Saltire Magazine

Glasgow is an international City, a creative City. Historically it expressed it’s personality through designed products and architecture. These had inestimable cultural value and great monetary wealth, enabling the City to pay it’s way through it’s own resourcefulness, a product of it’s own brand of Scottish engineering and education, canny economics and socialist politics expressed in a world market.

The City communicated it’s character through ships and locomotives, through architecture and publishing. Glasgow was the ‘Workshop of the World’, “… the finest Victorian City in Britain”. The term ‘Clydebuilt’ was synonymous with enduring quality, craftsmanship and innovation. Glaswegian design was understood throughout the world and valued by every Citizen because it touched everyone, rich and poor, and was a necessary and intrinsic part of life.

The growth in Glasgow’s physical and international dimensions during the 18th and 19th Centuries still forms a major ideological component in the City’s culture. It’s alive in the mythology, language and values the City holds to be most precious. It runs much deeper than even those people who worked in the industries can ever convey.

However, the effect of our vigorous history has not been cumulative. We irresolutely paraded our successes, neutralised our mistakes and consequently failed to progress as quickly as we might have.

In the late 19th Century Thomson and Mackintosh heralded a new order. The democratic internationalism of the Modern Movement appealed to Glasgow’s easy conviviality and an acknowledged track record in Classicism encouraged the City to believe it could sustain a place in the brave new world of concrete and Helvetica.

As Modernism gathered momentum the City destroyed much of what was good. Glasgow began the most intensive building programme in Europe driven by central government in London and prompted by the arid architectural polemic of drier climates. Glasgow, with it’s international socialism, fell prey to International Modernism without pausing to reflect on the human consequences of it’s actions. Politicians didn’t realise that Glasgow’s socialism was a different brand from everyone else’s. Glaswegian culture was replaced by economics in the guise of social housing, it’s manufacturing industries allowed to decline in favour of the new service industries.

In 1993 we can comfortably say that Glasgow has come through it’s most traumatic phase in recent years. Our post-modern, post-recession politicians are terrified of making mistakes or even making decisions which might be construed as mistakes. It’s therefore no surprise that it’s the students and the housing associations who are producing the most innovative design in the City. Only a handful of under-funded manufacturers make products of quality; a sorry state of affairs for a culture dependant upon objects for the expression of it’s aspirations and it’s values.

Politicians and economists don’t understand that every culture needs objects to signify what it is and does, and more importantly, what it believes in. If the success of a culture is said to be measured by the objects it leaves behind what on earth will the archeologists make of us?

We now need to generate a new vision of our City instead of constantly regenerating an old one, or a bland one or an imported one. Charles McKean of the RIAS is correct to ask, “What is Glasgow?” It certainly isn’t clear anymore, we used to know what we were.

Glasgow is learning to it’s cost the price of undervaluing it’s architecture, art and design. Essentially the same process, they don’t exist in a vacuum, but are influenced by and articulate culture, economics and politics.

What we, the architects, artists and designers must now do, is build a new Glasgow founded on the experience of the past, the talent of the present and a brave new vision of the future.