Power Crazy

Janice Kirkpatrick’s favourite building generates a rush of energy and excitement.

If I go back far enough, my most enduring love is for the architecture of power generation and for all of the tunnelling, damming and the pioneering British engineering that goes with it.

It all started in the ’60s with the hum of a sub-station and a fascination with the little buildings that sang. My father took me to Pitlochry to show me how electricity was made. Instead he explained how fish ladders worked. I imagined that the water contained behind the dam boiled with fish like it did when they squeezed in their dozens through the glass viewing-chamber to be quickly counted on their journey to and from the sea. Electricity and salmon occupied the same compartment in my mind, fused together by their momentary exposure in a water-filled screen: a very Scottish marriage of physics and fish.

As I grew older I learned to look beyond the cauldron of fins and tails towards the smoothly engineered earthworks covered in swathes of manicured grass. I saw architecture that worked with nature, heralding a new era of enlightened industrialisation after more than a century spent scarring the landscape.

My favourite building is Tongland Power Station and dam built in 1934. It’s the largest of the six power stations, seven dams and two tunnels that form the Galloway hydro-electric scheme that runs from Carsphairn in the North to Kirkcudbright in the South, taking in the waters of Doon, Dee and Deugh and Lochs Ken, Doon and Clatteringshaws. Conceived by engineer William McLellan, it was the biggest hydroelectric scheme of its type in Britain. It was a functional model of the new spirit of improvement, formed to produce the clean, modern power that would help build a brave new world.

To find the now diminutive Tongland dam you take the A711 to Kirkcudbright and wait for the power station to appear. Its hygienic dimensions emerge suddenly from the tight waltz of closely set bends that follow the course of the River Dee. Adjacent to it sits a vast Vitrolite-green Aldo Rossi drum that I presume carries water within its matt dimensions. If you travel past the entrance and across the bridge, looking upstream, the view is equally shocking, revealing the sub-structure that allows the turbine hall to hang above the river bed, its smoothly rendered surface contrasting deliciously with the jagged stone and spluttering water beneath it. Someone somewhere had the pleasure of drawing this lovely thing.

I first visited the pale, high vaulted turbine hall on a school trip. I felt the familiar sub-sonic throb as I entered a building that was lined with the same cheap wooden panelling as the corridors in my school. I remember the grey enamelled casings for the control units and their black and white dials with solemn faces and Bakelite buttons. I was directed through a door and on to a balcony overhanging the turbine hall. I could distantly hear the man in the laboratory coat talking about inlet diameters and outlet values while, for the very first time, it struck me that a space could be beautiful, and exciting.

The great generating hall, set on a single floor with three massive turbines placed beneath the finely fenestrated ten metre tall windows, gave the impression of a church that had been constructed for a new era. It was painted in the palest blue and bathed in pure white light. I remember the sense of having all that heaviness and weight of water coursing menacingly beneath me with so much lightness high above.