Peter's Seminary, a masterpiece of radical architecture, has lain derelict for 30 years and fallen prey to vandals
An appeal has been launched to save a derelict building hidden in an overgrown wood in Scotland that is described as one of the greatest modernist buildings in Europe.
With its long, clean lines covered by graffiti and its concrete greyed with rainwater, St Peter's Seminary has lain in a state of ruin since it was abandoned by the Catholic church in 1980. The vast, crumbling building is accessible only by foot and, despite a number of restoration proposals over recent decades, it has been left to decay and to the vandals. It has been dubbed "Scotland's shame" and "Scotland's creepiest building", yet a plan to turn the ruin into a hotel in 2007 was dropped because of the cost of restoration.
Foreign architecture students who make pilgrimages to see St Peter's have often been unable to locate it, lost as it is inside the 140-acre Kilmahew Forest, near the small town of Cardross, about 25 miles outside Glasgow, whose great architectural scion was Charles Rennie Mackintosh.
St Peter's was opened in 1966, a triumph of post-war architecture and stunningly imaginative design. But it was practically obsolete by the time it was completed, as the Catholic church had decreed in 1965 that its trainee priests should be schooled not in isolated rural havens like St Peter's, but inside the urban churches of Europe, close to those they would later serve.
As a result the seminary was never fully occupied. In 1980, it briefly became a drug rehabilitation centre before its closure later that year.
The Catholic church was at the forefront of modernist building works in Scotland at the time, commissioning several churches of bold radical design across the country. Many were designed by Isi Metzstein, known as Britain's answer to Frank Lloyd Wright, and Andy McMillan, who then ran the Scottish firm Gillespie, Kidd and Coia, which designed St Peter's.
The seminary is now the subject of a new book: To Have and To Hold, Future of a Contested Landscape. Funded by the Scottish government and Creative Scotland, the book is the first step in an ambitious £10 million project to save St Peter's, turn the surrounding area into a public space and establish a new arts college there.
"It's not a lot of money for a project like this. There is a lot of positivity, but we are very aware we are attempting to do what we want to do in the middle of the worst recession in however long," said Angus Farquhar, the creative director of Nacionale Vitae Activa, a Scottish arts charity which has acquired the site, which is also home to a Victorian estate within its ancient woodlands which the seminary was designed to sit against.
"But we won't be trying a complete restoration. This isn't like the National Trust approach, where everything will be restored to its original state. This is more an intent to preserve and re-use a modern ruin. St Peter's was designed with 107 cell bedrooms for trainee priests. As we have seen with previous commercial projects, that doesn't translate into a hotel or flats."
The idea was to clean up St Peter's, seal it from the elements and use it as a public arts space, treating it "as one would a 19th-century castle", he said.
"As a skeletal form it is very powerful. There is this great sweeping form with each cell making a floating concrete plinth. The use of light is exquisite. The chapel in particular uses light and shadow and shape, where light is filtered down across these huge beams above the altar and across this curved linear wall.
"It's such a symbol of that period of post-war regeneration, it seems logical to use the site as living heritage for artists and the public to come into this amazing landscape, for concerts and theatre groups. It will be something very special for Scotland."
In 2008 St Peter's was listed on the World Monuments Fund's list of 100 most endangered sites, but Farquhar hopes that the £10m fund, to be raised over the next two years, will enable restoration work to begin by 2013.
Letters: Scots architecture
Posted by The Sheet in Architecture News on September 16, 2011
The anglocentric tone of your guides to "British" architecture (10 September) is breathtaking. The years 476 to 1700 managed to avoid any reference to the very individual contribution of Scotland and Scottish architects. No mention of the unique Scots vernacular of tenements, tower houses or the Renaissance palaces of Stirling and Falkland, all so influenced by France and the near continent. Even the solitary tiny thumbnail of old and new in Edinburgh is anachronistic. The "old" is in fact a Victorian pastiche.
As for 1720 to the present, thanks for the photo of Robert Adam's Pulteney Bridge in Bath, but what happened to Macintosh and his contemporaries who electrified Glasgow and Europe at the start of the 20th century? This is not Caledonian girning and greeting. It's a complaint about you denying your readers the full texture of architecture in this "Britain" that you equate by and large with England. The ultimate irony is the brief, unillustrated mention of the extraordinary Alexander Greek Thomson as being "too little known outside his own country". No wonder, with guides like these.
Bill Paterson
London
• Every inch of Waterhouse's Manchester Town Hall, a building that Pevsner considered of international importance, would make a worthy photograph for your guide, so why choose E Vincent Harris's 1930s Town Hall extension? It's an old stock photo, too, as the extension and Harris's iconic Central Library are swathed in scaffolding and hoardings while their innards are being rearranged.
Paula Moorhouse
Manchester
More letters online at gu.com/letters: Getting the right balance between town and country planning
National Museum of Scotland: suspend your disbelief
Posted by The Sheet in Architecture News on July 27, 2011
Newly renovated, the National Museum of Scotland at last gives a collection of Victorian curiosities the extraordinary showcase they deserve. Jonathan Glancey takes a look inside
A hippopotamus suspended from the rafters. A colour television dating from 1937. A giant Victorian lighthouse lens that once illuminated the Firth of Forth. A seal gut anorak, looking like plastic, made by Inuit hunters in the 1850s. An exotic bird stuffed by Charles Darwin.
The collection of the old Royal Museum stretching along Chambers Street in Edinburgh's Old Town is an engaging but initially baffling affair. Where did all this stuff come from? And why has so much of it – at least 8,000 objects – only now gone on show for the first time since the museum was formally opened in 1866?
Housed in a magnificent Victorian building designed by Robert Matheson and Francis Fowke, the former Edinburgh Museum of Science and Art forms one half of today's National Museum of Scotland. The other half, next door, dates from 1998 and was designed by the architects Benson & Forsyth in a style that is half Scottish castle, half Le Corbusier monastery. Now, after a £46m renovation, the 19th-century museum reopens on Friday, and the two halves have finally been joined together.
While the Benson & Forsyth building is dedicated to showing objects made in Scotland, its restored Victorian sibling is a gloriously eclectic archive of the objects that Scottish explorers, inventors, soldiers and scientists brought back from their travels – as well as pieces from people such as Charles Darwin, who trained in Edinburgh.
Keen to plunge in, I head towards the grand steps leading up from Chambers Street to the even grander Lombardic Renaissance museum entrance. Dr Gordon Rintoul, director of National Museums Scotland, and his project architect, Gordon Gibb of Glasgow-based Gareth Hoskins Architects, stop me. "The entrance is this way," says Gibb, pointing to a dark, wide-mouthed opening in the base of the right-hand side of the museum's imposing 19th-century stone facade. While it seems odd to ignore the obvious way into the museum, this crypt-like entrance proves to be a dramatic and highly effective architectural manoeuvre.
Step inside, and you enter one of Scotland's finest and most unexpected new public spaces. Gibb has opened up a labyrinth of former storage spaces and dungeon-like workshops under the main museum floors. This brooding, low-lit vault – like the undercroft of a medieval cathedral – will receive visitors, feed them in a fine new brasserie at one end, offer them cloakrooms and then send them up from an atmosphere of romantic gloom into the soaring, daylit galleries above.
"The vault was originally divided by a stone wall," says Gibb. "We took that out to open up the space." This meant propping up the centre of the crypt with heavy-duty steel columns. "At the same time, we lowered the floors by over a metre to give us the height we needed to make this a public space. But, we wanted to keep the light levels low to create an atmosphere of . . ."
"Expectation?" suggests Rintoul.
Glass lifts and broad stairs lead up through apertures cut in the stones to the spectacular heart of the museum: a soaring, four-storey cast iron and timber structure surrounded by delicate and intricate galleries. Even on a dark and thundery day, the Grand Gallery seems almost unnaturally awash with daylight.
"It's like a giant Victorian birdcage," says Rintoul, and with its thin iron columns set close together and arched timber roof, that's exactly what the structure resembles. It is the Scottish masterpiece of Fowke, the Irish-born British military engineer best known for designing the Royal Albert Hall. Fowke, who died in 1865, worked on the museum with local architect Matheson. While the facade of the building is more Matheson, the "birdcage" hidden behind is far more Fowke, clearly influenced by Joseph Paxton's revolutionary Crystal Palace of 1851.
"We've stripped it back to its Victorian glory," says Gibb. "It was so clear from early on what we needed to do. Clear away the clutter, open up vistas and connect all the galleries leading off the Grand Gallery."
The architects' touch has been strong yet sensitive. Today, every part of Fowke and Matheson's design, built in stages from 1861 to 1889, does indeed link together. Here is a museum in which it is impossible to get lost. Wherever you walk, you will find yourself returning to the Grand Gallery. And, throughout, there is daylight: this is the least claustrophobic of museums.
The original museum was established in 1855 by George Wilson, an Edinburgh doctor and chemist, and his elder brother Daniel, secretary of the Society of Antiquities in Edinburgh. In the mid-1950s, the society moved into the Royal Museum, and the collections of the two institutions were merged.
When I ask Rintoul if the museum is a bit of a rattle bag, he corrects me. "A rattle bag? The collection is very wide-ranging, but it represents the sheer diversity of thought and activity that came out of the Scottish Enlightenment. Every object here tells a special story related to the ways in which Scotland went out to the world from the 18th century."
Part of the building's charm lies in the dramatic contrast between its grandiloquent stone facade and its light and airy interior, made even more theatrical because the exterior has been left untouched. Its stones bear sooty witness to 19th-century grime. Shrubs still sprout from cornices. Until a way is devised to clean these stones without razing layers of history, they will remain weathered and aged.
Before the current renovation, Fowke's crystal clear interior had become not so much dirty as cluttered. Rintoul's aim, from his appointment in 2002, was to sweep it out. As layers of paint were stripped away and bricked up doorways reopened, the building gave up its secrets. "We were helped by the fact that Fowke's original work was so very good and reusable," says Rintoul. "When we stripped the carpets from the galleries around the Grand Gallery, we were delighted to find the original American red oak timbers." The curators also discovered thousands of objects in store, most of them wrapped and crated in what is now the crypt-like entrance hall.
The clarity of Fowke's design gave the architects the lead they needed. "We wanted the architecture to stand on its own," says Gordon Gibb, "with the exhibits layered in." The architecture of the building can now be read as clearly and cleanly as it was when the museum first opened.
This approach is very much in tune with Gareth Hoskins's other projects. The Architecture Galleries at London's Victoria and Albert Museum, which opened in 2004, house fragments of buildings, models and drawings of many ages and styles, and yet the overall feel is as clear and illuminating as a shaft of light. With the Culloden Battlefield Memorial Centre, near Inverness (2007) – a building rooted in the landscape – the practice has helped tell a rich and complex story through a clear-cut design free of gimmicks. Yet the centre has a quietly powerful presence inside and out, reinforced by a long stone and timber wall projecting uninterrupted to the battlefield and countryside beyond.
Back in Edinburgh, the clear layering of objects on show in the renovated museum is a joy. The displays, designed by museum installation specialists Ralph Appelbaum Associates, gather collections of objects into particular stories that explain where they came from, how they were gathered and why they matter.
Dr Henrietta Lidchi, the museum's keeper of world cultures, walks me through its uppermost galleries. "Museums try to contain cultures," she says, "but here we like the idea of cultures moving on, morphing and changing. We work with peoples from around the world making connections and using the museum's resources as a tool for sparking off new ideas; these can be in jewellery, fashion – the list goes on."
So just as Scots went abroad to collect the objects displayed here, so the new National Museum of Scotland is now taking its message out to the world. Director, curators, designers and architects have revitalised a superb building that you will surely want to experience for its own sake before plunging, layer by layer, into the depths of its beautifully presented collections.
Before I leave, I do another turn around the galleries, looking at some of the newly found objects, lured first by the scaly throated tree-creeper stuffed by Darwin during his expedition around the world onboard HMS Beagle, then by the Nobel prize medal awarded to Alexander Fleming, the Scottish biologist and pharmacologist, for the discovery of penicillin, and, then by a painted buckskin worn by a native American chief long before Custer's last stand. Above all, though – and happily encasing these things – here is one of the truly great, and beautifully remodelled, Scottish buildings.
Totally cosmic: the Life Mounds of Charles Jencks
Posted by The Sheet in Architecture News on June 23, 2011
His swirling 'land sculptures' are inspired by molecular biology and outer space. Architect Charles Jencks tells Jonathan Glancey about his most ambitious project yet
The Life Mounds are the first thing you see as you drive through the gates of Jupiter Artland, a sculpture park in the grounds of Bonnington House, outside Edinburgh. Newly completed, these eight man-made hills have been shaped by the distinguished US critic, polemicist and designer Charles Jencks. Beautiful things, they rise in stepped ramps sheathed in emerald green turf, clustered around swirling ponds.
Last week, I climbed and sat on top of the tallest of these escarpments, as swallows performed aerobatics over the insect-rich waters. The Life Mounds called to mind the landscapes of ancient standing stones and barrows, of south-east Asian rice terraces, of patterns seen through a microscope; there was something of the spiralling forms of far-flung galaxies. All of these things (perhaps not the rice terraces) are acknowledged influences. Over the decades – he is a notably young 70 – Jencks has written a number of spirited books on modern architecture. It was his Modern Movements in Architecture, published in 1973, which helped me see that what had passed for a monolithic, single-minded Modern Movement had been no such thing. It was Jencks who identified the shift away from the certainties of modernism into the vagaries and rich (and sometimes indigestible) experiences of postmodernism: The Language of Postmodern Architecture, written 30 years ago by Jencks, remains a bestseller. And it is Jencks who, I can't help feeling, has begun to tire of the intellectual thinness of much contemporary "iconic" architecture, and to look for something beyond its ephemeral nature.
"Have I turned away from architecture? No, it's not that," he says when we meet at Portrack House, his home near Dumfries. "But I do believe architecture, and all art, should be content-driven. It should have something to say beyond the sensational. But, yes, the lack of culture in so much new architecture is worrying." Jencks wants to shape works that make us stop and think about our place, not just in the here and now, but in the cosmos. "It's something people have done even before they built Stonehenge, so why not now?"
The biggest woman in the world
Over the past decade and beyond, Jencks has fused a hungry interest in cosmology with his love and encyclopaedic knowledge of architecture and landscape art. This vision is explained in a new and engaging book, The Universe in the Landscape. "Not everyone will get it," he writes, with touching honesty. The Life Mounds at Bonnington are informed by cosmic patterns, as well as the molecular structure of cells at the point where, for good or carcinogenic ill, they divide. This stunning landform turns out to be a meditation on life and death.
"I've been a lucky man," Jencks says. "I've only faced one real tragedy: the death of my wife, Maggie, from cancer in 1995." Maggie Jencks was an innovative garden designer; together, throughout the 80s and 90s, the couple created their Garden of Cosmic Speculation in the grounds of Portrack House. Maggie's Centres, a number of cancer care clinics designed by world-famous architects (Frank Gehry, Zaha Hadid, Richard Rogers) were her idea, and is a scheme that has continued in her honour.
Jencks is now working on an enormous project just north of Newcastle. He has been commissioned by a UK coal-mining company to create a land form that will soften and enhance an otherwise challenging landscape. "Northumberlandia" (the name is his, intended to suggest a land goddess) is currently under construction, and due for completion in 2013. A giant effigy, in clay and soil, of a recumbent naked woman rising 34 metres (her breasts) and measuring 400 metres from head to toe, she will, Jencks says, be "the world's largest human form sculpted into the landscape".
Such figurative interpretations of earth goddesses could be seen as kitsch. But Jencks argues that she will fold, if not quite blur, into the landscape. Still, compared with the layers of cosmological meaning embedded into Portrack and Bonnington, this is clearly a populist work, one its patrons hope will become a major tourist attraction.
A commission from CERN
The Gretna Landmark Project should be one, too. Details have yet to be unveiled, but this ambitious work will mark one of the key border crossings between Scotland and England. Developed by Jencks and the artist Andy Goldsworthy, the final design will also involve the disparate talents of designer and engineer Cecil Balmond, California artist Ned Kahn and British architect Chris Wilkinson. Expect the unexpected, and certainly the bold and eye-catching.
Meanwhile, Jencks and his 30-year-old daughter, Lily, an architect and landscape designer, have been working on a design for CERN (the European Organisation for Nuclear Research) near Geneva. Their brief is to give this hidden wonder of the modern world (its workings are mostly underground) a physical presence. "There is no question," says Jencks, "that this Vatican of Science, with the visage of Heathrow Airport, desperately needs urban definition." As far as I can make out, the end result will be a pair of giant interlocking question marks made of grassed earth closing around, and interrogating The Globe – a hollow timber sphere originally designed for the 2002 Swiss Expo by architect Hervé Dessimoz.
In Jencks's view, cosmic passion, or the desire to know and relate to the universe, is one of the strongest drives in sentient creatures. The power of neolithic henges and bronze-age barrows, of the Uffington White Horse and some of the greatest buildings of all time – the spiral minaret at Samarra in Iraq, the Pantheon in Rome – lies in their elemental qualities. Their meanings are not explicit, yet they send shivers of recognition down the spine. The Life Mounds at Bonnington, to my mind Jencks's best landform work to date, have that effect on me.
Zaha Hadid’s Riverside Museum: All aboard!
Posted by The Sheet in Architecture News on June 2, 2011
Zaha Hadid's first major building in Britain is complete – a triumphant transport museum for Glasgow. Jonathan Glancey straps himself in
George Pinkerton was a rhubarb farmer, a speedway racer and a Spitfire pilot. The vintage motorcycle the Scot drove so perilously now sits proudly in Glasgow's new Riverside Museum, Zaha Hadid's first major building in Britain. A quietly charismatic affair, this transport museum will now build anticipation for Hadid's Aquatics Centre, destined to be one of the showpieces of the 2012 Olympics.
Pinkerton's motorbike is dwarfed, however, by the well-travelled local hero that dominates Riverside's main hall: a mighty locomotive built for South African Railways that pounded across the veldt from 1945 to 1988. This steam giant was recently returned to Glasgow, where it and countless others were built, popped on low-loaders, and taken through cheering crowds to the docks. Films and photographs of these events, stored at Riverside, prove a moving reminder of those glory days.
Despite its battleship bulk, Riverside, opening later this month, has already made itself at home on the site of an old shipyard. As I stroll around the spot, to the west of the city where the Kelvin meets the Clyde, the pleated walls of this snaking, zinc-clad building seem to blur into the low clouds and lugubrious waters, especially in the fine mist of rain that's been in my face since I came out of Partick station, a 10-minute walk away.
Perhaps inevitably, this building has been dubbed Glasgow's Guggenheim. Well, it's not. This is not a building that seems to have been dropped down into an alien setting, which it then dominates; instead, Riverside blends into the climate and culture of Glasgow and its riverscape, feeling like part of its great flow of architecture and history. "My grandfather was harbour master here in the 1960s," says local man Colin Campbell. "As a wee boy, I saw two ships sliding down the ramps into the Clyde. It made your heart thump. Hardened shipbuilders had tears streaming down their cheeks."
The steel and zinc roof, with its rippling zigzag, may have the drama of a Guggenheim spiral, but it looks to me like a heartbeat on a monitor, or tightly lapping waves – compressed, perhaps, by the sort of ocean liner that used to be launched into these waters. Seen from inside, those zigzags look like the keels of ships, moored above this vast expanse of pillar-less space that's home to trams, cars, locomotives, motorbikes, a tube train, a glider, ships, skateboards, prams, shoes and, well, pretty much anything that ever helped Glaswegians to move about.
The show starts right away. You walk in and – thump – the orange, green and cream trams are there to greet you, or even pick you up. Nearby, there's a green 1930s Bentley that ended up being used as a children's plaything in a Glasgow garden. And over there sits a beautiful Caledonian Single No 123, a high-striding locomotive built in just 66 days for the 1886 Edinburgh International Exhibition.
Although the museum is woven through with interactive guides, the building is still able to display more objects than it could in its old home in Kelvin Hall, which was limited to a still formidable 1,300. Riverside has room for 3,000 – and even that's just the tip of an iceberg. The museum owns 788 model ships alone, most longer than a bath, made by the Clyde yards as marketing tools or designs for boardrooms. Many of these, and a treasure trove of other artefacts, are still stored in a warehouse on the south side.
The aim at Riverside, with its lurid, pistachio-coloured galleries (a choice I found hard to adjust to), has been to appeal to all ages. Hands-on screens let children learn how to put out a fire in a tenement, or fire up and drive a Highland Railway Glen Class 4-4-0. The results are enchanting and funny.
Bobbing in the waters to the south of the museum, and reflected gloriously in its operatic pavement-to-roof windows, is another treat: Glenlee, a three-masted tall ship built near here. This 75-metre vessel braved Cape Horn 15 times and circumnavigated the globe four times before being turned into a floating, forgotten museum in Seville in the 1980s. She has since been rescued by the Clyde Maritime Trust.
Take me doon the watter
Glenlee provides more than just a fascinating detour: she encourages visitors to step out on to the water, without which Glasgow's transport history and this swirling museum would never have existed. Although the Clyde itself is far too quiet these days (the seals and otters spotted here recently might disagree), ferries do ply past as you lean on Glenlee's rails. The occasional seaplane splashes in to land, back from the highlands; helicopters whirl overhead; and trains race cars up to Oban.
The steel structure, itself an echo of the shipbuilder's craft, is testament to Hadid's respect for the sort of large-scale, seasoned engineering behind several of her major projects around the world. Many still imagine her buildings to be gratuitous, though, all art and artifice with little substance; and yet neither BMW, for whom she has built a production plant in Leipzig, nor the city of Wolfsburg, for whom she designed a science centre, would have commissioned her if they thought she lacked an understanding of their demanding and practical worlds.
The British, however, have been cautious. Although this is her first major British building, Hadid did do a modest Maggie's Centre in Kirkcaldy and a Brixton school. While Riverside's presence on the Clyde is unmistakable, you can see that every penny of the £74m budget has been spent carefully. In that respect, for all its scale, it's as lean as a Clyde-built clipper.
Spreading out from its main gallery are three street scenes complete with rescued shop, cafe and pub interiors, a hill-climb of cars associated with or built around Glasgow (remember the Hillman Imp?), not to mention an internal viewing bridge spanning much of the collection, and vast windows offering sudden views to the city beyond.
There are plans to put Riverside on the route of the Waverley, the world's last seagoing paddle-steamer. Famed in the city for taking Glasgwegians "doon the watter", the Waverley will be offered a landing stage close by. Given that she was launched from a slipway here in 1946, there could be few more welcome homecomings.
• This article was amended on 2 June 2011. The original sited Maggie's Centre in Falkirk. This has been corrected.