The Monadnock of Dundee - MArch Thesis by Jemma__McBride

THE MONADNOCK OF DUNDEE CELEBRATING THE HIDDEN ORDINARY

JEMMA MCBRIDE 110016653 Word Co u n t - 5, 26 7

ARCHITECTURE + SOCIETY Graeme Hutton Neil Verow 1

Overgate Tower + Steeple Church + The Howff

Overgate Tower + Steeple Church + McManus Galleries

Overgate Tower on Existing Overgate Shopping Centre

Overgate Tower on 1960s New Town Development

Overgate Tower imposed on 1800s Historic Plan

Overgate Tower imposed on 1800s Historic Route

Overgate Tower + Shopping Cnetre Structure + Howff Gravestones

Overgate Tower + Local Trees

Overgate Tower + Existing Public Spaces

Overgate Tower + Proposed Public Spaces

Overgate Tower + Grid

THE MONADNOCK OF DUNDEE

JEMMA McBRIDE 110016653

M A rc h T hes i s Sc h o o l of A rc hi tec ture Un i v e rs i ty of D undee

ARCHITECTURE + SOCIETY Neil Verow Graeme Hutton D undee F ri day , A pri l 28, 2017 Wo r d C o u n t - 5 , 2 6 7

CONTENTS

Nomenclature: Modnadnock /məˈnadnɒk/

NOUN;

An isolated hill or ridge or erosion-resistant rock rising above a peneplain. (level land surface produced by erosion over a long period, undisturbed by crustal movement) Ordinary /ˈɔːdɪn(ə)ri/

ADJECTIVE;

1. With no special or distinctive features; normal. 1.1 Not interesting or exceptional; commonplace. Everyday /ˈɛvrɪdeɪ/

ADJECTIVE;

1. Happening or used every day; daily. 1.1 Commonplace. Banal /bəˈnɑːl/

ADJECTIVE;

So lacking in originality as to be obvious and boring.

Summary Methodology Introduction Defining the Ordinary Defining the Monadnock Touch the Ground Touch the Sky Tectonics of the Facade Celebrating the Ordinary Conclusion Bibliography Appendix

5 7 9 15 23 33 39 57 67 71 72 78

Palimpsest /ˈpalɪm(p)sɛst/

NOUN;

A manuscript or piece of writing material on which later writing has been superimposed on effaced earlier writing. Objets Trouvés /ˈȯb-ˌzhā-trü-ˈvā/

PLURAL;

A natural or discarded object found by chance and held to have aesthetic value

(Reference: Oxford Dictionary)

SUMMARY

The Overgate Tower is a Monadnock within Dundee. It is a hidden form within the city with everyday qualities that are visible through its facades and sentient nature. The character of the tower could be celebrated by creating a public space on the ground and establishing itself in the cityscape. The towerâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s character was based around the idea of a gate as a walkway into the heart of the city centre. The detritus around the tower is to be removed to refocus and celebrate the physicality of its structure and revitalise memories of the Overgate as a public route. The idea of the everyday is used as a tool to celebrate the towerâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s identity and structure; recreating the tower as an extraordinary object within its space.

Fig. 1 - Overgate Tower (left), 2008 4

METHODOLOGY Research Goal

This thesis explores the idea of the ordinary and concealment of everyday fragments within the city. Interpretation of the ordinary is investigated through street presence, everyday inhabitants of the proposal and definition in the cityscape. How can the hidden everyday be brought into the public realm and enhance the city in an extra-ordinary manner? Using the Overgate Tower as the Objet TrouvĂŠ, the proposal seeks to redefine its ordinariness as a poetic construct to be celebrated in Dundee. Research Methodology

The City House in Dundee was built along with the Overgate Shopping centre in the 1960s, However, subsequent regeneration of the centre has left the tower unmarked, and uncelebrated. The thesis will use the tower as a tool to celebrate a hidden piece of the city as a proposed object in space. Exploration of how the tower touches the ground, its uses and impact within and around the public realm will also be considered. Investigations will also analyse the structure of the building, and its tectonics; following through into its identity within the cityscape. This thesis uses the physical remnants left by the towers impact and its selective memories to help define the tangible and intangible reminders of a past that still continues to shape the now and future development around the tower.

INTRODUCTION Dundee’s New town development began in the 1960s, and the town has continued to reinvent itself for posterity’s sake. Through the pulling away of historic layers and reconfiguring, one form has stayed unaltered since the first iteration of a New Town Development in the 60s. The Overgate tower, formally known as ‘City House’ has stayed in the same location with no redevelopment, nor inhabitants to celebrate its locale within the city. The only clear indication of the tower’s presence is to face the Overgate Shopping Centre and look upwards, to find a concrete backdrop obstructing the sky. In its ordinariness, the tower has become hidden. Its mundane facades and, repetitive elevations have left little for the eye to ‘discover’. The aesthetic is inherently banal; although its strange situation is hidden from the city it has become an Objet Trouvé; its structure a product of the surrounding development. The tower epitomizes the ‘as found’, altered by the surrounding definition with no consideration for its own resultant aesthetic. Its banality is obvious, but its better qualities are hidden. The opportunity of the object towering on a slender structure is suggestive of a more extraordinary intent. How can the ordinariness of the building become harnessed? Arguably its ordinary situation is something extra-ordinary. Where does the everyday object become the art object, and how can the tower harness art as a way to explore underneath as space and above the tower? Can the As Found object be designed or does it merely develop? This begs the

Fig. 3 - Overgate Tower, 2016 8

question of ordinary architecture as an organic creation and not designed or is there something stylistically that could be captured? The thesis explores the relationship of ordinariness and architecture and questions morally if it is wrong for architecture to transform the ordinary building into an extraordinary one through applied aesthetic; or if it can celebrate its ordinariness through exploring opportunities below, within and above the tower. The tower may not be representational of something other, however, the stark power of the ordinariness gives the tower an undeterred meaning; influences of palimpsest and the tectonics of the tower can help to determine the towerâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s bearing within the city. The tower should have an identity; it deserves presence within the public sphere. This is investigated through the exploration of the structure of the tower and how it meets the ground. However, defining the poetic as the extra-ordinary, does giving the tower presence on the street alter the poetic? The poetic becoming defined as the extra-ordinary. The exploration of planes and the spatial relationship of structure, tower and ground begin to relate the tower to the city of Dundee and give it presence. Celebrating the tower and its potential inhabitants would be explored through these varying forms of Touching the Ground, the Sky, and its Tectonics.

Fig. 4 - Overgate Tower, 2016 10

Fig. 5 - Overgate Tower, 2008 12

Extra-ordinary buildings have intrinsic personality, and display a tension between the generic and specific. (Allford, 2016)

DEFINING THE ORDINARY The banal, the ordinary and the everyday are three distinctive notions, which are seemingly synonymous. The ordinary can be viewed as a poetic construct, whereas the banal suggests the dull and the predictable. However, when you apply definitions ‘endless’ or ‘infinite’ the banal is suggestive of the poetic due to the added interest in the ideal of an infinite banal. It romanticises the banal. The everyday is commonplace whereas ordinary lacks distinctiveness or special features. The banal is boring. It lacks originality. The tower however is not obvious. Its position as a hidden structure adds interest and becomes suggestive of a poetic definition. Berke forewarns of the dangers of writing about the Everyday; the difference between an ‘architecture of the everyday’ and everyday buildings lies precisely in the consciousness of the act of making architecture. (Berke, 1997) At this point, this subject has the potential to become naïve, architecture leads itself into an innocent view of designing the everyday. The everyday touches the boundaries of mass culture, and uses it as instrument for its own ends. (Smithsons, 1970) The everyday is that which remains after everything else is defined. How can this poetic definition be harnessed for the tower? Arguably, the everyday is an organic construct and therefore indeterminate of architectural design. Theorists such as Sergison Bates and Caruso St John have attempted to intellectualise this idea of the ordinary. However, this in a sense removes the common place, the naturally occurring and makes it an aesthetic style. Under examination, the ordinary is actually less visionary and more complex than perceived; it takes in hugely different scales from the vast facelessness of the metropolis down to the

Fig. 6 - Overgate Shopping Development (Tower in Background), 1960s 14

profoundly domestic detail. The appearance of the modern city can be deceptive, even disquieting, but underneath is the human involvement that finds virtue in the humble and value in what commonly remains unseen or discarded. (Scalbert, 1995) If the ordinary is defined by our surroundings to what extent are the encounters with ordinary just an absurd conglomerate of standardized fragments put together in a strange situation and we accept as commonplace, and where can the value be found in this assembly of fragments. If there are unique moments created amongst the ordinary; and a space was to be created within the facelessness of the metropolis could this be regarded as the ordinary or does it become the extraordinary in the backdrop? The understanding of our everyday surroundings actually become more than just the strange encounters of standardized parts that determine how the ordinary is created. (Hirschbichler, 2014) The ordinary is portrayed in such a way that the banal acquires its significance and gradually loses its professed subtlety, thus revealing the ambiguity that is hidden beneath the familiarity of its facades. Edmund de Waalâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s porcelain art displays/highlight the poetics of the endlessly banal. The idea of taking an everyday object such as a pot, de Waal then repeats this object multiple times. The end product created is something beautifully banal and elevates the everyday pots into a piece of art. â&#x20AC;&#x2DC;Pots lean on each other, share secrets, cluster in groups, isolate and persecute oddballs.â&#x20AC;&#x2122; (De Waal, 2013) The rhythmical facades profess the idea of poetically banal and have the potential formulate ideas of the treatment of the tower itself and its involvement in the everyday.

Fig. 7 - A Lecture on Weather,2015. Edmund de Waal 16

As Found, coined by the Smithsons, attaches positive attributes to the pre-existing, taking the properties of an Objet Trouvé and engaging with what is there, to give this object recognition and to follow its traces with interest. (Smithsons, 1970) This engagement with the existing is what leads to a more radical forming of proposals. The balance between the activity and passivity of the object calls for the receptivity to its ‘fine nuances and meanings and setting out from there to make something’. It relies on the second glance to be noteworthy. It creates the line of thought that anything considered unworthy, banal or beyond mention can be seen as something completely different; exciting and fascinating. (Smithsons, 1970?) The everyday can be used as tool to explore the poetic boundaries formed by the existence of the tower. Subsequently, As Found architecture may not only be about “making” but rather a “remaking” as Nelson Goodman has stated: ‘The many stuffs, matter, energy, waves, phenomena, that worlds are made of are made along with the world. But made from what? Not from nothing, after all, but from other worlds. Worldmaking as we know it always starts from worlds already on hand; the making is a remaking.’ p.6 As Found is concerned with the attentiveness, concern for that which exists, with passion for the task of making something from something. It is the technique of reaction, and is something to be developed. Launching the proposal into the perception of reality gives it open ended possibilities and these ideas only begin to uncover the potential of the tower.

Fig. 8 - Infinite Banality - Overgate Tower Facades 19

2000s Rebuilt Overgate Centre opens. The only one sided shopping centre in Europe.

2017 Proposed demolition of Robertsons’ Furnishings Store Category B Listed

2000 1940S Lindsay Street + Tally Street before Overgate development

1564 The Howff is gifted by Mary Queen of Scots and used as the ‘meeting place’ for the Nine Incorporation Trades of Dundee

1960s The Overgate was designed and constructed

1900

1800

1400

1950s Telephone Exchange opened on Willison Street

1970s The Wellgate Shopping Centre is constructed. Leading to the decline of the Overgate.

1970-2000 Continuing clearance of mills and housing around telephone exchange

2100

Pre-1879 Overgate connecting to the Marketgait before demolitions

1480s The Steeple Church or ‘St Mary’s’ is completed by the Town Council of Dundee after numerous rebuilds and extensions.

2011 Dundee City Council moves into its new offices designed by Reiach and Hall

2017 City House is only occupied on two floors by offices

Fig. 9-21 20

‘The debris of shipwrecked histories still today raise up the ruins of an unknown, strange city. They burst forth within the modernistic homogenous city like slips of the tongue from an unknown, perhaps unknown language.’ (Certeau, 1998)

DEFINING THE MONADNOCK The concept of the tower as a monadnock which is designed and considered as a celebratory object is a quasi-abstract idea; peeling back the detritus and revealing the ordinary structure and studying its ordinary appeal which has a result of stratification that needs to be understood before reacting and remaking.

‘The physical artefact can be a powerful holder of meaning … there exists a threshold of density or presence which buildings must embody if they are to have the capacity to hold meaning.’ (Caruso + St John, 1996) The Overgate Tower is a hidden object due its unique situation, placed on top of a popular shopping centre defining its ordinary nature; its banal treatment of its elevations and commonplace application of telephone antennae create something ordinary, it is considered too mundane for appreciation. Dundee’s infrastructure and fabric of the city were torn apart in favour of modernist ideals, an expanded waterfront and the appeal to car users over pedestrians. In doing so, this created created a city that became less than what it could be. Dundee’s developments are unique as a city, as it is always looking forward, not back, the outcome of which has created blank static shopping centres and developments, with very little meaning and relation to their landscapes. Sébastien Marot refers to the post Second World War period in which the endlessly copied method that treated landscape as a “flat” plane: buildings were loosely positioned as freestanding objects within this open field (2003). The tower finds itself as a building object ‘loosely placed’

Fig. 22-24 - Overgate Tower from various points in the city, 2016 22

‘If, in your everyday life, you leave a little space open for poetry, you can make visible the invisible.’ (Bottura, 2015)

in the middle of Dundee and has been neglected as time passes around it. The period of industrialization and the reconstruction period after the Second World War are indicative of the Tabula Rasa approach where buildings and places are built from scratch and have little attention paid to the meaning and contribution of each place. (Marot, 2003) Often, solutions these problems tend to favour showing little regard to any existing framework of our cities and choose to instead replace the old with the new; at great environmental, social, and cultural cost. (Fulcher, 2016) The statement ‘there is no there there’ (Stein, 1937) was used to describe and lament the idea of place taken away. There is nothing to remember or remark upon of the previous history. The layering upon historic routes and what came before in Dundee shows the lack of understanding in importance of these routes and connection to the city. ‘Does it have no identity, is it undifferentiated, uncentred, unbounded?’ (Musch, 2001) The ‘Monadnock’ or the Overgate Tower is embedded within the shopping centre. The boundary is undefined from the between the sky and the ground. The loss of its identity was created/or furthered through the redevelopment of the Overgate Shopping Centre. It lost its only connection to the ground once the Overgate Centre was internalised. Architecture is often seen as an object or product and is conceived as a goal; once the building has been built, it is there. In the hidden nature of the tower and giving it new life where manipulation of the visible becomes the object of perceptive intrigue, it can become an object within space. From its conception to present day the concern to make visible the invisible, to present itself to the city could inform

Fig. 25 - 1920s Overgate Route with Tower Imposed on top. Fig. 26 - Historic Routes converging 24

Fig. 27 - Overgate Tower on 1920s Historic Model 26

Fig. 28 - Historic Map of Overgate Area, 1920s. Tower imposed on top. 27

‘I am not obsessed with the idea of a clean sheet...our responsibility is to find clues in memory and context. … There is a familiarity and yet there is a shock, and I find that jolt very interesting.’ (Chipperfield in Avermaete, Haddad + Rifkind, 2014)

the way we engage with the city itself. It is to define the forgotten landscapes, and hidden away monadnocks and the lost hinterlands back into the fold of the city, all of them significant in our history and waiting to be re-examined. (Allford, 2016) There is a need for to contemplate the meaning of buildings, objects and landscapes and its inherent history that affect one another.

‘The world around us, so much of it our own creation, shifts continually and often bewilders us.’(Lynch,1976) In What Time is this Place?, Kevin Lynch (1976) writes about the complexity and time within cities. He gives a poetic description in which he suggests that places with a strong historical context and history are the interesting ones:

‘Layering is used as a deliberate device of aesthetic expression – the visible accumulation of overlapping traces from successive periods, each trace modifying and being modified by the new additions, to produce something like a collage of time. It is the sense of depth in an old city that is so intriguing. The remains uncovered imply the layers still hidden (…).’ p.171 The tower is defined by nothing other than its binding relationship to the Overgate Shopping Centre. The route below the tower is historically important as one of the four ‘gaits’ into the city centre and has the potential to become once more defined as a gait through the tower. Koolhaas’ Generic City (1995) observes the contemporary city unhampered by any sense of moral obligation towards the ‘classicism’

Fig. 29 - Layered Drawings of Tower’s influences and influencers surrounding. 28

of the past. The tower has literally been ‘loosely placed’ on top of the route with little regard for the history of Dundee. Underneath the Overgate Tower, the existing shopping centre has become a bottle neck for people moving through the centre. It is a ‘non-place’, a commuter corridor and this leaves Overgate Tower as a non-entity, and does not manifest itself within the public realm.

ury

20th Century

21st Century

The aesthetic style of brutalist movement it was introduced under conveys its character. The tower’s structure and façade rhythms become important factors and the potential perception through deeper analysis of the tectonics of the building; with the exposure of its hidden identity in the cityscape. Rossi believes that the history of a city and its past can have an influential role in architecture. This point has become a commonplace thought. It is almost too common, and what is a culturally critical approach devolves into a fashions statement. (Herzog, 1997) Overgate’s Tower has been built on top of the historic route of the ‘Overgait’. Whether through arbitrary reasoning or poetic statement the tower is inherently tied into the fabric through accident, statement or not. Overgate Tower was a beacon of a new way of working within a city centre. Beleaguered attempts to make it what it should have been are not working, evident by only two floors being occupied. The potential uses for the tower could be numerous but for architecture, it has begun to have a have diminished responsibility for a narrow descriptive programme, even for adaptive reuse; what has become clear is, the ideas of use for a building are of less value now than what architecture can do for the everyday.

21st Century

Fig. 30 - 1960s New Town Development + Fig. 31 - Existing Situation of Overgate 30

‘Grounded in the everyday, we still seek the sublime in architecture.’ (Tuomey, 2004)

TOUCH THE GROUND We learn from our ancestors and there are certain memories and historical events connected to places. The area in front of the tower was an important feature for Dundee, as it was the local ‘meeting place’. The Luckenbooths, Town Hall and Union Hall were all located around the location of the tower. The object as a celebration of the route underneath, and its presence in the city could become part of the new ordinary. The discovery of influences on the tower through layers of historical drawings created a connection between the itself and the ‘gait’ in to the centre of Dundee. In turn, Overgate Tower manifests itself as a palimpsest, through placing the form on top of these historic layers;

‘The land, so heavily charged with traces and with past readings, seems very similar to a palimpsest.’ (Corboz, 1983) p.150 If there were unique spaces carved into the public realm against the ordinary could this help to celebrate the tower against a backdrop? With unique moments created amongst the ordinary; and spaces created within the facelessness of the metropolis, this could be regarded as the ordinary or potentially becoming the extraordinary in the backdrop. Grounding the tower physically in the city, is to give it a poetic meaning through its ordinary identity. It is a poetic task for architecture, but for the heft of the tower it becomes a social kind also, pertaining to the idea of ordinary life and social occasion around. Therefore, the building ought to belong where it is built, so it can ‘recast’ its existing conditions in a new light. (Toumey, 2004) Extending and consolidating the existing urban context that surrounds it, opening itself up to the city as an object in space, an Objet Trouvé.

Fig. 32 - Overgate Tower Structure on Van Doesburg’s Russian Dance, 1918 32

Some form of spatial enclosure is conditional to a place being able to develop. According to theorists such as Lynch and Cullen, the lack of spatial enclosure is a major cause of the loss of public space. Frampton explains that a sense of place can be restored and defined by adding public external spaces such as shopping streets to the city. (Musch, 2001) External public spaces and streets to be formed around the tower can define its locale within the city and helps to redefine the heart of the city centre in front of the tower.

â&#x20AC;&#x2DC;Man does not live in the construction but in the atmosphere generated by the surfaces.â&#x20AC;&#x2122; (Doesburg, 1928 p.261)

In Van Doesburgâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s theosophical approach to painting he explores the harmony that exists between things on the ideal, divine level and what is hidden underneath the chaotic surface; the images of everyday existence. As he abstracts his work into something more representational, he peels away the chaotic layers and represents the harmonious space beyond. Art that could make people aware of, and allow them to experience, a spiritual perspective. The opacity and transparency create a dialogue within a simple process of sliding and adjusting a series of vertical and horizontal planes which are strategically located within the structure to produce a synthesis of the space. The planes begin to form the space underneath the tower are adjusted to the structural values of what the tower needs and the spaces formed through the planar surfaces. Surface is fundamentally important. It bounds the spaces that architects wish to create: limitless space is delineated with walls, upon which surface is inherent. It is important to distinguish between material and surface, as

Fig. 33 - Worm Axo - Overgate Tower + Fig. 34 - Architectural Analysis, Van Doesburg, 1923 34

material that is purely faux may become superficial and lose meaning, whereas surface is integral. Architecture can become something more qualitative as well as the quantitative in terms of the everyday and its perception, therefore acknowledging the importance of architectural delight and beauty from celebrating the â&#x20AC;&#x2DC;undercroftâ&#x20AC;&#x2122; of the tower could be enriching the ordinary in its street presence and above. Delight and pleasure may then become part of Dundeeâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s city centre that were heretofore not tactile and experienced through surface.

Fig. 35 - Celebrating the Ordinary - Forming Public Spaces 36

‘In my opinion, a tall building has to have a crown, it has to end on something that suggests that the building is in dialogue with the sky.’ (Pelli, 2017)

TOUCH THE SKY

The silhouette of Dundee is a strange mixture exposing the historic layers of Dundee, from its mills, church spires to high rise towers; it cannot be removed and yet it cannot be reached, and it is in a state of transience and ambiguity. The definition of horizon is ‘to delimit’; the horizon, or ‘the line’ so to speak delimits the earth and the sky. Essentially what is decided to be placed there can become an important factor in how a city and its silhouette is perceived. Moving across the bridge the spires and towers of Dundee become visible and then legible relative to each other, slowly clarifying masses and spaces. The Overgate Tower becomes visible as part of the composition of Dundee’s skyline. (Parry, 2015) Dundee’s skyline has a relationship with the River Tay to the south and the Law Hill delineating the top of the city. The majority of the tower’s connection to the city is purely through its relationship to the cityscape. Street presence is cut off by the shopping centre, and even the top of the tower has a weak relationship due its usage for telephone antennae. The opportunity to create something unique on the ground can be carried through to the top of the tower. Its presence in the city has the potential to be celebrated in a unique way. ‘One aspires for the sky, and I understand that, it is so powerful. It cannot be a shaft that is all the same from top to bottom. That is to me a silly building.’ (Pelli, 2017)

CAIRD HALL

LAW HILL

OVERGATE TOWER

Fig. 36 - Dundee Skyline with Overgate Tower, 38

The skyline has physical and emotional capacity to touch the sky. The limitations of tower have been imposed by the telephone antennae. The tower below has been cut off at the knees with the regenerated shopping centre. The vistas planned and framed within the Overgateâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s town centre development of the 60s have been closed away to the outside. Within the town, registering the tower in a view is more difficult as it becomes concealed with little opportunity to present itself to the city; only when moving across the Tay Road bridge, Dundeeâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s tallest buildings and steeples begin to register themselves in the city skyline. Touching the sky in individual ways the tower must seek to find its own identity within the city and standout.

Is the concept of a vertical city an ideal that could be harkened back to? Living high should not mean living like caged birds, but should provide what the old order had, with added views, privacy from overlooking, and safety of movement. Movement up and down as well as along and around the corner, so that our immediate neighbours are increased not decreased. (Smithsons, 1970) The capabilities of the tower to house third age residents being to look at the idea of living high. The development of the programme for the tower emerged from the idea of the tower being hidden from the city, in a similar circumstance elderly people also need to feel a sense of belonging and neighbourliness within their neighbourhood; key features of a successful, close-knit community. The greyness of the tower sinks into the background of the city, and

Fig. 37 - Overgate Elevation Development. 40

merges behind other tall elements. It is not just this; the modular brutalist form of the building makes it almost invisible; it’s ugliness is a blot in Dundee, an awkward reminder that Dundee’s history was pulled apart in favour of the 1960s comprehensive town development. We build our ideas of the everyday by imagery and our senses. By presenting this information in novel patterns, artistic inventions alter our sensibilities – change what we see and therefore how we conceive the world and again how we look at it. There are unique temporal changes of our environment that will not only delight us but also enliven our image of time and help us to heal the breach between the abstract intellectual concept and our emotional sense of it. (Lynch, 1976)

‘The horizon cuts across the spatial distinction between inside and outside. In the horizon, exteriority merges with interiority.’ (Parry, 2015) Fig. 38 - Overgate Tower. 2016 42

The following drawings begin to use the ideas of tracing, to investigate the tectonics of the towerâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s facades.

All authorâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s own. 44

‘The exterior becomes like the interior. The surface becomes spacial. The surface ‘attracts.’’ (Herzog, 2006)

TECTONICS OF THE FACADE Sunset and dawn, new leaves on branches, the gathering of people in a lift, and the homeward-bound employees released on the city streets – these all become clichés and the everyday, like good clichés, never fail to interest us. (Lynch, 1976) Design can provide a transitional form to shape this act of change. Redecoration becomes ritual; it becomes part of the everyday. Buildings should embody this urban idea and mirror the success of the city, accommodating communities of varying uses and acting as a background to the life of its inhabitants. (Allford, 2016)

The altering and emphasis of the tower’s characteristics has potential in celebrating the ordinary. If one accepts that architecture is about altering and extending what is already there, then one can engage the presence of the real so that the feeling of urbanity is extended in the place that one is working. (Caruso, 2008) The Smithson’s coined ‘As Found’ as a positive stance; the notion of attributing a certain qualitative nature to the pre-existing is unusual; the remark ‘been there’ is usually intended to disparage and is usually understood that way. The tendency to engage with what is there, to recognize the existing, to follow its traces with interest: this has the potential for new insights and forms of celebration through the lives of the residents.

Fig. 1 - Overgate Tower, 2008 56

Fig. 39 - Overgate Tower - Elevational Model Study. 57

Fig. 40 - Palazzo Abatellis, Door Detail + Roof Detail + Repeated Window Test 58

Tracing can also be a method of remaking. For the remodelling of the Palazzo Abatellis, in Palermo Scarpa, the technique of tracing was used to mark time within the rendering of the façade. The lines that were created on the façade, in the end, became an architectural gesture, almost an ornament. In this respect, Richard Murphy stated:

‘ With a series of vertical and horizontal scored lines in the rendering Scarpa marked each day of work so that together with the rectangular windows the palace is being layered with a subtle thin and modern new white skin.’ (2014) A proposal for living one’s life in the ‘everyday’ Smithsons stated that a city is living organism; adding something new to it would renew and reorientate itself accordingly (Smithsons, 1970) The idea of the palimpsest makes us aware that certain things can be remade, recovered and given new life: architecture as a remaking. The view of the tower shows its modular ordinariness, recognizing this as its existing layer; the tower can begin to be viewed as something playful. Architecture becomes interesting when it is ‘enmeshed in the patterns of everyday life’. (Leatherbarrow, 2009)

Fig. 41 - Palazzo Abatellis, Window Detail 60

As residents of the tower they embody its character and identity. Its form is reinterpreted for its uses; a celebration of the interior, exterior, bottom and top. The ‘boring can be good’ where boring doesn’t negate humanity and character. (Allford, 2016) The idea that this tower is boring could be hard to define as it’s whole appearance and need for use changes. It is there for the residents, to celebrate themselves within the city and give themselves an identity, Dundee city must better appreciate the widespread benefits and more balanced communities that intergenerational housing can bring. We want vibrant communities and keeping older people near their family and friends where they’ve perhaps lived all their life – that is what we would all want to see. (Taylor, 2016) How to make extra ordinary architecture that is made from the ordinary has led to a strategy which is to make the generic specific to current use without in any way precluding further uses in an unknowable future. (Allford, 2016) The risk of tampering with the everyday, ‘bettering’ the tower may cause potential loss of its ordinary character, the commonplace may be lost and something like a rudimentary stranger is in its place. As the characters try to restore the ‘dear ordinary’ ‘performing the rituals of the ordinary as an act of faith, as if re-enacting the commonplace would make it merely commonplace is irrevocably altered. The ordinary cannot be revived.’ (Fausch, 2014) A need to rebalance the ordinary and the remaking of the ordinary become different tangible things.

Fig. 1 - Overgate Tower, 2008 62

Fig. 42 - Everyday Life underneath the Layers. 63

Fig. 43 - Everyday Life at Overgate Tower 64

Fig. 44 - Everyday Life in Dundee. 65

‘A building that talks of the everyday yet has an undercurrent of the extraordinary’ (Gillespie, 2015)

CELEBRATING THE ORDINARY In recent times there has been a drive to the iconic, yet, the boring has become special instead. Something that is deliberately, intentionally not special; the ordinary is no longer mundane but it has become distinct from others. Recent projects by Caruso St John, Sergison Bates and O’Donnell + Tuomey have been lauded in the architecture periodicals for their unassuming identities and seamless integration within their contexts. The banal has become beautiful. It has become celebrated within architecture, but how can that be tempered with existing banality?

Sergison Bates’ approach to their buildings is to create little distinction between the new, the old, or the exciting. In pulling the ordinary into their buildings they begin to pull a diachronic nature in their designs and enable them to virtually disappear in their surroundings. They looked very ordinary and at the same time very exceptional. (Ursprung, 2005)

The promise of Rossi and of Venturi is put to good use in work that uses typology to rediscover a purpose and a place for architecture in the city: buildings that employ ‘normal’ construction techniques to extraordinary artistic ends. Work that develops a critical attitude towards building in the contemporary city, neither blind ‘reconstruction of the European city’ nor a prolongation of the post-war difference, but a true architecture of the Everyday. (Caruso, 2009) Caruso St John’s approach to architecture is to be inspired by the everyday and create a contemporary architecture from it, stylistically. These architects speak of a new a type of architecture that takes its inspirations from the ordinary and turn it into something Avant Garde and intellectual. Allford from AHMM states that,

Fig. 45 - Celebrating the Tower. 66

‘it is in the field of everyday building that modern architecture has failed the city… to survive architecture it must make a memorable impression.’ (2016) If no new contemporary architecture from Caruso St John or the clean Modernism that eschews the everyday, then there is no precedent to be set for how the ordinary can be set within architecture. For it to make a memorable impression and ‘survive architecture’ then a precedent must be set to not only be inspired by the everyday but to celebrate it within the city. Overgate Tower is to become part of a ‘healing’ approach to the ordinary and not a mere repetition of it. Caruso St John and Sergison Bates are the most prolific of architects who use the ordinary to be celebrating but also have adapted it as style in their own work. Their work has been lauded as sensitive architecture, and it’s worst, a simple imitation of the ordinary. If architecture can celebrate the ordinary in a different way, separated from the styled ordinary and refocus on the everyday life of the inhabitants and users it may begin to show more inspiration than mere style.

Fig. 46 - v 68

CONCLUSION ‘There are unique temporal changes of our environment that will not only delight us but also enliven our image of time and help us to heal the breach between the abstract intellectual concept and our emotional sense of it.’ (Lynch, 1976) Architecture’s drive to marry the everyday with the pure aesthetic style falters when there is no underlying meaning to attach itself to. Identity must be given to the banal. The tower could be given an identity; one that is different from its former self. To recreate the tower as an extraordinary object within its space; distinguishing its unique presence. However, by giving the tower an altered identity is its poetic everyday lost? As an object of banality centred in the city the use of artistic means to rediscover its potential use within the city could be seen as the marrying of everyday and artistic style. The tower can be used as a tool of the everyday, and of the hidden ordinary. It begins to explore the idea of found object, an art form that is worthy of special distinction amongst the many elements of Dundee. Can the everyday, banal, and unnoticed be designed at all without destroying its essential nature as unremarkable, unremarked, and unplanned? Can an architecture that designs the ordinary, in other words, itself be ordinary? Or does it not, by its reform of the ordinary, step outside of that realm into that of the artful, and therefore the extraordinary? (Fausch, 2012) This is the intrinsic nature between that of the everyday and the poetic object.

Fig. 47 - Celebrating the Tower. Top to Bottom 70

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