Cities

Cities

I find cities very emotional places – I find it very difficult to be objective about why I love them. Everyone has a favourite place, a favourite city – I love Barcelona, New York, Manchester and even London, although more for the friends I have who live there than for the city itself.

I adore Glasgow and have spent a lot of time trying to work out why I find the place so bearable. I love it’s roughness and vitality and I find it’s intolerance of bullshit a relief given that the whole world of art, design and architecture has so much of it. It’s a good base emotionally and geographically, it has a stabilising effect in my life.

Cities change all the time, they’re in a constant state of flux. Glasgow has re-invented itself almost as many times as ‘art’ and ‘design’ have re-defined themselves. Glasgow has always used design to promote whatever its most recent reincarnation might be. We were “The Second City of the Empire”, “The Workshop of the World”, “The Finest Victorian City in Europe” and “The Cultural Capital of Europe in 1990”. We also had one of the biggest type foundries in Europe and have two world class schools of architecture and design. However, the overall effect has not been cumulative – we irresolutely paraded our successes, neutralised our mistakes and consequently failed to progress as quickly as we would have liked.

Art, design, and architecture, all underpinned by the creative process, have expressed cultural change throughout the ages, over thousands of years. We all belong to an old profession, arguably older than prostitution although some would say sharing much in common with it.

I along with Ross, Paul and Stuart at Graven Images, the design consultancy we formed when we left the School of Art, we made a conscious decision to stay in Glasgow and see if it was possible to work from the city – that was almost ten years ago, and yes it is possible, Glasgow can sustain us and there’s room for more like us.

Firstly, before I go on to talk about the city, I think it’s important to tell you a little about where I’m coming from, my viewpoint, which informs my understanding of art, design and architecture and the relationship they have with the city and Glasgow in particular.

Creative process

Central to my belief, and all we do at Graven Images, is a shared understanding of what we mean by the term, ‘design’. Most of the problems designers have, our current lack of power and achievement, stems from our inability to understand what we do and how we can use our skills to make the world a better place. We fail to explain this to the wider public, who are right to distrust us.

I believe that architects and fine artists are also designers as we share the same creative process before we are named after a specific specialist skill such as sculptor, architect, graphic designer.

The creative process is about the ordering, interpretation and manipulation of ideas – the process of designing a train, a book or a building is essentially the same, except that the technical constraints differ. The creative process is essentially the same as the process an artist uses to produce art, this process is made up of ‘intuition’ or ‘taste’ and qualified or underpinned by analytical method, such as colour theory, psychology or sociology.

The production of art sometimes involves more intuition and less analytical method than architecture and design, but not always. I firmly believe that artists, architects and designers would find it easier to explain to other people, our clients, what it is we do if we would only recognise the common ground we share rather than pigeon-holing ourselves according to our preferred specialism.

Design, as well as being a clearly understood and well documented process is a powerful tool for revealing change. The ‘creative process’ is also described as ‘the controlled evolution of ideas’, bringing order out of apparent chaos, creating cities out of a confusion of dust and ritual. The creative process helps us make sense out of the world around us and presents information in a structure which we can understand and manipulate. It makes magicians out of all of us and allows us to wield powers which can evoke change. We have the power to reveal only the things we wish the rest of the world to see.When you arrive in a new city it can seem apparently chaotic so we have to find ways of making sense of it, understanding it, how it works,how the different parts come together. One way is to devise a map which reveals the flow of traffic through the area – this is a structure which reveals one level of information showing order does exist in apparent chaos.

Cities

Design, art and architecture have reflected the ever changing culture of cities throughout the ages, Culture, or social glue, the stuff that binds us all together and makes society, changes all the time and constantly needs re-calibrated, so we should never, theoretically, be out of a job. It’s designers, artists and architects who describe this change, express it and celebrate it in more than one dimension, in time and space, we make change evident through manipulating all of the human senses: taste, touch, smell, sound and sight. We make the objects, the props against which people play out the drama of their everyday lives. We can make people behave in different ways by altering the props.

Cities are conglomerations, concentrations of lots of complex and conflicting signals. The ancient Egyptians, some three thousand years ago, knew how to manipulate people through encoding their environment with lots of signals. They manipulated people through all of the senses, through architecture and graphic communication, to reflect the benign and humane civilisations expressed in the cities of Thebes and Memphis. In sharp contrast Albert Speer used architecture, graphic design, garments and rituals to create an identity for Hitler’s Germany, re-creating Berlin according to classical mythological rules, a domineering, warlike, and monolithic Arian super-city.

Culture

However, in Glasgow, as in Thebes and Berlin, design can only express the culture that is already present. We can’t change culture, at least not quickly, we can only interpret it in new and ingenious ways, revealing things which were hidden and finding new ways of expressing old attitudes. This is what has brought about Glasgow’s so-called ‘renaissance’. The city hasn’t essentially changed, it’s just chosen to view itself from a different angle.

Glasgow

Glasgow realised that it had to project a positive image of itself if it was to finally come to terms with it’s heavy industrial past, it’s lost world status, and focus the energies of younger generations on new challenges which would create and sustain the city’s vigorous cultural energy. It knew this would create an atmosphere of confidence which would encourage people to take risks, to innovate, and this in turn would attract business, create wealth and ensure Glasgow remained an exciting and varied place to be.

In the eighties marketing cities was big business. It continues to be big business in the nineties, especially when tourism is the largest industry in the world. Technology now allows us almost instant access to every far-flung location, and encourages us to choose one destination over another, one potential building site over another and one business location over another. Glasgow is in the game of making itself attractive to potential tourists and investors in a world arena, not just a Scottish, British or European arena. The city views creativity as an essential component in making itself distinct, recognisable and attractive to the rest of the world.

Different kinds of cities express their culture, their personality, their attractiveness, in different ways. Glasgow is often described as a regional capital or second city unlike Edinburgh or London. They are First cities or Capital cities like Paris, Madrid and New York. They communicate their culture through the design and architecture of their national institutions. Through their pompous, rich heritage and history. Through their boulevards and monumental spaces, their skylines, seats of government and national, state resources, like the ballet, gallery and the opera.

Second cities, many of them like Glasgow, tend to articulate their culture through activities. They are post-industrial cities with a less monolithic though often unusual architectural heritage. They tended historically to express there personality through the production and movement of the products they made: Glasgow through heavy engineering, ships and locomotives, world trade and the maverick architecture of Mackintosh, Chicago through steel, cars, carcasses and the architecture of Louis Sullivan, Barcelona through its port and the architecture of Gaudi.

As the manufacturing of products in Britain continues to decline, second cities are denied the traditional means of expressing their culture and identity through their products and services, except in the sense of industrial heritage, a museum and theme park existence where culture is cut short, frozen in time, an impotent servant of the tourist industry.

Creative people, instead of innovating and designing new ways to create wealth, employment and therefore a positive, new expression of our Glaswegian culture, find themselves relegated to servicing, dressing-up and repackaging history. We’ve never been so needed or ironically so far from removed from being asked to help.

Recession, design industry’s excesses of the eighties, lack of real understanding of what design is and how it can act as an economic and cultural re-generator have conspired to baffle both the public and the politicians. Designers have scored a dramatic own goal through failing to communicate their worth and we must work quickly to make up lost ground and persuade people to trust and use us once again.

Designer, architects and artists have given moribund policy-makers and politicians, people with little creativity and certainly no strategic or creative process, the excuse to avoid creating economic and cultural strategy, preferring the confusion of chaos over order, allowing markets to find their own deteriorating levels of trade and cities to drift in leaderless miasma. What is Britain in the Nineties? We have a Ministry of Heritage instead of a Ministry of Culture. We live in a society which guards against newness and refuses to plan for innovation, variety, complexity and enrichment. Banality, shoddiness, predictability and myopia are the facts of life in Britain, in the Nineties.

In Glasgow we spend millions preserving our Victorian heritage and cannot find the confidence to commission brave new work which expresses life in Glasgow in the nineties. We’ve gone half way to breathing new life in the city through saving and repairing the past but we still have the challenge of building the future. So far it seems we’d rather live in a false vision of the past than dare to look at what the new millennium might hold for us.

Many attempts to economically ‘turn around’ post industrial second cities fail because people impose wholesale solutions on entire populations, on entire communities. Each city and each area in a city has it’s own personality which requires it’s own special solutions if we are to retain things which are different and special.

Glasgow’s previous ‘renaissance’ offer some guidance to designers. One definition of ‘renaissance’ is ‘the revival of classical influence in Europe’. In recent history Scotland has made a special contribution through the very original interpretations of classicism by Playfair and Adam. Alexander ‘Greek’ Thomson, Wiszniewski, Elder & Cannon, Page & Park and painter Stephen Campbell all brought something vigorous, new and valuable to the international classical vocabulary while enrichening and re-evaluating Glaswegian culture. Unfortunately, classicism failed to meet some of our society’s more practical requirements, particularly for housing.

Look at Glasgow in the sixties – Modernism offered a different kind of renaissance in Scotland. The civic death of classicism and rebirth of a new order, heralded by Mackintosh, or arguably by Thomson before him, signalled the beginning of a new century. The democratic internationalism of the Modern Movement appealed to Glasgow’s easy conviviality. An acknowledged track record in classicism, with the city boasting many beautiful buildings, encouraged the city to believe it could sustain a place in the brave new world of concrete and Helvetica.

So as modernism gathered momentum Glasgow destroyed much of its classical heritage and tried to move forwards into the future. The Gorbals died a success and were demolished in the name of cleanliness, its people banished from the inner city in the name of Godliness, and condemned to suspended animation in the margins of civilisation, in Easterhouse (without shops or pubs or in the high rise in the Gorbals with no space for kids to play). To rehouse its population, Glasgow began the most intensive building programme in Europe, driven by central government in London and by the arid architectural polemic of drier climates (Corbusier and sun-drenched perfect flat roofs). Glasgow, with its international socialism, fell prey to the banality of international modernism, which provided an instant, cost-effective solution to the city’s housing problems. Central government’s insatiable demands didn’t allow much time to reflect on whether or not this new environment should be humane as well as hygienic. Glaswegian culture was replaced by economics in the guise of environmental health.

Politicians and architects didn’t realise that Glasgow’s socialism was different from anyone else’s. Ironically, an architectural co-operative demonstrated that much of what we were destroying, our classical tenements, was useful and necessary to distinguish us from other cities – the gridiron plan of four-storey classical tenement buildings could economically be made sanitary and the city once more become solid and Glaswegian. But Assist Architectural Co-operative couldn’t save the city’s declining population, its manufacturing base or its publishing industries, which fell prey to economics and tactical politics. Glasgow came through its most dangerous rebirth in recent times and wasn’t about to risk another foray into the future again – unless it could dictate the terms of its own progress. It’s, therefore, not surprising that it’s the housing associations and co-operatives, not the private developers or local authorities, who are being most adventurous with the architecture of New Glasgow. The public sector are too scared they’ll fail again.

The city now has a clean, almost intact Victorian centre, some truly excellent social housing and some very well-educated design graduates. The city wrote the handbook on town planning and social housing so it rightly should boast some great schemes. But what of manufacturing, graphic design and art?

Once again designers are groping towards mass production, which carries with it all the glamour of big money, big numbers and global markets. This city has learned that quantity doesn’t come cheaply and mass production leaves little room for cultural expression, sometimes derogatorily referred to as mere “style”. It is now time for designers to express the rich cultural differences between Scotland, England, Northern Ireland and Wales using their skills to reveal what’s especially valuable in our culture, what adds value to products and services and makes us distinct in a european and global marketplace.

Architecture, art and design don’t exist in a vacuum, but are influenced by and express culture, economics and politics. Glasgow and Scotland are learning to their cost the price of undervaluing the culture of a city and a nation. Glasgow and Scotland have particular qualities which can’t be measured by numbers alone, but need to be expressed and explained through the design process.

Instead of preaching utility and restraint, in the lip service of economic recovery and environmental conservation, we should celebrate and explore our culture differences through every conceivable form of art and design.

Design, art and architecture don’t exist in a vacuum, apart from everyday life. Many people understand the skill and intelligence required to ‘turn around’ a company, identifying and communicating it’s strengths and developing strategies which will minimise it’s weaknesses. It is a demanding, broad-based activity which has much less to do with logos and slogans and much more to do with understanding the underlying ideologies, the fundamental dynamics of what makes a place special and different from any other. Success has a lot to do with explaining and encouraging people to participate in the process, to believe in their city and have aspirations for it’s success. Cultural turnaround can’t simply be bought or brought into being through clever advertising, superficial design or gallery based art.

Every city and every community within a city has different ways of living. These differences are expressed through everyday rituals, through art, sport, buildings, environment, products and services. These differences are unique and precious and should be celebrated. They are more important (and more fragile) than the international diet of state culture: the ballet, opera. symphony orchestra, national theatre and gallery, because they give us the sense that we have a distinct, recognisable and hopefully desirable, identity.

In business, difference or personality, offer advantages in an increasingly competitive marketplace, giving and advantage which can’t be measured in monetary terms alone. In a federalised European marketplace differences allow us to be distinctive and competitive. In Britain, in the nineties, we need to move away from our increasingly centralised model where all things revolve around Westminster.

As creative people charged with the responsibility of interpreting the world around us, we must learn to identify, understand, value and communicate the essence of all our regional riches, our second cities, through product and service industries, architecture and the arts if we are to rebuild our economy and society in the new millennium.

Our Glaswegian culture is much more than an art and sport lottery. All we do in our lives is ‘cultural’ activity. Cities are concentrated manifestations of cultural activity. High culture and low culture, there’s no such thing as bad culture, some’s just more pompous and high-brow than others and both are vital. Glasgow has both succeeded and failed in it’s attempt to promote a much less one dimensional representation of the city and move public perception away from it’s post-industrial grime and it’s ‘hard man’ reputation.

Like Albert Speer and Akhenaten, Glasgow’s leaders are beginning to recognise the role which creativity can play in re-orienting public perception of a city. Glasgow is once again re-discovering and re-defining itself. Trying to express it’s post- industrial personality through architecture, manufactured products, the arts and service industries in an intelligent and integrated way. And that’s where we, as educated creative people, professional thinkers and problem solvers, are useful.

If we can take the time to understand and explain the economic and social benefits of what we do to politicians and strategists, encouraging them to use design and creativity as the tool for economic regeneration, Glasgow and the rest of Britain could be quite a place – this is really important to me, it’s my sole mission in life and my reason for staying here.

Glasgow is a city, it has a sense of itself, kind of like a city state, like Lichtenstein. It is a complex place with many tensions, constantly at odds with itself and the rest of Scotland and Britain. It has the aspiration to be a great world city and a small, tight political structure which is relatively easy to influence, unlike London which is just too big and doesn’t really function as a united city, it tends to act like a collection of smaller communities, lacking any centralised political authority, and therefore difficult, if not impossible to influence or change.

I am really interested in what happens to Glaswegian culture. What happens if it is denied and means of physical, tangible expression through products and buildings, when the only products you can buy are Japanese and the only public buildings are designed by safe, star architects, when the only housing is Beezer Homes’ tudor vernacular. I am not a nationalist but it’s very difficult to be ‘Scottish in the nineties’ when all the props in the play are Japanese or dralon reproductions of Louis XIV’s boudoir.

I love having products of other cultures around me but would like to have the choice of English, Scottish, Irish and Welsh products and services too. Service industries need design as much as manufacturing as it is only through design and the arts that they become tangible and visible, through architecture, clothing and graphic communication.

Glasgow has moved a long way from being, ‘The Workshop of the World’, to the ‘Service Capital of Scotland’. Thirty years on Glasgow still feels sore about not being able to make things, it has no outlet to express it’s old ideologies and channel the old pride in new constructive ways. To actively deny any country the right to manufacture is to deny it’s right to exist in the real world – it becomes invisible or frozen in time. Any country’s success as a civilised nation can be directly measured in the artifacts it leaves behind: I wonder what the archeologists of the future will make of ‘once great Britain’?

In recent years many ill conceived or underfunded accolades have been created to help distinguish our industrially emasculated cities. Many have attached ‘festivals’, and titles are awarded through competition: ‘European City of Culture’, The Garden Festival, Years of the Artist, new opera houses, conference centres, concert halls , and sports events including the Olympic and Commonwealth Games. All demand cities commit already over stretched resources to secure a chance of competing and winning.

Few of these themed events are truly innovative or even worth while, most are based on the displays of imperial power so popular in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Anachronistic re-workings of old ideals which lie comfortably with current political daydreams of going back to the future, back to basics, and quite simply backwards to the bad old days our parents and grandparents fought two world wars to change.

Glasgow has already been successful in winning the title of ‘European City of Culture’ in 1990 and the ‘Garden Festival’ in 1988 and is very aware that neither title offered long term, integrated remedies for a deeply traumatised society. These titles acted as useful markers, shorter term goals, which raised public awareness and recreated a sense of potency and pride in the city.

Glasgow has just won the title of ‘City of Architecture and Design 1999’, part of the Arts Council of Great Britain’s Arts 2000 strategy which celebrates a different artform every year in the run up to the millennium. It’s Glasgow’s intention to ensure that this time around there will be tangible long term benefits for the city. Winning the title places architecture and design firmly on the political agenda for the next five years and creativity once more in the driving seat of the economy, influencing and creating strategy and influencing the expenditure of huge amounts of money.

Stephano Marzano, in the Design Renaissance conference held in Glasgow at the end of 1993, said that, “Design is a political activity”. Glasgow knows that design, because of it’s analytical, creative process and ability to generate wealth creating products, can help identify the real problems which underpin the city today. Homelessness, unemployment, drug abuse and lack of cultural identity are all symptoms of more deeply rooted problems which tend to be treated in a tactical and superficial way by politicians.

The creative process can help solve some of these underlying problems. Through creating employment in new product and service industries, these have massive cultural benefits as well as economic ones. Through creating an accessible and attractive environment and educating, empowering and encouraging the public to take part in designing the future. Through showing people a new perspective on their world through art.

Glasgow must design it’s way out of it’s current problems through actively using creativity. When used to it’s full potential design is a powerful force for creating strategy, influencing the economy and revealing the very best of British culture in all it’s different regional and urban forms. I believe that in placing design at the top of the agenda Glasgow will enter the new millennium in the same powerful manner as it left the old.