{"id":5265,"date":"2017-06-15T14:46:51","date_gmt":"2017-06-15T14:46:51","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/sceptical.scot\/staging\/?p=5265"},"modified":"2017-07-02T06:03:34","modified_gmt":"2017-07-02T06:03:34","slug":"scotlands-lost-architectural-futures","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/sceptical.scot\/staging\/2017\/06\/scotlands-lost-architectural-futures\/","title":{"rendered":"Scotland’s lost architectural futures"},"content":{"rendered":"

The unexpectedly bitter controversy over the proposal to demolish Glasgow\u2019s Red Road Flats during the 2014 Commonwealth Games opening ceremony was symbolic of Scotland\u2019s complex relationship with the legacy of post-war Modernist architecture.<\/strong><\/p>\n

For nearly half a century the six 31-storey towers stood as sentinels on the Glasgow horizon, anticipating some future utopian city.<\/p>\n

Over time the blocks became associated in the popular imagination with crime, deprivation, leaks and infestation. But they also – quite literally – lifted thousands from the Gorbals slums over which they were built, providing modern homes for thousands who had known only squalor.<\/p>\n

Speaking in 1966, shortly before work on the Red Roads project began, Glasgow Corporation convenor Edward Clark proudly announced that the flats were designed for \u2018citizens in the Springburn area and other districts who look forward to living in decent surroundings with all the modern amenities that they have so long desired.\u2019<\/p>\n

The estate is one of several major Scottish post-war architectural ventures featured in Lost Futures<\/a>, a new book by Owen Hopkins published to accompany the Futures Found<\/a> exhibition at the Royal Academy, a collection of film, photography and other media exploring \u2019The Real and Imagined Cityscapes of Post-war Britain\u2019.<\/p>\n

Hopkins\u2019s survey, which looks at some 35 projects from across Britain, including housing estates, schools, libraries, factories, restaurants and power stations built from the 1950s to the 1970s is inspired by the remarkable resurgence of interest over the past decade in Britain\u2019s post-war architectural heritage, a reassessment – after years of ridicule and neglect – driven by a chronic and worsening housing crisis.<\/p>\n

The multifaced crisis – whose causes include the failure of successive governments to replenish the stock of social housing in the wake of the Thatcher government\u2019s \u2018right-to-buy\u2019 policy; the financial pressures on local authorities to authorise lucrative regeneration projects on prime city centre land once occupied by housing estates; and the chronic dependence of the British economy on inflated house prices – has inspired a new generation of architecture commentators to recover the collectivist ideals at the heart of the post-war reconstruction project.<\/p>\n

The most prominent include Owen Hatherley, whose work<\/a> has sought to recall the spirit of political utopianism that ran through architectural Modernism, the high-minded hope that the new architecture pioneered during the 1920s by Le Corbusier, Walter Gropius and the Soviet avant-garde should serve ordinary people, transforming the environments and homes in which they lived. As Aneurin Bevan, Housing Minister in the Attlee government once put it when opening a new estate: \u2019Nothing is too good for the working classes.\u2019<\/p>\n

Hatherley seeks to draw a stark contrast between the earnestness of the Modernists and the freewheeling post-modernist and Private Finance Initiative aesthetic of the 1980s and 90s, with its playful \u2018barcode facades\u2019, shiny surfaces, rainbow colours, wood veneer, and penchant for showy atriums, an undeniably modern architecture shorn – in Hopkins\u2019s words – of \u2018the socially transformative mission of the post-war architecture it so frequently replaced.\u2019<\/p>\n

Hatherley\u2019s peers include Douglas Murphy, whose Last Futures<\/a> explores the wilder shores of 1960s masterplanning with its dreams of cities floating on the seas or sheltering under geodesic domes, and John Grindrod author of the best-selling Concretopia<\/a>, an engaging history of the planners who built the post-war housing estates and New Towns.<\/p>\n

These and others are part of a wider movement encompassing organisations such as the Manchester Modernist Society<\/a> and an array of social media channels including This Brutal House<\/a>, a celebration of all things concrete. And the unapologetic advocacy of a classic social democratic programme by Jeremy Corbyn\u2019s Labour Party has only served to intensify hopes that it may be possible to revive the lost ideal of mass social housing.<\/p>\n