Is 1999 a waste of time?

Is 1999 a waste of time?

‘The researches of many commentators have already thrown much darkness on this subject, and it is probable that, if they continue, we shall soon know nothing at all about it.’ mark twain

Here we are over one year after the Arts Council of Great Britain’s announcement that Glasgow had won the coveted title of ‘City of Architecture and Design 1999’. Ironically, I first talked on this subject earlier this year at a festival of architecture and design, in Edinburgh. Maybe this teaches us a valuable lesson in Scottish psychology. God help us if ever we get home rule…

Personally, I’m unconcerned which of the two Scottish cities was charged with the task of hosting the 1999 event, but content that it has come to Scotland because it gives all of us the unique opportunity to explore if a festival can be made from architecture and design, if such an event can stimulate and educate all factions of our culture and economy and if such a festival can ever have a meaningful impact on the whole of society?

Glasgow, through a participative process, decided not to concentrate on bricks and mortar conspiring to concentrate it’s energies strategically, building innovative and democratic decision-making structures which would ensure that good design eventually emerged, not just every now and then, but consistently with increasing momentum over time – creating a climate of confidence which would lead the city bravely into the new millennium. It was process, not product that the bid team, sought to influence and to change. Placing all the emphasis on building a long term strategy for a design led society and economy.

Glasgow was keen to promote it’s bid as a ‘Glasgow bid’ made in ‘partnership’ with Glaswegians. This partnership was between the public and the private sectors. The city emphasised that it’s bid was most definately not a City Council bid, it was not a ‘public sector bid’. Nor was it nor should it have been. The Arts Council of Great Britain no doubt recognised that, with local government reorganisation, ever diminishing municipal resources and an increasingly bureaucratic administration, cities must work with the wider economy in they are to develop and grow in stature. Glasgow knew that the Arts Council would not favour a city-led bid. The flux precipitated by reorganisation could paint an uncertain picture. A city council alone might not be in a position to deliver all it promised in a new altered condition.

There are two absolutely key issues I would like to explore. Issues which I believe must be satisfactoraly answered if ‘Year of Architecture and Design 1999’ is not to be a complete waste of time. These issues are:

Is it possible to develop a city wide strategy to promote the ‘public appreciation of architecture and design?

Is it really possible for a true partnership to exist between the public and private sectors in any way more substantial than in name alone?

Let’s consider the first of these: ‘Is it possible to develop a city wide strategy to promote the ‘public appreciation of architecture and design?’

A city wide strategy to promote the ‘public appreciation of architecture and design’ is firstly a cultural strategy. Albeit one which has the power to influence the economy or society in a powerfully direct way that other factions within the Arts find more difficult to illustrate. Through, for example, creating new products which result in jobs, exports and cash, or investing in education and community groups which influence the way in which existing investment in housing is spent, leading to better housing, new ways of living, an enhanced environment and broad social benefits.

Culture is something which is easy to talk about but very difficult to define. It’s likened to ‘social glue’, the stuff that sticks us together and makes society. Very simply, culture is everything and we in it therefore we can’t ever stand apart from it to gain a more objective view. That is why it is so difficult to create and manage cultural strategies for events like ‘City of Architecture and Design 1999’. It may even be impossible to do so without actively damaging the delicate balance, the tensions and nuances, the characteristics which have evolved in cities over hundreds of years. The very last thing architecture and design need is another cultural ghetto. We have already marginalised ourselves. We stand accused of being precious, unrealistic and uncommunicative and would be ill advised to remove ourselves further from the sensorially disinfranchised larger part of our society. Architects and designers have much to prove in order to win the respect of the rest of society.

Many attempts to change the urban culture of post industrial second cities failed because politicians and design professionals conspired to imposed wholesale solutions on entire communities. Citizens must be involved in the evolution of their communities and be encouraged and supported to take some of the responsibility for that evolution with the help of other team members, designers and architects as well as politicians. It is important that citizens are enrolled in the process of change at its outset as they are the ones who shoulder the responsibility for carrying on that process and living most closely with the outcome in the future. Glasgow’s track record…

The current decline in Britain’s world power and central government’s growing introspection have forced cities to bid for accolades especially created to help distinguish industrially emasculated cities.

Unfortunately, many accolades are ill conceived or underfunded. Few are truly innovative or offer lasting benefit, 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 and quite simply backwards.

Neither ‘European City of Culture’ in 1990 or the ‘Garden Festival’ in 1988 offered long term, integrated remedies for a deeply traumatised, post-industrial society. These titles acted as useful markers, shorter term tactical goals, which raised public awareness and recreated a sense of potency and pride in the city. Many have attached ‘festivals’ with titles which are awarded through competition including ‘Years of the Artist’, new opera houses, conference centres, concert halls, and sports events including the Olympic and Commonwealth Games. All demand the commitment of already over stretched resources to secure a chance of competing and winning – an expensive, exhausting and dispiriting process if nothing is learned, gained or retained along the way. Most bids are lead by local government departments which are exist for one project and are then disbanded with loss of energy and expertise.

Glasgow has hosted the National Garden Festival in 1988 and was ‘Cultural Capital of Europe in 1990’. Although these were useful milestones in the development of the City, much experience and momentum gained in their production has subsequently been lost. In 1999 Glasgow will be ‘United Kingdom City of Architecture and Design’ and it is to be hoped that we will learn from our previous experiences.

Winning 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 art form every year in the run up to the millennium. It was part of the private/public partnership bidding teams’ intention to ensure that this time there would 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, where it might influence strategy and the expenditure of huge amounts of money.

Those of us, the architects and designers in the private sector, made a pact before we formally agreed to become part of the bidding team. We agreed to commit ourselves to the project on the understanding that the knowledge, networks and expertise gathered over the two year period would be used by the City Council for the promotion of architecture and design. It was agreed that all information would be catalogued and accessible to any citizen who wished to progress our aspirations or learn from our experiences.

We also agreed that the bid should be a Glasgow bid and not a City Council bid. We wanted to work in partnership with the public sector and put in place innovative decision making structures which would allow change to happen and the City to progress once again.

Anders Sjostedt, a chaos pilot, helped me see why Glasgow’s strategy could work. Anders recognised that it was the act of communicating, participating, educating and innovating integral to the process of developing a strategy which were of real and lasting value. The strategy itself was less valuable than the networks and connections made in the process of creating it. Andy Lowe, a marketing lecturer at the University of Strathclyde embellished this point by remarking that, “We do business with those who’s values and aspirations we share, they will be our most stable and rewarding relationships and ones which will sustain us and help us move mountains”.

We made the whole process of bidding into the creation of a broad democratic strategy for the development of a design-led Glasgow. Because culture changes so quickly it is important to allow plans to be flexible. This is why we developed a broad framework within which many projects could happen.

The fifth and final strand of Glasgow’s strategy is, “the promotion of the public appreciation of architecture and design by example,because we knew that if we got the process right examples of excellence would evolve. These examples and the documented process which brought them into being might encourage others to take risks and progress.

A city is much more than than it’s Council. Cities are complex places with as many demands and dreams as there are individuals in them. Architecture and design touch everyone all of the time and it is therefore important that all citizens feel they are included in designing the future of their environment or at least in understanding why the city has evolved to create the environment that forms that backdrop and props against which we perform the drama of our everyday lives.

There are five parts to my presentation – four questions and a statement. I believe that all four questions must be answered before any strategy for promoting design-led urban change can be created. They are:

1 design – what is it?

2 culture – what is it?

3 cultural strategy – what is it?

4 the urban environment – what is Glasgow?

5 what Glasgow can hope to achieve

1 design – what is it?

Design is much more than creating obviously stylish things. In the broadest terms design is a creative process. 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’ or ‘graphic designer’.

I believe that 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, creative people, would find it easier to explain the usefulness of their skills to other members of society, if they would only recognise the common ground they share rather than defining themselves according to their preferred specialism.

Design, as well as being a clearly understood and well documented process is a powerful tool for revealing change in many dimensions. Change is made evident through manipulating all of the human senses: taste, touch, smell, sound and sight. The creative process, this controlled, evolution of ideas, brings order out of apparent chaos, revealing cities within of a confusion of dust and ritual. The creative process helps us make sense out of the world around us, identifying fundamental and dynamic issues, presenting 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 invoke change. As designers we have the power to reveal only the things we wish the rest of the world to see, we can present information in one or many dimensions: when we 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, how it may be changed, manipulated. One simple way is to devise a ‘map’ which reveals fundamental or dynamic information, such as energy flow, the flow of traffic through an area – this is a method which reveals one level of information, revealing a kind of fundamental order in apparent chaos.

The process of designing: the creative process, is a potent tool for both analysis and synthesis or reconstruction of the world. It allows us to distil the important components from a multi-dimensional image of reality and recompose them in a new way. Analysing and selecting the powerful, recognisable components from the past, re-calibrating the ideologies and aspirations embodied in them and creating a framework with which to construct a meaningful map of the past and the present. Revealing the ideologies that motivate us, excite us and are most meaningful to us. This gives us clues which we can then use in developing a strategy which may yield a future which will be appropriate: familiar yet new, challenging yet supportive.

The creative process draws upon an armoury of analytical methodologies which can help reveal the particular cultural dynamics of our neighbourhood or region, enabling us to expose, understand and focus cultural change. It also allows us to celebrate cultural change and welcome it because we understand and control the direction change may take in an approximate way rather than fearing it through lack of understanding and control.

2 culture – what is it?

Design, art and architecture have reflected ever changing culture 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, re-valued and expressed as new architecture, new products and new rituals. Designers, architects and artists help describe this continual process of change and give it meaning in many dimensions, in time and space. They provide the backdrop and props which help dramatise a new order in the theatre of everyday life. Architecture, design and art, creativity, helps describe and dramatise new ways of living.

Because culture is largely intangible it cannot be measured, it can only be interpreted. Cultural traits are qualitative and need to be interpreted and explained in order to be understood. It can be argued that culture should be seen as a ‘set of solutions to the key problems of survival’.

Every city and every community within a city has different ways of living and surviving. These differences are expressed through the intangible rituals of everyday life through business, through art, through sport and designed products which form the tangible theatre of life, the props and the backdrops: our architecture, products and garments. These differences are unique, fragile and very precious because they give us a sense of identity, a sense of place and of home. Their creation and survival depends on the support of ordinary people and informal networks, not governments or professional organisations.

In business, cultural differences can significantly enhance a company’s relationship with the external world, giving an advantage and adding value in an increasingly competitive marketplace. Giving a distinct edge which cannot be quantified in monetary terms alone. Cultural differences can do the same for cities; through expressing indigenous forms of architecture; through shaping the environment to reflect the unique demands of citizens; through employing people in cultural industries, these industries include the service industries, manufacturing, publishing and building, not only the ‘Arts’.

Cultural differences can be used to create self-awareness, understanding and pride within cities. Restoring confidence and a worthwhile vision of the future through examining, understanding and re-presenting history, community and the economy in the new context of today and tomorrow. Allowing us to intelligently create new industries and environments with which to fill the place yesterdays heavy industrial dinosaur.

Cultural strategies should be developed through consultation with the wider community, through education, participation and communication. Designers can gently orientate citizens away from anachronistic cultural ideologies, such as those embodied by heavy engineering, using symbols of the old power, the old ideologies and cultural grammar. Designers can give well understood meaning and real depth to a new future in a transformed environment with a new set of values. Using old, established representations of order to make sense of an apparently chaotic vision of the future.

Designers are particularly well equipped to express cultural change, bringing forth new order from the continual chaos which surrounds us. Designers use a sensorial vocabulary, a truly international language which utilises language, symbols, rituals, myths and values in order to control and manipulate the world around us.

The core of any culture is it’s ideologies. These are the fundamental driving forces which motivate us and compel people to act. Because culture is largely invisible, clues have to be discovered from tangible artifacts, then interpreted. These clues are like the layers of skin on an onion which hide and protect the ideologies. There are five layers through which one must pass before an understanding of the ideologies can be reached: language, symbols, rituals, myths and values.

Most creative individuals want to share their vision with the rest of the world and influence the rest of the world. As designers, we are an egotistical, evangelical breed and if we are to truly influence the world for the better, both socially and economically, then we must communicate and explain what it is that we do. We must inform, control and communicate what we mean by our creativity if others are to understand, help and support us. Communication is essential for sustained design-led transformation and the first strand of five strands in Glasgow’s strategy.

The second strand is education which is essential if non-designers are to understand this common language which allows us to discuss change in the context of the physical, sensorial, social and economic environment. There is no correlation between creativity, social benefit and economic success in Britain at present. In the United Kingdom young people can leave school after thirteen years of formal education and undertake a science based degree with thirteen years pre-understanding of the subject area. Architects and designers after thirteen years of formal education go on to their degree courses with no pre-understanding of their subject area. Is it therefore not surprising that our environment doesn’t work. Education for both old and young is a priority if we are to positively change any aspect of our environment in the longer term.

Designers are impatient. But it is both difficult and undesirable to change the world overnight. Glasgow tried to and realised at the last moment that the urban environment and the communities who lived there were complex and very fragile. Change should be gradual and set within a strategy which promotes communication between designers and the rest of society through education. Designing new ways to live and work will, by it’s very nature, be innovative, not simply an exercise in importing methodology from another culture. Every place is different and special however similar it may seem on the surface. Glasgow has tried to transplant successful monolithic solutions from other cultures, in a bid to solve its own problems. These solutions were doomed to failure, and temporarily destroying confidence and the political will to innovate and progress.

Innovation is the third strand in Glasgow’s strategy. Innovation requires deep self-knowledge, control, support and courage. Designers can help reveal how cities might plan for the future. As designers we should have the tenacity to sustain this strategic vision in the midst of criticism and the doubt which always accompanies change.

The process of innovation, or rather, that of ‘allowing change to happen’, instead of actively preventing it from happening, should involve every faction within society. Innovation should be participative, enrolling every community, allowing people to understand and feel part of the process of change. People feed from the energy created by a successful project. Education and participation ensure people understand why a project might have succeeded or failed, it gives them the strength and support of a team with which to support a second attempt if the first one fails.

Nothing new is created without an element of the unknown. Successful cities must face the challenge of innovation if they are to embrace the future. We must create an environment in which innovation is seen as challenging and not frightening. Failure must be viewed as a necessary part of the process of change.

Innovation always involves risk. One definition of risk is ‘dangerous opportunity’. Successful cities must be courageous enough to risk and be mature enough to be supportive in failure. Failure is not bad, but a necessary component in a successful strategy for change. In many ways Glasgow’s greatest strength is it’s historical ability to consistently fail and it’s pathological need to strive for a better future, almost like a compulsive/obsessive disorder, continually destroying and creating, but always, ultimately, moving forwards.

The fourth strand in Glasgow’s five strands of strategy is participation, because it is meaningless for designers to do it on their own. History is littered with disastrous environments inflicted by designers on communities, without any consultation, compassion or even a properly negotiated brief. Product and graphic designers discover their mistakes more quickly than architects. All designers must guard against egotistical behaviour which ultimately serves no one.

We must bring all of our knowledge, vision, intuition, analytical method, and above all, humanity, to the table when we become partners with the rest of the community in creating a better world than the one we now inhabit.

4 The urban environment – what is Glasgow?

The ancient Egyptians, some three thousand years ago, knew how to sensorially manipulate people. They expressed their cultural values through language, symbols, myths and rituals. These were celebrated in the benign and humane architecture of Thebes and Memphis. In sharp contrast, earlier this century, Albert Speer expressed a different set of cultural values to communicate the values of Hitler’s Germany, re-creating Berlin according to classical mythological values, a domineering, warlike, and monolithic Arian super-city.

However, in Glasgow, as in Thebes and Berlin, design can only reveal values which are already present in our culture. 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 breathing life into old values. This is what has brought about Glasgow’s so-called ‘renaissance’. the city hasn’t essentially changed, it’s just chosen to be viewed from a different angle in a new era.

the second city

I believe it is important that cities, especially post-industrial cities, such as Glasgow, use design as a tool for cultural change. Providing an analytical framework through which to understand the archaeology of the past and describe what the archaeology of the future might be.

Glasgow has re-invented itself almost as many times as ‘art’ and ‘design’ have re-defined themselves. The city has a world reputation based on its design and architectural heritage and has always tended to use the tangible products of the creative process to promote its current personality. Glasgow was Great’s Britain’s second city, simultaneously ‘The Workshop of the World’ and ‘The Finest Victorian City in Britain’. The social and economic profit from design-led manufacturing was celebrated through municipal architecture. However, the overall effect of the city’s phenomenal development during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries has not been cumulative for we irresolutely paraded our successes, neutralised our mistakes and consequently failed to progress as quickly as we would have wished.

Different kinds of cities articulate their culture, their personality, in different ways. Glasgow is often described as a regional capital or second city, unlike Edinburgh or London. They are both 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 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 which survive on a pre-designated international repertoire leaving little room for individual cultural expression.

Second cities, many of them like Glasgow, express their culture through activities. They are often post-industrial cities with a less monolithic, often unusual, architectural heritage. They expressed their personalities through the production and movement of the products they manufactured: 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 many post-industrial cities continues to decline, second cities are denied the traditional means of expressing their identity through their products and services, never mind their architecture. Except in the sense of industrial heritage, a museum and theme park existence where culture is cut short, frozen in time, a sanitised memory and an impotent servant of the tourist industry.

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

The current political tactic used by the ‘Eurosceptic’ Conservative Party who have now held power in the United Kingdom for over fifteen years, that of ‘returning to the past’, fails to yield solutions to the problems of the present. We have achieved little in recent times which we can be proud of. Pride and self-respect have been confined to the past – they are now only memories. Politicians align themselves with economists. Seeking solace in the measurable, persuading voters that future success may be found by repeating the past. The future is unknown and innovation is dangerous. Creative people are considered to be unpredictable, mysterious and unquantifiable. Therefore, we are all doomed to failure because the world moves on and it cannot wait for us nor can we use successful solutions from other cultures because there problems are not wholly the same as ours.

Designers, architects and artists have given moribund policy-makers and politicians, people with little creativity, 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. I suspect Britain is not alone or we would not need this conference.

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 learn from their mistakes and we must work quickly to make up lost ground and persuade people to trust and use us once again.

Many of Glasgow’s current problems were created in the City’s recent history when Modernism offered Glasgow and Scotland a different kind of renaissance than it did elsewhere in the world. The civic death of Classicism and rebirth of a new order, heralded by Charles Rennie Mackintosh, or arguably by Alexander ‘Greek’ Thomson before him, signalled the beginning of a new century.

The democratic internationalism of the Modern Movement appealed to Glasgow’s easy conviviality. Glasgow had an acknowledged track record in Classicism and boasted many fine buildings. The city was encouraged by it’s recent successful history and it believed it could sustain a place in this brave new world of concrete and Helvetica.

As modernism gathered momentum Glasgow laid waste to vast areas of the city, destroying much of its classical heritage while trying to move forwards into a vision of the future the west had mistakenly thought to be utopia. The Gorbals, a vigorous, stone tenemented, working class area south of the River Clyde in which much of the city’s contemporary mythology is rooted, died a notorious success. Demolished in the name of cleanliness, its people, who were the life and soul of Glasgow, were banished from the inner city and condemned to suspended animation in the margins of civilisation, in municipal housing estates such as Easterhouse: a new estate with a population of over thirty thousand people but without shops or public houses or meeting places.

Some of the original population of the old Gorbals were rehoused in new high rise buildings which were erected to replace the old tenemented streets. These provided no space for children to play and no place for adults to socialise. Many of the families, and even some of the buildings, began to deteriorate as the last inhabitants were still moving in to their new homes.

To rehouse its population, Glasgow began the most intensive building programme in Europe, driven by central government economists in London and by the arid architectural polemic of drier climates. Corbusier’s vision of perfect sun-drenched flat roofs and windows shielded by brie soleil were hopelessly inappropriate for Glasgow’s driving rain, grey summers and working class culture. Glasgow, with its international socialism, fell prey to the banality and simplicity 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 would be humane as well as hygienic. Glaswegian culture was replaced by economics in the guise of environmental health.

Politicians and designers simply failed to recognise that Glasgow’s socialism was different from anyone else’s. Ironically, it was an architectural co-operative that demonstrated that much of what we were destroying, red sandstone 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