Castlecrag After the Griffins, Modernism and the Sydney School

Posted on September 29, 2022May 19, 2023 by funambulator@live.com

Castlecrag is an affluent suburb on Sydney’s lower North Shore with an abundance of bushy vistas and water views. The other thing Castlecrag has in abundance is architectural heritage, and the foundation of that heritage was laid by Walter Burley Griffin (WBG), the suburb’s American planner, early in the 20th century.

WBG’s bold experiments in living
The 15 houses that Griffin completed in the northern peninsula suburb (>30 more remained on the drawing board) are low-rise dwellings constructed in concrete, sandstone or brick, mainly locally sourced. Most of the houses are modest dwellings, small and squat, and for the most part the exteriors could be said to be aesthetically challengeda⃞. WBG’s credo was “designing for nature”, his enunciated goal—subordinating the Castlecrag houses to the surrounding landscape thus preserving the natural features—was realised…WBG left a legacy that inspired the projects of later architects in Castlecrag, notwithstanding that much of post-war Castlecrag housing development has not however been sympathetic with the Griffins’ architectural vision (‘Sydney — Castlecrag’, Walter Burley Griffin Society, www.griffinsociety.org).

. . .
The Glass House
Two architects drawn to Castlecrag in the 1950s to create Modernist residential buildings that are both innovative and in synch with the bush environment are Bill Lucas and Peter Muller. Lucas, a WWII veteran, with his wife Ruth, also an architect (cf. Walter and Marion Griffin) designed the “Glass House”…built in 1957 by Bill and his brother Nev and a friend and financed by Bill’s war service loan. The Glass House is like no other dwelling in Castlecrag, open plan in design, all four walls are of glass and thus the house is open to the landscape on all sides. The Lucas House (which was constructed as the Lucas family home and a studio for Bill’s practice) has been lauded for its economical design, providing the bare essentials while maintaining its sustainability…its “featherweight structure float(ing) miraculously about the tree canopy”b⃞ (with rocks and creek below) (‘Revisited: ‘Glass House by Bill and Ruth Lucas’, Peter Longeran, Architecture Australia, 17-Aug-2022, www.architectureau.com). The Glass House has been described as an “excellent seminal example of the shelter-in-nature minimalist composition constructed in Northern Sydney post World War II by architects of the ‘Sydney School’” (’Aus_Modern_House_Lucas_GL’, Docomomo International, 2003, www.docomomoaustralia.com.au).

The radical Glass House was a reaction by the Lucases to WBG’s restrictive covenants and building controls in force in Castlecrag. WGB’s covenant forbid housing construction in materials other than stone, concrete or brick, but the all-glass Lucas House somehow circumvented the stringent building restrictionsc⃞.

Lucas House,
80 The Bulwark
Castlecrag, NSW

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. . .
Audette House
Muller’s House (built for an American client in 1952) was the 24-year-old rookie architect’s first completed commission. Intended as an American colonial house, however Muller won the client over to something more Antipodean, devising a technique for the walls which became known as “snotted brick” – mortar oozing out the grout lines between the bricks (‘Striking a chord: Peter Muller on Audette House and why architecture is like music’, Architecture and Design, 17-Sep-2014, www.architectureanddesign.com.au. Muller drew on his recent experience studying in the US for his project which bears the strong influence of Frank Lloyd Wright’s iconic ‘Fallingwater’ and Muller’s liking for traditional Japanese motifs in residential architecture.

Audette House
265-267 Edinburgh Rd
Castlecrag NSW

Sydney School v International School: “Nature-responsive” v purist “white painted walls” Lucas and Muller were part of a loosely-connected group of Australian architects in the mid-20th century labelled the “Sydney School”. The group rejected the prevailing trend in architecture, the International School of Le Corbusier, Gropius and Van Der Rohe (whitewashed masonry, steel framed glass houses) as unsuitable in an Australian context. Sydney School architects, influenced by Frank Lloyd Wright‘s organic (“natural”) principles for designing houses, and WBG’s Castlecrag project which was visually sensitive to the natural bushland, “displayed distinctive choices that were driven by the natural environment and employed simple, ‘minimally processed’, low-cost materials”. ‘Sydney School, the virtuous case of Australian modernism’, Tommaso Picciioli, Domus, 27-Mar-2020, www.domusweb.it. The School was sometimes referred to as the “Nuts and Berries” Style for its preference for rustic materials (stone, brick, timber).

. . .

Footnote: Modernist Castlecrag
Castlecrag architecture is interesting in that it contains examples of both of these rival Modernist styles. In addition to Lucas and Muller, many of the leading local architects of the second half of the 20th century (quite a number of them émigrés from Nazism) including Neville Gruzman, Harry Seidler, Hugh Buhrich and Andre Porebski, contributed to the residential profile of the suburb. The variety of architecture sitting under the umbrella of Modernism can be seen in houses as different as Gruzman‘s ”organic” monolithic Gowing House (8 The Bulwark) (1969) and the two Hugh Buhrich family homes, 315 and 375 Edinburgh Road (No. I constructed 1940s, No. II constructed 1968-72)d⃞. Both Buhrich Houses are in the European Bauhaus style, the later one rated by architect Peter Myers as “the finest modern house in Australia“, and an example of Brutalist domestic architecture (‘Brutalist Architecture in Sydney’, Sydney Morning Herald, 29-Sep-2017, www.smh.com.au). Architect and urban designer Glenn Harper extends the Brutalist tag to include the Lucas Glass House, despite Lucas eschewing the use of one of Brutalist architecture‘s key materials, raw concrete, in his Glass House (”How the ‘Sydney School’ changed postwar Australian architecture”, Davina Jackson, The Conversation, 28-Jun-2019, www.theconversation.com).

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a⃞ with the exceptions of Fishwick House and Grant House

b⃞ the house has been described as being “barely there” (www.archinform.net)

c⃞ one explanation is that the construction being engulfed in dense bush was overlooked by Willoughby Council (Longeran)

d⃞ Buhrich also designed the Duval House at 2 The Tor Walk

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The Architectural Folly of Portmeirion: Faux Italian Riviera on the North Wales Coast

Posted on June 4, 2022August 5, 2023 by Wolfgang Childerglas

Built Environment, Cinema, Popular Culture, Regional History, Social History

Gobeithio y gwnewch chi fwynhau eich arhosiad yma.

“We hope you have a pleasant stay in Portmeirion.”

༺ ༺ ༺ 𓇬 ༺ ༺ ༺

British architect Sir (Bertram) Clough Williams-Ellis spent half a century (1925 to 1976) on a pet construction and town planning project in the Snowdonia region of North Wales, handcrafting his ideal of a village from scratch. The eccentric, autodidactic architect with a penchant for wearing knickerbockers called his back country village “Portmeirion”, drawing inspiration for his Welsh labour of love from the Italian Riviera fishing village of Portofino. What Williams-Ellis created was a scaled-down village comprising a picturesque patch-quilt of individual buildings built primarily for decoration, known in the architectural business as follies.

Piecing together the mosaic
Architecturally, Portmeirion is “an eclectic pastiche” (Gruffudd 1965) with stylistic borrowings from Gaudi, the Mediterranean and the Italian Renaissance, from the Arts and Crafts Movement and from Nordic Classicism et al, juxtaposed and intertwined together. Trompe l’oeil windows, Baroque murals, gargoyles, inverted copper cauldron, Classical details, all contributing to a quirky, multi-coloured panorama of buildings with a Mediterranean feel – in North Wales. Williams-Ellis sourced materials from disused estates and ruined castles across the UK for the village. (“Portmeirion Village: Fifty Years Since The Welsh Resort Starred In TV’s Iconic ‘The Prisoner’”, John Oseid, Forbes, 22-Mar-2017, www.forbes.com). Williams-Ellis’s use of salvaged fragments led him to describe his creation as “a home for fallen buildings”.

Portmeirion’s creator (Source: Portmeirion Village)

Reconciling structures with landscape
Williams-Ellis was a champion of preserving rural life, inspiring a Welsh movement, CPRW, guardians of Cymru Wledig…his philosophy applied to architecture was that “the development of a naturally beautiful site need not lead to its defilement”, new buildings, done well, could enhance the landscape (‘Portmeirion: A Passion for Landscape and Buildings’, Rachel Hunt, Gwanwyn, Spring 2018, cprw.org.uk). For the site of his cherished Italianate village William-Ellis choose a “neglected wilderness” which had formerly been part of the Aber Iâ① estate. Over the years the constituent parts of the village took shape – the Citadel (an Italianate campanile (bell tower)), Battery Square, Village Green, Gothic pavilion, Bristol Colonnade, blue-domed Pantheon and statue of Hercules, Italianate landscaped gardens. The Victorian manor from the old estate was transformed into the village hotel. The plan had been to incorporate a 19th century castle, Castell Deudraeth (named after an extinct 12th century castle in the locale), but this didn’t happen in Clough’s lifetime. Since 2001 the castellated building has functioned as a hotel for Portmeirion tourists.

Academic architecture hasn’t rated Portmeirion highly, tending to dismiss it as an “idiosyncratic playground of little interest”, a mere “hodge-podge” of differing styles (Manosalva, M.A., 2021. One-man-band: Clough Williams-Ellis’ Architectural Ensemble at Portmeirion. ARENA Journal of Architectural Research, 6(1), p.3. DOI: http://doi.org/10.5334/ajar.268). Not that this in any way deflected Williams-Ellis from single-mindedly pursuing his own peculiarly personal architectural vision of a “fantasy village”②… the architect freely admitted to taking what he described as “a light opera approach”, wanting to give people architecture that was pleasurable and fun to behold and enjoy.

‘The Prisoner’ being filmed on site (Source: radio times.com)

Sixties‘ TV spy culture augments the Village’s celebrity and tourism
While Portmeirion’s uniqueness guaranteed its fame and its standing as a niche holiday resort, its selection as the set for a cult 1960’s TV series magnified that fame exponentially. The Prisoner, a Sci-fi dystopian series, created by and starring Patrick McGoohan, was filmed in and around the village in 1966-67. The 17-episode series about a government agent who finds himself mysteriously transported to a beautiful, charming but bizarre community—where for inhabitants, imprisoned betwixt mountains and sea, there is no escape — a community impersonalised to the point where everyone is a number and no one knows who’s in charge. The Prisoner‘s enduring cult status has ensured a constant stream of loyal fans from far and near making the pilgrimage to Portmeirion each year (Covid permitting). The local tourist industry has done its bit to capitalise with a Prisoner souvenir shop, tours of the film locations, etc. The giant chessboard in the square which appeared in the TV show has been (permanently) reconstructed to further cash in on the series’ appeal.

Beatle George visits the Village – “fab!” (Source: North Wales Live)

Endnote: Enticing the rich and famous
A host of celebrities can be numbered among the endless throng of visitors to Portmeirion over the decades…GB Shaw, HG Wells, Bertram Russell, Frank Lloyd Wright③, Brian Epstein, George Harrison, to name but a few. Noel Coward wrote the first draft of his comic play Blithe Spirit during a stay at the seaside resort.

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① Welsh: “ice estuary”

② when his architectural “day job”, designing other people’s houses and buildings in various parts of the UK and Ireland allowed it

③ apparently FLW approved of the architecture of the place

Brasília, Brazil’s Modernist Capital in the Interior: An Unliveable Utopian Showcase?

Posted on February 3, 2022May 20, 2022 by Bonza Rottwheeler

Built Environment, National politics, New Technology,, Society & Culture, Town planning

Brazil’s bold experiment in creating a new capital city from scratch in five years, Brasília, won much praise as a modern architectural marvel upon its inauguration in 1960. With project town planner Lúcio Costa’s radical, artistic urban plan (the Plano Piloto) for the central city in the shape of a bird in flight⦑a⦒, and the symmetry and spacing of architect Oscar Niemeyer’s stark white, curvilinear, futuristic structures with sculptural silhouettes⦑b⦒, Brasília was heralded as “a modern utopia (expressing) optimism and trust in the future” and a demonstration of Brazil’s capacity for modernising progress (Dr Steffen Lehmann, cited in ‘60 Years Ago, The Modernist City of Brasília Was Built From Scratch’, Stefanie Waldek, AD, 21-Aug-2020, www.architecturaldigest.com).

↟ Costa’s plan for Brasília (Source: nickkahler.tumblr.com)

Bland homogeneity?
Detractors of the futuristic urban ‘miracle’ in Brazil’s central west however have been many and varied. Brasília’s inner city residential zones comprising superquadras (“superblocks”) were characterised by French writer Simone de Beauvoir as all exuding “the same air of elegant monotony”. The city’s large open lawns, plazas, and fields have been likened to wastelands. Structures intended 65 years ago to represent the future, now crumbling, accentuate this sense of decay and obsolescence (‘Brasília, national capital, Brazil’, Britannica, www.britannica.com)

The car is king!
In a city built for the automobile, Brasília is uber-pedestrian-unfriendly. “With long distances and harrowing six-lane highways connected by spaghetti junctions, Brasília presents challenges for walkers” (Lonely Planet) – which is good news at least for the city’s car hire firms! Transport options for the non-driver in Brasília have been meagre…the subway was basically an afterthought; footpaths are confined to a scanty few, where they exist they are dwarfed by the criss-crossing gargantuan highways; the first set of traffic lights in Brasília didn’t get installed until the 1970s (‘Lost and Found – Brasília’, Blueprint, ABC Radio (broadcast 21-Jan-2022).

A lack of a pulse?
Some critics point to the Brasília lifestyle’s deficit in “humanness”. The city centre is bereft of “the typical street life of other traditional Brazilian cities”. It is merely a place to work…night life is unstimulating, city workers tend not to hang around after hours, few stay to “live and play in the Pilot Plan” centre (Kobi Karp in Waldek). According to Prof. Ricky Burdett (LSE), Brasília flounders on the basics of what constitutes a city…no messy streets, no people living above shops, no mixed use neighbourhoods – rather it’s “a sort of office campus for a government” (‘Niemeyer’s Brasilia: Does it work as a city?”, Robin Banerji, BBC News, 06-Dec-2012, www.bbc.com). The scope for improvement is hamstrung as a result of restrictions on development and expansion in accordance with the city’s world heritage covenants.

The creation of two segregated communities
Overpopulation is part of the Brasília problem…designed as a city for 500,000 people, it has five times that many residents today, hence the growth of satellite towns which the poorer residents of Brasília have been shunted into⦑c⦒. Allocation of resources is another…whereas in the centre everything was zoned, over-organised city blocks to the point of impracticality, the satellite towns have been neglected and left in a disorganised state without adequate infrastructure, services and civic spaces (Britannica; ‘Lost and Found – Brasília’). Accentuating the imbalance between the centre and the outliers, only 300,000 of the 2.5 million Brasiliense live in the Pilot Plan area where the jobs are!

”A monument to technocratic rationalism”
One of the biggest savagings of Brasília’s architectural merit came from trenchant art critic Robert Hughes who brutally summed up the capital city’s shortcomings: “a ceremonial slum…this is what you get when you think in terms of space rather than place and about single rather than multiple meanings, when you design for political aspirations and not real human needs. Miles of jerry-built, platonic nowhere infested with Volkswagens” (The Shock of the New, Ep. 4 (BBC documentary, 1980). The “utopian” city of Niemeyer and Costa, lauded at its onset as ilha da fantasia has acquired other, less glowing epithets such as “concrete carbuncle” (‘fast:track’, BBC News). For Jane Jacobs (Death and Life of American Cities, the failure of Brasília and other such utopian dreamscapes was in making the mistake of trying to substitute art for life – with unworkable consequences for the inhabitants. Brasília has also come under fire on environmental grounds, the impact of its footprint has contributed to the deforestation of the Amazon region.

Postscript: the whole purpose of Brazil’s new capital in the interior for President Kubitschek⦑d⦒ and the urban planners was to create a modern city that avoided the excesses of Río and São Paulo (overcrowded slums, the preponderance of favelas). Costa’s “grand vision” envisaged a new urban centre that was deliberate, orderly, rational, dignified and systematic. In practice, the endgame to the myopic focus on the Plano Piloto was a city of inequality (with a good quality of life only for a minority of the inhabitants), congestion and urban sprawl (‘Inside Brazil’s ‘cautionary tale’ for utopian urbanises’, Diana Budds, Curbed, 07-Jun-2019, www.archive.curbed.com). Rather than being transformed into the shining exception, Brasília is “a mirror of Brazilian society…those with power live in a little island or cocoon. Those who don’t—which is the majority—live on the outside” (Prof. Vincente Del Rio).

—————————————-———
⦑a⦒ alternately it has been likened to the Crucifix, to an airplane or even to a bow and arrow
⦑b⦒ and avant-garde landscape design by Roberto B Marx
⦑c⦒ 90% of the Brasiliense, in the lower or lowest income brackets, live outside the centre in satellite towns
⦑d⦒ the politician in power who initiated the Brasília project in the mid-1950s

Glasgow’s Postwar Planning Wars: Utopian Visions of Dystopia, Slum Clearances, New Towns and Social Engineering – Part 3

Posted on December 31, 2021January 3, 2022 by E Curb Nottus

Built Environment, Heritage & Conservation, National politics, Politics, Regional History, Society & Culture

At the conclusion of World War Two no one was seriously of the opinion that Glasgow didn’t need to urgent address the acute housing and quality of life dilemmas besetting the city’ inhabitants. For their part, the planners focusing on the city certainly had (or at least professed) good intentions in their efforts to ameliorate what was for tens of thousands of Glaswegians a polluted, congested and thoroughly unpleasant living environment. For all the planning and the vast sums of money poured into redevelopment however, the results were and continue to be more than disappointing. As discussed in the first two parts of this blog series, the uncoordinated approach of having two rival sets of planners trying to implement conflicting visions of a new Glasgow didn’t help matters at all.

The Clyde Valley Regional Park Plan with the umpf of the UK government behind it got more of its planned restructure of Glasgow off the drawing board than the discredited Bruce Plan. The core of CVRP’s plan was the “overspill policy”, relocating the surplus population away from the slums of inter Glasgow to new, modern, sanitary, green and spacious accommodation far from the inner-city. There were two planks to the planners’ intended re-housing fix – the creation of five purpose-built “New Towns” outside of Glasgow, at East Kilbride, Glenrothes, Cumbernauld, Irvine and Livingston, and the establishment of four new housing ‘schemes’ (ie, estates)«A̴» on the outskirts of Glasgow — Castlemilk, Drumchapel, Easterhouse and Pollok.

Avoiding the city slums only to find a brand new set of problems
What looked good on paper (modern flats, heating, indoor toilets, more space, etc) transpired in reality for many of the relocated residents into a deeply dissatisfactory and frustrating experience. Flaws soon surfaced in many of the flats and houses, shoddy construction«B̴», poorly designed heating and ventilation, crumbling housing stock (eg, Castlemilk and Drumchapel). For these residents, the initial hopes and optimism floundering on what Florian Urban calls “a sculpture park of failed modern utopias”. There were grounds for hopefulness at the beginning. After the poky, dirty, overcrowded tenements of Glasgow central, the former inner city residents you imagine would have welcomed living in the housing schemes, many of which were “the equivalent size of many towns in Scotland”, but their positivity were cut asunder by infrastructure realities – there was nothing like an equivalent level of facilities provided to cope with the large implants of population. In a catastrophic piece of non-planning the areas of the schemes had hardly any places for residents to shop or to meet new people and socialise (no pubs, no dance halls, no cinemas, etc) and the promised open spaces for leisure activities failed to materialise. Public transport to take estate residents to the city centre did not run frequently enough and was relatively expensive. The promised local employment opportunities for the new estates were not forthcoming, so unemployment became a major problem for the schemes’ residents (‘Overspill Policy and the Glasgow Slum Clearance Project in the Twentieth Century: From One Nightmare to Another?’, Lauren Paice, IATL Reinvention, Vol 1 Issue 1, May 2013, http://Warwick.ac.uk; ‘Billy Connolly classically described the new estates as “deserts wi’ windaes”’, The Herald, 07-Nov-1998, www.theheraldscotland.com).

Scourge of Easterhouse
Easterhouse has the unwanted distinction of embodying the most dire consequences of the failings of Glasgow scheme planning. Physically isolated on the eastern edge of Glasgow, the severity of Easterhouse’s housing estate social problems and their persistence in the 21st century, has drawn a lot of concerned celebrity attention…. Princess Diana, PM Tony Blair and French President Chirac et al all made special visits to its notorious “sink-estates” (‘What’s Happened To Easterhouse: the Most Notorious Housing Scheme in Glasgow’, Francisco Garcia, Vice, 14-Nov-2016, www.vice.com). So depleted was its basic amenities, so lacking in a sense of community spirit, its infrastructure and housing problems magnified by a unemployment rate calamitously high (31.9% cf. a national average of 13.7% Hansard, 3 May 1985), the suburb’s schemes became a case study for social planners on what not to do to create a successful housing development (Paice). Easterhouse’s continuing woes have been compounded seemingly by a corresponding lack of political will to effect meaningful change (Hansard). Rather than leaving their problems and worries behind in the toxic slum tenements of the city, the dispersed Glaswegians found in the peripheral, facilities-deficient housing estates and towns a raft of new social problems…spikes in incidences of drunkenness and family violence, suicide, etc. Alienated and bored youth reacted to the lack of things to do by engaging in vandalism and petty crime (with young gangs perhaps no where active in the late Sixties than in Easterhouse and it’s so-called “Ned culture”).

Family dislocation
Relocation to the edges from the city led to other unforeseen or unaddressed problems, including a major disruption to the extended family network…many residents in the new projects were now too far away from their past abodes and cut off from their extended families and friends, resulting in a heightening of a sense of isolation (Paice). This outcome was even more perturbing for those Glasgow citizens who had been forced into relocating to the schemes and New Towns.

Though the Glasgow schemes and the New Town project have been widely maligned as abject failures and disasters by both observers and residents, not everyone has come away with a negative perception: the people of Cumbernauld in a 1980s poll gave the program an 87% approval (of course some schemes and some New Towns did better than other). At the very least, the housing experiments did free thousands and thousands of Glaswegians from the abomination of slum life in the city and transported them into new and better if still far from perfect living conditions… certainly anywhere after the Glasgow slum tenements had to be a step up, although some would argue that after fifty or sixty years, the New Towns with their persisting ailments, no longer new, were showing the clear signs of the foundations of new Glasgow slums«C̴» [‘Neighbourhoods New Towns’, (W Hamish Fraser), The Glasgow Story, www.theglasgowstory.com].

Divine right of technocrats
Nonetheless, a deep sense of dissatisfaction was and continues to be the general feeling about the two housing programs. Both plans for Glasgow’s regeneration, both the Scottish Office and Glasgow Corporation, were guilty (unsurprisingly) of taking a technocratic, “top-down’ approach to the re-housing solution. Both groups of planners failed to consult the residents themselves on what they wanted, the very people whose futures were riding on the experiments’ success and would be most affected by the results…a blind “focus on processes and numbers rather than people and their lives” (‘Modernizing Glasgow – Tower Blocks, Motorways, and New Towns 1940-2010’, Florian Urban, Glasgow School of Arts, www.radar.gsa.ac.uk). In hindsight, had they done so, at least some of the chronic and systemic problems may have been averted.

Social engineering, the “Glasgow Effect”
Glasgow’s 20th century standing as the British Empire’s “Second City” and an economic and industrial powerhouse in the region came at a cost. Studies have long revealed that Glaswegians have a proportionately higher early death-rate—and not accountable by poverty alone—than other comparable great cities«D̴». A 2016 report by the Glasgow Centre for Population Health (‘History, politics and vulnerability: explaining excess mortality’) concluded that the combined historic effects of overcrowding, poor city planning (1960s-’80s) and “a democratic deficit–a lack of an ability to control decisions that affect their lives”—were the causes of the city’s susceptibility to premature death (“Revealed: ‘Glasgow effect’ mortality rate blamed on Westminster social engineering”, Karin Goodwin, The Herald, 16-May-2016, www.heraldscotland.com). The SO took this tact, the GCPH asserted, knowing full-well that the policy would be damaging to the long-term health of Glaswegians (Goodwin).

Castlemilk ca.1965 (Source: Gordon Waddell (Pinterest))

“Skimming the cream”
The evidence points to a deliberate government policy of social engineering experiments in Glasgow…Scottish Office documents released under the 30-year rule reveal a calculated policy in determining which inner city residents were relocated where. ”Skimming the cream” (rehousing the best preferred preferred citizens in the choices parts of the new settlements) was practiced. Skilled workforce and young families were chosen to reside in East Kilbride and the other New Towns while the centre was left with “the old, the very poor and the almost unemployable”. This tactic and the steering of economic investment away from Glasgow resulted in a “serious population imbalance” (Goodwin) and putting the vulnerable ’stayers’ in a jeopardy.

Postscript: Belatedly aborted Stonehouse – New Towns become surplus to needs
There was meant to be a sixth New Town built to absorb overspill population from Glasgow…the small village of Stonehouse was slated to accommodate 22,000 new homes and 35,000 people, in fact local farmers had their land compulsorily purchased and the first 96 homes in Murray Drive were not only constructed«E̴» but in 1976 the first residents were already two days in occupancy before the Scottish Office suddenly got “cold feat” and pulled the plug on the development! Why was Stonehouse New Town axed and why did it occur so late in the process? Originally proposed in the early Sixties when planners had identified a continuing need for new houses on the periphery, by 1973 two developments had prompted a policy change — Glasgow city had depopulated dramatically as a result of the dispersals (1970-73: 58,000 Glaswegians left) and the authorities were concerned that too many young people were leaving the centre. The emphasis for the inner city refocused on renovating rather than demolishing and rebuilding and the SO began redeploying resources towards regenerating and rehabilitating the East End of Glasgow. Roger Smith’s answer to the obvious question of why the authorities still kept going with Stonehouse after it was apparent by 1973 that the project was a “no-goer” is that the government machine at both the centralised and local level was simply incapable of “respond(ing) quickly to changing events and new understandings of existing situations”…which seems to sum up many of the urban planning missteps made in postwar Glasgow (Roger Smith (1978) Stonehouse—an obituary for a new town, Local Government Studies, 4:2, 57-64, DOI: 10.1080/03003937808432733; ‘The Scottish town that never was’, Alison Campsie, The Scotsman, Upd. 04-Jun-2020, www.scotsman.com.au).

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«A̴» which initially were unfortunately called “townships” until someone pointed out Apartheid South Africa’s use of the same term to delineate non-white homelands
«B̴» the haste of the estate building program contributed to this
«C̴» as a result of multiple factors including lack of investment, cost-cutting on building materials and techniques, poorly maintained estates, apathy and neglect, pollution, loss of community pride, etc.
«D̴» 30% greater risk of dying before 65 than comparable deindustrialised cities like Liverpool and Manchester (Goodwin)
«E̴» everything else planned remained unbuilt, schools, swimming pools, sports centre, factories, etc.

Just blogging away … doing the hard blog

Continuing the search for signs of Intelligent Life in the University.

Built Environment

Castlecrag After the Griffins, Modernism and the Sydney School

The Architectural Folly of Portmeirion: Faux Italian Riviera on the North Wales Coast

Brasília, Brazil’s Modernist Capital in the Interior: An Unliveable Utopian Showcase?