\n We\u2019re here to give it some love though, and not just the Met Tower. Right across Scotland, buildings like this one \u2013 modernist, brutalist, call it what you will \u2013 attract love and hate. Many of the big housing developments that went up in the 50s and 60s as part of the movement have been pulled down or blown up. But brutal architecture \u2013 concrete, utilitarian, some would say utopian \u2013 is also being reappraised, reassessed, and in some cases reborn. Lovers of brutal say: give it another chance.\n<\/p>\n
\n So that\u2019s what we\u2019re here to do. To mark the publication of two new books on brutalism, The Herald has asked prominent admirers of the style to choose a brutalist building they love and tell us why. Some might say these buildings are among the ugliest in Scotland. But here\u2019s a chance to give them another look, from a different angle, and maybe think again.\n<\/p>\n
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\n The Met Tower from the roof of the Martha Street flats (Image: Newsquest)\n<\/p>\n
\n The Met Tower, Glasgow\n<\/p>\n
\n Standing on the roof of the Martha Street flats, Natalie Tweedie points at the Met Tower, the College of Building and Printing as was, and tells me why we should love it. Natalie is an artist and started out drawing and painting Glasgow\u2019s fine red-brick Victorian buildings before turning her attention to the city\u2019s brutalist architecture, including the Met Tower. \u201cLook at it,\u201d she says. \u201cIt\u2019s just as beautiful as some of the great Victorian buildings.\u201d\n<\/p>\n
\n She realises not everyone will agree. \u201cA lot of people hate it and think it\u2019s a concrete box, but if you actually look at it, it\u2019s angled at the front, there\u2019s beautiful detailing at the side \u2013 it\u2019s not concrete, it\u2019s a form of marble \u2013 and you have the Le Corbusier-inspired sculptural forms on the top which are brutalist. I\u2019m a big fan.\u201d\n<\/p>\n
\n Natalie believes buildings like the Met are symbols of a more positive, progressive age. It was opened by the Labour leader Harold Wilson in 1964 not long after his famous \u201cwhite heat\u201d speech, in which he promised a scientific revolution to modernise industry and drive economic progress; it was also a time when there was a great expansion in municipal buildings and social housing, often designed and created by modernist architects and designers. \u201cA lot of the brutalist architecture was utopian,\u201d says Natalie. \u201cIt was aspirational and hopeful and was rooted in trying to give people a better place to live. It\u2019s a vision of the future from the past.\u201d\n<\/p>\n
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\n The problem in many cases, of course, is that the utopia didn\u2019t come to pass: Basil Spence\u2019s famous\/notorious flats in the Gorbals<\/a> for example. But even there, Natalie says the failures were often down to other factors: housing policy, poverty, even the climate (brutalism works better in sunny places). \u201cBrutalist buildings are an easy target because they have an association with failed social housing,\u201d she says. \u201cBut that doesn\u2019t apply to the Met Tower.\u201d\n<\/p>\n \n As it happens, it now looks like the future of the tower is going to be housing too. It was still a college until 2014 but has been unused since and a number of possibilities have been mooted, including a hub for science and tech. However, it\u2019s now been acquired by a developer who has plans to turn it into, no prizes for guessing, student accommodation, and Natalie says if it saves the building, why not.\n<\/p>\n \n \u201cIf the Met Tower was in somewhere like Berlin,\u201d she says, surveying it from 20 storeys up, \u201cit would be restored and celebrated and it makes me sad that Glasgow doesn\u2019t do that.\u201d But Natalie is also hopeful we\u2019re witnessing the beginnings of a turnaround, a greater appreciation of the modernist legacy. \u201cBrutalist is a term that allows people to write these buildings off, but I think they should sit alongside the Victorian buildings; they are beautiful in their own right. So why erase that and demolish it? Why not value it instead?\u201d\n<\/p>\n \n \n The Lang Stracht Hotel, Aberdeen\n<\/p>\n \n Even by brutalist standards, the Lang Stracht Hotel in Aberdeen<\/a> is an extraordinary building. Designed in the 60s by architects Baxter Clark & Paul as part of the expansion of the Mastrick area of the city, it\u2019s a place that, like a lot of brutalist design, shows off its inner workings: the stairs, the corridors, the pipes, the vents. The bulging windows and buttresses give it an organic quality too, like a creature crouching. And like all brutalism, some\u2019ll love it, some\u2019ll hate it.\n<\/p>\n \n Simon Phipps loves it. Simon is an artist and photographer who\u2019s documented many of Scotland\u2019s brutalist buildings in his new book Brutal Scotland. \u201cThe Lang Stracht Hotel is a remarkable building,\u201d he says. \u201cAnd the fact they\u2019ve painted the rear black makes it even more monumental. It\u2019s the dynamism of the form that I particularly like: the building is the sum of its parts, the stairwells are pushed out, the entrance ramps, it\u2019s showing what\u2019s going on inside.\u201d\n<\/p>\n \n For Simon, who trained as a sculptor, the hotel and other buildings like it represent buildings as sculptures and the best of the modernist ethos. \u201cI find it incredibly powerful and beautiful and sculptural and I know there are many other people who appreciate its qualities,\u201d he says. \u201cIt\u2019s my personal passion to record and exemplify what this period of architecture represented, not just for its artistic and architectural qualities that are there for all to see, but I\u2019m also interested in the societal impact it had \u2013 all these radical new ideas about building a new Jerusalem almost, almost utopian thinking: we can build a better world.\u201d\n<\/p>\n \n \n Simon is aware there are risks here, in artists, writers and photographers waxing lyrical about modernist buildings on the one hand and leaving other people to live in them on the other. \u201cI do feel that sometimes,\u201d he says. \u201cI live in an Edwardian house, that\u2019s the way it\u2019s worked out, but I\u2019ve lived in modern houses on and off throughout my life. My parents were architects and most of my growing up was in Milton Keynes where they were part of the design team so we lived in a modern house there. My dad still does. He lives in a small really nice brick modernist house from the mid-70s.\u00a0 He loves it and I love it too. But I take the criticism.\u201d\n<\/p>\n \n Simon accepts too that the brutalist legacy, particularly in housing, is mixed to say the least. \u201cClearly, they didn\u2019t all work,\u201d he says, \u201cpossibly due to some of the architectural decisions that were made; also they were reflecting what was going on throughout society, a decline in industry and wealth.\n<\/p>\n \n \u201cBut people have also been too quick to demolish rather than look at reappraising what\u2019s there \u2013 essentially, the layout of a lot of these places works very well, particularly residential. There were far better space standards in a lot of those blocks than you would ever get now. We also forget that a lot of what went before were virtual slums and completely inadequate for people to live in.\u201d\n<\/p>\n \n Simon essentially believes brutalist architecture often gets the blame for problems caused by other factors. \u201cA lot of people blame the architecture but it has a hell of a lot more to do with what was going on in society, particularly in the Thatcher period when public housing was allowed to be sold off without any replacement. There was a period when the state looked after you in a better way than it seems to these days and all of it was represented by modernist architecture. And if we could do it then, why can\u2019t we do it now?\u201d\n<\/p>\n \n \n Dundasvale, Glasgow\n<\/p>\n \n Bruce Peter remembers coming to the Dundasvale estate when he was a boy. The professor of design history at Glasgow School of Art<\/a> and author of new book Modernist Scotland is in his fifties now so we\u2019re talking more than 30 years ago and it was a different time in some ways.\n<\/p>\n \n \u201cI remember you had that notion that high-rise is awful and you\u2019d come here and find it vandalised,\u201d he says, \u201cbut I found an earlier version of what you see today: an extremely well-maintained, highly sought-after estate and people were very proud of their homes. And it\u2019s in good condition.\u201d He tells me if he were younger and single, he\u2019d happily live here.\n<\/p>\n \n And I see what he means. This has always been one of my favourite pieces of brutalist planning: six five-storey blocks and two high rises, all arranged around large, traffic-free green spaces. It was the work of Walter Underwood and Partners, who also did the Queen Margaret Union at Glasgow Uni and the Fulton Building in Dundee<\/a> (more of which later) and, as Bruce explains, the idea was great sweeping horizontal lines, corridors in the sky, a bit like the Barbican in London.\n<\/p>\n \n The problem is what has been done to it since. \u201cWhen people talk about beautiful or ugly,\u201d says Bruce, \u201cthey\u2019re often confusing the condition a building is in with its underlying design. Looking at pictures of a lot of these buildings when they were brand new, you realise they are very beautiful.\u201d\n<\/p>\n \n The issue now is that ugly wind-shields have been stuck on to the Dundasvale buildings, the whole thing\u2019s been painted magnolia and the original multi-coloured doors have been replaced with neo-Georgian wood-effect ones. \u201cWhat\u2019s happened here,\u201d says Bruce, \u201cis there\u2019s been an attempt to superimpose a language of an inter-war suburban bungalow on a building that\u2019s more like the Barbican Centre in London and it completely ignores what this is. So it ends up looking a bit of a hotchpotch.\u201d\n<\/p>\n \n For the people who actually live in the flats, the picture is mixed. I speak to a few and they tell me the flats themselves are good but other issues are a problem: cuts to the concierge service, not enough maintenance by the housing association, and undesirables including drug dealers hanging about the carpark. A couple of people also mention the policy of housing refugees in the flats; one female resident says she can often come across groups of young men in the corridors and it can be scary. In other words, it\u2019s still buildings like this one that become the centre of bigger social issues and it\u2019s a familiar story. Is it really the building\u2019s fault?\n<\/p>\n \n \n The Nuffield Unit, Edinburgh\n<\/p>\n \n If you want to know what brutalism is really all about, check out the Nuffield Transplantation Unit at the Western General Hospital in Edinburgh<\/a>: the vaulted roof, the ochre-coloured concrete, and a bridge over the road connecting different parts of the building. The point is that the Nuffield was designed in the 60s for a specific purpose \u2013 the emerging science of organ transplantation \u2013 and the purpose dictated the look, which is often how brutalist buildings work: they don\u2019t hide their function, they show it off.\n<\/p>\n \n A big fan of the building is Robbie Macfarlane, senior course tutor in architectural history and heritage at Edinburgh University and a member of the Architectural Heritage<\/a> Society of Scotland. \u201cThe Nuffield unit very much typifies what brutalism actually is,\u201d he says, \u201cwhich is usually buildings that were very forward looking, municipal in nature, that were using the cheapness of energy and the abundance of concrete post-war. It was very forward-looking and connected to a hopeful future.\u201d\n<\/p>\n \n \n The Nuffield is also by an architect, Peter Womersley, who\u2019s particularly hot property in brutalism just now. The studio he designed for the textile designer Bernat Klein in the Borders has just been saved by a consortium of heritage groups and will be restored from its dilapidated state. And the architect\u2019s extraordinary football stadium for Gala Fairydean FC in Galashiels<\/a>, comprising great triangular planes of concrete defying the usual angles, has benefited from a \u00a31.45m renovation and is looking better than it\u2019s ever done. Robbie believes Womersley is grossly under-rated but is now attracting more of the attention he deserves.\n<\/p>\n \n Robbie does have a couple of issues with brutalism however \u2013 for a start, the name. \u201cThe name started as a joke, because it\u2019s a continuation of modernism,\u201d he says. \u201cBut brutalism has nothing to do with brutality or buildings being foreboding or scary or anything like that.\u201d\n<\/p>\n \n The other issue is how we look after the buildings. As happens in hospitals, the Nuffield has been repurposed and reconfigured, which means it\u2019s lost much of its original appearance, but the real issue for Robbie is maintenance. \u201cPeople are happy to pay for maintenance for an old church roof perhaps,\u201d he says, \u201cbut when it comes to modern buildings, they\u2019re just left. And when things aren\u2019t new and shiny anymore, we very quickly lost interest.\u201d\n<\/p>\n \n \n The Fulton Building, Dundee\n<\/p>\n \n The last building is another choice of the photographer Simon Phipps and it has a rather special place in his memory. He photographed the Fulton Building at Dundee University for his book, Brutal Scotland, and as he did so, he started to realise the building was familiar to him. Eventually, he worked out that he\u2019d photographed it some 30 years ago when he was working as a sculptor and was taking pictures of buildings as inspiration for his work.\n<\/p>\n \n It isn\u2019t a surprise to Simon that he should have seen the Fulton in this way because for him the building, like a lot of brutalist architecture, has sculptural qualities. \u201cI was particularly interested in the concrete frames of these buildings and it\u2019s part of the appeal of brutalism, the structure, you can see exactly how it\u2019s made and how it supports itself. It illustrates its construction and I found that very exciting. It invites you into the inside, it displays exactly what it does \u2013 the form is defined by its function and I love that idea.\u201d\n<\/p>\n \n And Simon can\u2019t help returning to what he believes brutalism once represented and can again: aspiration towards something better. \u201cMistakes were obviously made,\u201d he says, \u201cand there\u2019s that isolation factor, the sense of unease and danger that some of these places can foster. But people are attracted to the boldness and the ideals that went along with it. It\u2019s not just the visual allure, it\u2019s about what it represents: a vision of society that\u2019s better.\u201d\n<\/p>\nThe Lang Stracht Hotel (Image: Simon Phipps)\n<\/p>\n
Simon Phipps (Image: Simon Phipps)\n<\/p>\n
Bruce Peter on the Dundasvale estate (Image: Newsquest)\n<\/p>\n
The Nuffield Centre (Image: Simon Phipps)\n<\/p>\n
Robbie McFarlane (Image: Robbie Macfarlane)\n<\/p>\n
The Fulton Building (Image: Simon Phipps)\n<\/p>\n