Urban Realm Summer 2017

VOL7 ISSUE30 SUMMER 2017

S P I C E OF F I F E :

DUNFERMLINE DEPOSITORY SCOTTISH DESIGN AWARDS COSMIC COLLISIONS LOST PERTHSHIRE

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M

I F TO AN ES

Strength and stability stand out as inalienable principles of any construction project but what happens when the nation itself is lacking both attributes?

Amidst tragedy and uncertainty we seek solace in the arms of TV architecture evangelist and perennial optimist George Clarke, who aims to channel his passion by preaching firmer foundations for the construction industry through his Ministry of Building Information (pg 48).

Taking respite from the turmoil we then bunker down in the former Barnton Quarry nuclear bunker (pg 26). Since decommissioned its very existence can no longer be dismissed as quaint paranoia.

We also find refuge at the bottom of a champagne glass amongst this years Scottish Design Awards winners (pg 12).

A stellar line-up they show, together with Dunfermline Carnegie Library & Galleries (pg 38), what can be achieved in adversity.

Our focus lies with landscape architecture however, to which we devote 14 pages documenting the professions enduring success (pg 74). The theme continues with a look at a proposed surf centre in Ratho, Edinburgh (pg 32), another former quarry with a surprising second life.

We also travel to the convivial environs of Sanquhar in the Borders (pg 58) to relax in the company of Charles Jencks and Daniel Liebskind - two industry greats who find themselves confronting celestial concerns.

We then fall back to Earth with a bump with a trip to Perthshire (pg 88) in the company of Mark Chalmers, who laments a lost generation of country houses and castles.

I hope Urban Realm provides a soothing balm for what promises to be a long hot summer ahead.

John Glenday, Editor

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CONT ENTS QUARTERLY DIGEST 12 SCOTTISH DESIGN AWARDS 26 BARNTON QUARRY 32 WAVEGARDEN 38 DUNFERMLINE LIBRARY & GALLERIES 48 HOUSING CRISIS 58 COSMIC COLLISIONS 68 EMPLOYEE OWNERSHIP 74 LANDSCAPE ARCHITECTURE 88 LOST PERTHSHIRE 90 BRE 96 DIRECTORY 97 PRODUCTS 04

Cover image: Dunfermline Carnegie Library & Galleries, Fife Council

OUR EDITORIAL PANEL INCLUDES:

John Glenday

Mark Chalmers, architecture writer and photographer

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Paul Stallan, director, Stallan-Brand

David Ross, design director, Keppie

Chris Stewart, director, Collective Architecture

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Q U A R T E R L Y D I G E S T A P R

THIMBLEROW THUMBS-UP

BRIEFS

Perth & Kinross Council have approved outline plans for a major mixed-use scheme in the Thimblerow area of the city, clearing the way for submission of a detailed planning application.

Dualchas Architects have marked their 21st anniversary with a practice re-brand that has seen it adopt the image of a wild Hebridean goat, a symbol of resistance dating back to the Highland clearances, as a new identity.

The charging goat motif symbolizes the replacement if people with sheep throughout the region, a process which saw domesticated goats left behind to run feral.

Referred to as the Mill Quarter the development will establish a mix of restaurants, speciality shops, a multi-screen cinema, 58 apartments, and a multi-storey car park by spring 2019.

LBA have secured planning permission to build four apartments in North Berwick by converting the B-listed Blenheim House.

This will entail construction of a two storey new build addition together with a full refurbishment of the existing property retaining its large rooms, original cornicing, sash and case windows and fireplaces.

GROUNDS FOR OPTIMISM

GREEN FOR GO AT INVERKEITHING

Plans have been put together by Cameron Webster Architects and Loader & Monteith for the creation of 38 flats within the grounds of the B-listed Carnbooth House Hotel in Carmunnock, Glasgow.

Ola Properties intend to extend the arts and crafts mansion through recreation of a lost courtyard via a new function suite – funded by building new homes within the grounds.

7N Architects have filed a detailed planning application for the construction of 16 new homes at Manse Road, Inverkeithing, on behalf of Kingdom Housing Association.

The homes will be delivered in partnership with landscape architects Rankin Fraser in order to integrate the homes with public and private grounds to create a safe and comfortable family friendly environment.

URBAN REALM SUMMER 2017 URBANREALM.COM

City of Edinburgh Council has lent its support to a 1,330 home masterplan for the New Brunstane district of the city spearheaded by the EDI Group and Area.

Including 300 affordable homes the scheme will deliver a family-oriented neighbourhood complete with a new primary school and civic centre incorporating retail, commercial and community facilities.

The University of Edinburgh has filed a change of use and restoration application to extend the A-listed surgical building at the former Edinburgh Royal Infirmary to form a new educational facility and events space.

Spearheaded by Bennetts Associates and Faithful & Gould the Quartermile initiative will repurpose the historic building to offer 21,300sq/m of floor space, 6,000sq/m of which will be new build, returning the site to its original configuration of six Nightingale wards and a clocktower, Construction should get underway next year.

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Q U A R T E R L Y A P R D I G E S T PENTLAND STUDIOS ENTER PRODUCTION

SHOPPING MECCA PLANNED

Pentland Studios have won approval in principle to press ahead with a film and television studio at Straiton, Edinburgh.

A detailed planning application for the site will now be drawn up by Keppie for a film studio, academy and energy centre on the Midlothian site, which could also include shops, offices, a 180-room hotel, six sound stages, two backlots and student accommodation.

WSP | Parsons Brinckerhoff will assist in the planning of the £250m facility, which was given consent to proceed despite running contrary to the Midlothian local development plan, working with Midlothian Council to identify routes for the proposed A701 relief road.

Planning permission in principle is being sought for an overhaul of Aberdeen’s Bon Accord Centre with BMO Real Estate bolstering the city centre mall with a complementary hotel, flats and serviced apartments.

Mixed use proposals by Allan Murray Architects and CDA aim to breathe new life into the centre by diversifying away from retail; including a new leisure and restaurant destination.

WICK CAMPUS Hub North Scotland has marked the official opening of Wick Community Campus during the Easter break following completion of the combined high school, primary and community facility.

Incorporating a swimming pool, sports halls and library the £48.5m campus has been designed by Highland Council and Ryder to replace the historic Wick High School following its merger with Pulteneytown Academy Primary and South Primary.

DOUGHNUT EFFECT A £150m mixed use masterplan by Ashfield Land for Blackdog, Aberdeenshire, has cleared planning, following hot on the heels of a housing scheme on the same site put forward by Kirkwood Homes.

The latest approval will see a food hall, retail, cinema, hotel, leisure and business facilities built over the coming decade off the new Aberdeen Western Peripheral Route.

BRIEFS Robertson Group have commenced preparatory work to deliver a £4.95m community facility and nursery on the site of the former Auchinairn Primary near Bishopbriggs, providing a community focal point through a range of facilities from a multipurpose hall to a café, meeting rooms and play area.

Completion of the Holmes Miller designed facility is expected in spring of next year.

EMA Architects have secured planning consent to press ahead with a £17m social housing development in Paisley on behalf of Sanctuary and AS Homes.

Renfrewshire Council’s decision clears the way for work to begin on the Love Street build this summer, including a range of timber frame terraced and semidetached properties.

Highland Council are pressing ahead with plans to build a new community campus on the site of the existing Tain Royal Academy – to provide a mix of primary, secondary, nursery and special needs places, around a series of internal courtyards along a central ‘cloister’.

Graham Construction have moved on-site of a Holmes Miller designed community facility in Dumfries delivered on behalf of Dumfries and Galloway Council and Hub South West.

The Bridge is the third project to be delivered as part of the Dumfries Learning Town initiative and will provide lifelong learning facilities for people of all ages and interests when it opens during winter 2018/19.

Glasgow School of Art have lifted the lid on an ambitious refresh of the former Stow College to create a new School of Fine Art. Led by BDP the conversion will see a new roof built on top of the 1930’s landmark , enabling two new atria to flood the interior below with light, opening in time for the 2018/19 academic year.

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Q U A R T E R L Y D I G E S T M A Y

TIMBER TERRACE

Glencairn Properties and LBA Architects have secured a prized planning consent to deliver three townhouses overlooking Edinburgh’s Royal Observatory and Liberton Tower at Liberton Brae.

The four-bedroom properties will take the place of a disused agricultural barn within a complex of buildings that include a B-listed 19th century farmhouse, converted in an earlier phase of work.

HOMES IN STORE

WAID ACADEMY

ADF Architects have dusted off revised plans to create a mixed-use development comprising a hotel, student residences and a restaurant behind the retained façade of a B-listed art deco furniture store on Dundee’s Barrack Street.

Prepared on behalf of Structured House Group the plans will see the tiled façade repaired and refurbished to serve as a ‘memory’ of the sites historic function.

Arranged in a U-plan the £20m complex will wrap around a central courtyard.

Hub East Central have marked completion of BDP’s Waid Community Campus with a formal handover of the £21.5m school by BAM Construction.

Gathering council services together under one roof the 800-pupil secondary will double-up as a community hub, housing council offices, a library and police station, placing the new facility at the heart of the community.

Pupils and staff moved into the new school in June.

CRAIGIE CAMPUS

FLAT OUT

Keppie Design have secured planning permission in principle for a 102 home residential expansion at the University of the West of Scotland’s Craigie Campus in Ayr. The masterplan calls for delivery of a mix of detached, semi-detached and terraced homes arranged in compliance with Designing Streets and Creating Places principles to embody a central shared activity space to serve as a meeting point for residents, with pedestrians given priority on surrounding streets.

The Riach Partnership have dusted down plans to build 32 apartments on vacant land off Eaglesham Road, Jackton Village, with a formal planning application to South Lanarkshire Council.

Designed on behalf of niche housing developer Robertson Frame the up market scheme will include associated car parking, landscaping and amenity space; taking the form of four aligned blocks under pitched roofs and one smaller off-set addition.

Faced in brick the accommodation wlll flank a shared communal space.

URBAN REALM SUMMER 2017 URBANREALM.COM

BRIEFS Our Enterprise working in conjunction with HTA Design have filed plans for a second phase of development at Dundee Waterfront.

This will establish a creative community by delivering a twist on more conventional homes and office space via a co-working space, a business accelerator unit and a communal area capable of hosting events and exhibitions.

Targeting start-up businesses these ‘urban offices’ – a single floorplate capable of subdivision into as many as three suboffices – will sit alongside 117 professionally managed apartments David Chipperfield has been named as the design lead for a 1,000-seat concert hall behind Dundas House off Edinburgh’s St Andrews Square.

Appointed following a competition conducted under European procurement rules Chipperfield will be tasked with delivering state-of-the-art acoustics as well as a home for the Scottish Chamber Orchestra, educational facilities and a recording studio.

Hiddleston & Feist Architects have brought forward plans to demolish a vacant factory building on Fairmuir Road, Dundee, to create eight homes.

The Baltic Works will be replaced by new homes arranged to form a clearly defined street frontage with living spaces positioned on the upper floor.

Rear gardens occupy sloping ground a half level above the entrance and a half level below upstairs living spaces.

Hackland + Dore are pushing plans to build eight flats on Edinburgh’s Friggate Street, within the city’s Portobello conservation area.

Presently utilized as a communal courtyard and vennel the subject to construction of a three storey infill building containing three studio flats and three two bedroom properties.

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Q U A R T E R L Y M A Y D I G E S T ORKNEY

CITY CITADEL

BRIEFS

Threesixty Architecture have been selected to lead development of the Orkney Research + Innovation Campus, to be housed within the redeveloped former Old Academy and Primary School of Stromness.

The £6.5m project is being led by Highlands and Islands Enterprise and Orkney Islands Council to provide a home for institutes, consultancies and startups in an environment melding research, academia and business. Work is expected to commence onsite later in the year for completion by 2019.

CMM Architects have advanced plans for new short stay accommodation above a ground level café at Fergus Drive in Glasgow’s West End. Housing 77 individual apart-hotel suites the scheme lies a short hop from Byres Road and aims to reconcile the transition from traditional tenements to an estate of 1960’s slab blocks. The development will be finished in uniform sandstone coloured glass fibre reinforced concrete panels with aluminium timber composite windows and doors.

NHS Grampian are to proceed with the planned Baird Family Hospital and Anchor Centre to replace the current maternity hospital at Forresterhill with the expectation of submitting a formal planning application this summer.

This has prompted main contractor Graham Construction begin a search for subcontractors to help deliver the mammoth Norr build, timetabled for completion by 2020.

Sheppard Robson Architects have won planning consent to build 180 flats, maisonettes and town houses on a brownfield site overlooking Edinburgh’s Water of Leith.

Canonmills Garden is being driven by Artisan REI to transition from the river to the New Town by way of four separate blocks of accommodation arranged around a garden square.

GARDEN HEAVE LDA Design have asked that planning be granted for an overhaul of Aberdeen’s Union Terrace Gardens which would see a variety of alterations, repairs, extensions and demolitions carried out within the park.

Amongst the architectural interventions planned are an events entrance building and toilet block; a café pavilion and gallery space within retained Union Terrace arches and an event space. Copper shingle clad raised walkways and curved balustrades will open presently inaccessible points in the grounds. Work could get underway by autumn 2019.

Kearnay Donaid Partnership have revealed their intent to build 32 apartments arranged across four, four-storey blocks on the site of a former petrol filling station on Grampian Road, Aviemore.

Led by Cairngorm Residential the project will provide homes exclusively for private sale following an agreement with Highland Council to locate an affordable housing contribution of 14 homes on a separate site within the town.

Smith Scott Mullan Architects have filed plans for a new fire and rescue training facility at Newbridge, Edinburgh, adjacent to the existing fire service HQ within Claylands Road Industrial Estate. The facility will be used to simulate hazards and disaster scenarios.

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Q U A R T E R L Y D I G E S T J U N

GRANTON WATERFRONT Places for People has submitted plans for 89 new homes on Waterfront Avenue, Granton, designed by Reiach & Hall Architects.

Offering residents a landscaped

courtyard and amenity space the project will restart pre-recession plans for the areas regeneration, including 200 homes designed

by CDA.

BRIEFS Aberdeen City Council has deferred a decision on whether grant approval to Aberdeen Football Club’s Kingsford Stadium plans until October in order to conduct additional environmental surveys for the £50m sports hub.

Despite the delay the club insists it remains on track to deliver the Halliday Fraser Munro designed venue in time for the 2020/21 season.

The National Galleries of Scotland have scaled back plans for an ambitious transformation of its Edinburgh base, after discovering that aspects of the £16.8m Hoskins designed project were more complex and expensive than first thought.

A planned extension will be scaled back as a result to remain within budget.

John Meunier, one of the architects behind Glasgow’s A-listed Burrell Museum now emeritus professor of architecture at Arizona State University, has issued an 11th hour plea to John McAslan & Partners to re-think their plans.

The architects were quick to rebuff the approach however, stating that the changes are ‘required’ to arrest a decline in visitor numbers.

MOXON MANSION An Aberdeenshire shelter has been transformed into studio workspace by Moxon Architects as a temporary office solution for the practice ahead of delivery of a permanent new studio in 2018.

The granite steading retains its agricultural character following the work with new floor, ceilings and staircase treads formed from wide-boarded maritime pine with a steel block insertion providing a kitchen, wet room and storage space.

MISSING LINK 7N Architects have undertaken the design of 199 homes for mid-market rent on behalf of Link Housing Association on brownfield land at Salamander Place, Leith.

Cruden Homes and the Teague Group will move on-site for the project, sandwiched between Leith Links and the docks, later this year - forming part of a wider masterplan which could bring up to 600 homes to the industrial area.

URBAN REALM SUMMER 2017 URBANREALM.COM

CALA Homes have moved onsite of a new build residential project called The Crescent located within the grounds of Edinburgh’s former Donaldson’s College – which will itself be converted to form new apartments.

Designs by Richard Murphy Architects call for full restoration of the A-listed Playfair building, including the removal of tones of soil to allow formation of underground parking.

New build properties on top will take their height and massing cues from nearbys Georgian crecents.

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Q U A R T E R L Y J U N D I G E S T CIRCUS RING

MARYHILL LOCKS

BRIEFS

Expresso Property are to begin work to complete a missing link at Glasgow’s Park Circus next month with construction of 98 homes designed by Holmes Miller.

Park Quadrant Residences will complete the original masterplan of concentric rings conceived by Charles Wilson in 1851 by infilling the final plot of land with new flats finished in natural sandstone to respect the existing Victorian streetscape.

CCG have taken the wraps off a second phase of 19 homes to be delivered at Maryhill Locks, Glasgow.

Spearheaded by Bigg Regeneration the project is situated on the banks of the River Kelvin and Forth and Clyde Canal and was built using CCG’s closed panel timber system.

The McGinley Bell designed properties were manufactured off-site with pre-installed insulation, windows and internal doors.

McAslan & Partners have seen off all challengers to secure a £75m commission to build a new archive facility for the National Galleries of Scotland at Granton, Edinburgh.

Located at Madelvic House, a former car factory, the 30,000sq/m National Collections Facility will be built to Passivhaus standards to provide a low-energy home for more than 100,000 exhibits – including art, sculpture, photographs and publications.

FIN-TASTIC JM Architects have brought forward an application for permission in principle for the mixed-use transformation of an electricity substation in Edinburgh’s Exchange district to accommodate 4,500sq/m of office space, 550 hotel rooms, retail and leisure uses.

Constituting three finned buildings stepping up in scale from the Georgian and Victorian tenements through to the Edinburgh Conference Centre on a central podium built on top of the Edinburgh to Glasgow mainline.

Michael Laird Architects have produced a planning application for the latest addition to Edinburgh’s BioQuarter life sciences campus.

MOB 2 will conform to an existing masterplan for the area in providing a mix of laboratory and office space in a prime central position overlooking a central landscaped avenue.

Planning in principle is being sought for conversion of Dundee’s former Dens Road Market to form an indoor adventure play centre.

Occupying a collection of redundant mill buildings Arktx will fashion a new front elevation created to Dens Road formed from brick, rainscreen cladding and feature glazed projections.

PERTH CITY HALL Perth & Kinross Council are exhibiting five shortlisted designs for the redevelopment of Perth City Hall.

Austin-Smith:Lord with MVRDV, Hoskins, LDN, Mecanoo and Richard Murphy are all

bidding for the cultural commission, which will see interactive displays, learning facilities and a meeting space housed within the historic venue as a centrepiece of the city’s 2021 UK City of Culture bid.

The Scottish Government has launched a tower block safety review in the wake of the Grenfell Tower blaze in London as part of a wider review of building standards in the wake of the tragedy.

While no high-rises north of the border have been identified as using the type of flammable cladding employed down south Holyrood will nevertheless work closely with local authorities to provide an ‘additional layer of scrutiny’ to ensure that existing blocks are safe to provide reassurances for residents.

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SCOTTISH DESIGN AWARDS

TWENT Y TWENT Y V I S I ONS

Reiach & Hall scored big with Oriam - Scotland’s Performance Centre, which hit the ball out the park both figuratively and literally at the SDA’s

FRESH FROM THE TWENTIETH ANNIVERSARY OF THE SCOTTISH DESIGN AWARDS URBAN REALM SHOWCASES ALL THE CATEGORY WINNERS FROM THE MOST DRUNKEN NIGHT IN ARCHITECTURE. WE ALSO DELVE BEHIND THE SCENES FROM THE JUDGING TO REVEAL WHO MADE THE BIGGEST WAVES. The Scottish Design Awards, held in partnership with Urban Realm, have marked a second decade of exemplary design in style with recognition for a welter of prize-worthy work from Reiach & Hall’s translucent Oriam sports centre and the domestic finery of Ann Nisbet’s Newhouse of Auchengree to the historical echo provide by Page\Park’s Spens Building.

Open to both architecture practices and design agencies the awards span the full gamut of creativity; from affordable housing to commercial offices and schools and once again recognise those projects which have done most to push the envelope while addressing issues of sustainability – all while meeting the needs of clients and individual end users.

Oriam knocked the ball out the park this year as winner of the architecture Grand Prix, lauded by jurors for its ‘integrity, social role and beauty’, an accolade which sent the team on to pick up the coveted title of Practice of the Year. The judges remarked: “It’s an elegant structure and the translucent URBAN REALM SUMMER 2017 URBANREALM.COM

covering rises head and shoulders above other similar sports centres, literally and in its beauty.”

Newhouse of Auchengree saw Ann Nisbet studio win out in the residential category, with Parry full of praise for what had been achieved: “I thought it was bloody good as a single house. A little bit uptight and tending toward a one-liner but an excellent submission. There’s such a love in this.” Lewis added: “The light on those facades is very nice. The scale works well with the form. In the brief they said the couple wanted to have the space for extended family but not to feel they were in a big house, there’s a logic to the divide.”

Meanwhile heading up the health category was Eastwood Health and Care Centre delivered by Hoskins Architects, of which Parry said: “It’s a polite, well-organised and mature piece of considered architecture which uses brick in a considered way, with elegant use of timber to give a comfortable sense of scale within complexity. It’s approachable with a good >

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SCOTTISH DESIGN AWARDS

© KEITH HUNTER

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Above - City of Glasgow College - City Campus by Nichael Laird and Reiach & Hall was in step with judges opinion URBAN REALM SUMMER 2017 URBANREALM.COM

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Above - Moxon’s Culardoch Shieling would melt the coldest of hearts

courtyard space.”

Over in the education category a head to head tussle between City of Glasgow College City Campus by Michael Laird and Reiach and Hall and Page\Park’s Spens Building for Fettes College threatened to spill over into the judging room. Giving voice to their dilemma Parry commented: “How on Earth do you balance the material quality and detailing of a private endeavor like Fettes and City Campus?”

In the end the team elected to give two awards with Parry praising The Spens Building for its use of ‘Nice materials made to last, a nice echo of the historic buildings. The attention to detail will stand the test of time and it is environmentally responsive in performance.” Banging the drum for its Glaswegian counterpart Lewis called it ‘A heroic undertaking in relation to a complex brief. Beautifully accomplished.’

Sentiments echoed by Pelan who said: “It’s elegant as a civic building and important to have steps to sit on.”

The Royal Edinburgh Military Tattoo scooped the top spot for best re-use of a listed building for its design team; which included Calum Duncan Architects, Harley Haddow, Hardies Surveyors, David Narro Associates, Kevin Shaw Lighting Design, Astute Fire and Malcolm Fraser Architects.

German was full of praise for the ‘Beautifully done, refined

Organised by:

Sponsored by:

aesthetic shown throughout’. Sentiments shared by Lewis who welcomed ‘returning the building to its original qualities’.

As far as low-cost projects valued at under £200k were concerned the Houldsworth Centre and Hunter Community Health Centre Public Art by Fourtwentyseven Design proved to be the scheme to beat with German pleased at the embrace of artwork in a health building to ‘make a positive contribution to wellbeing.’ Parry added: “It brings a narrative to rather banal spaces.”

On the night it was Stallan Brand who proved victorious in the affordable housing category courtesy of its ‘industrial’ swagger while Holyrood North by HarrisonStevens livened up the public realm and landscaping courtesy of its ‘Exemplary high density’. Parry said: “It’s fit for purpose in the way it slots into the city. To fit 1,100 units in that way is very good.” Lewis added: ”This to me is of merit for assessment of the landscape.”

Award arbiters were led this year by Eric Parry, founder, Eric Parry Architects who was joined by John Pelan of the Scottish Civic Trust; Andrew German, partner, Sheppard Robson and Penny Lewis, lecturer at the Scott Sutherland School of Architecture.

For those who couldn’t make it along on the night we present a full list of all award-winning work here.

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SCOTTISH DESIGN AWARDS

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01 - Affordable Housing: Laurieston; Stallan Brand for Laurieston Living 02 - Residential: Newhouse of Auchengree; Ann Nisbet Studio for Dr & Mrs Law 03 - Re-use of a Listed Building: The Royal Edinburgh Military Tattoo; Calum Duncan Architects with Malcolm Fraser Architects URBAN REALM SUMMER 2017 URBANREALM.COM

© GILLIAN HAYES

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SCOTTISH DESIGN AWARDS

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© KEITH HUNTER

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URBAN REALM SUMMER 2017 URBANREALM.COM

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01 - Future Project: Fasque masterplan, RankinFraser, Malcolm Fraser & LDN for Fasque Estate 02 - Public Realm/Landscaping: Holyrood North, HarrisonStevens for The University of Edinburgh 03 - Interior Design: Macs Adventure, Julia Grant & Ormond Design

Š KEITH HUNTER

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SCOTTISH DESIGN AWARDS

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© ANDREW LEE

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01 - Leisure/Culture: The Spens Buiding, Page\Park for Fettes College 02 - Chairman’s Award: Culardoch Shieling, Moxon for Iwan & Manuela Wirth

SCOTTISH DESIGN AWARDS

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© GILLIAN HAYES

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© GILLIAN HAYES

© ROSS CAMPBELL

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01 - Low Cost Project: Houldsworth Centre and Hunter Community Health Centre Public Art: Fourtwentyseven Design for NHS Lanarkshire 02 - Commercial: ISO Design Studio, McGinlay Bell for ISO Design 03 - Health: Eastwood Health Centre, Hoskins Architects for Hub West Scotland and NHS Greater Glasgow and Clyde

EVALUATE RATIONALISE CHALLENGE DELIVER WWW.ASTUTEFIRE.COM

EDINBURGH

Scottish Design Award 2017 Affordable Housing Laurieston Living

80 Nicholson Street Glasgow G5 9ER info@stallanbrand.com 0141 258 5015 www.stallanbrand.com

GLASGOW

LONDON

SCOTTISH DESIGN AWARDS

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© LEE LIVE

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01 - Lighting: The Scott Monument, KSLD for The City of Edinburgh Council 02 - Regeneration: Holyrood North, JM Architects & Oberlanders for The University of Edinburgh

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BARNTON QUARRY SEAN KINNEAR

CURRENT GEOPOLITICAL RUPTURES HAVE INSPIRED URBAN REALM TO INDULGE IN A SPOT OF MILITARY ARCHAEOLOGY, SENDING ARCHITECTURE GRADUATE SEAN KINNEAR DEEP DOWN TO THE DUSTY DEPTHS OF BARNTON QUARRY. ONCE A ‘REGIONAL SEAT OF GOVERNMENT’ IN WAITING FOR A POST-APOCALYPTIC SCOTLAND IT IS IN PROCESS OF BEING REBORN AS A COLD WAR MUSEUM.

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BARNTON QUARRY

Left - Cold War politicians could be said to have duct the issue Right - There is plenty to stop and stair at in Barnton

As diplomatic tensions regularly approach boiling point, news headlines continue to report on North Korean missile tests, an ongoing debate over Trident and the RAF scrambling to intercept the occasional Russian bomber teasing the fringes of UK airspace.

All the while, a small but dedicated team work 60ft below ground at Barnton Quarry in Edinburgh, restoring a disused ex-government bunker. The three- storey facility buried below the quarry is a left-over relic from the Cold War, but it intends to open its doors once again in 2019 as an interactive museum and educational hub with dedicated spaces for touring exhibitions.

Barnton Quarry, once the ‘Regional Seat of Government’ for Scotland in the event of a nuclear attack, has operated in a variety of roles dating back to its use by fighter command during the Second World War. The subterranean installation was constructed between 1954 - 56 to act as the ‘Sector Operations Centre’ for Scotland. Initially the facility was tasked with monitoring and plotting potential Russian bombing raids by collating the vast information received from an extensive radar network across the country. As the Cold War era evolved developments in technology and weaponry saw the emergency plans for Scotland in a state of constant flux, subsequently changing the status of the bunker to ‘Air Defence Notification Centre North’ through to 1958. It remained secret until 1963 when a group known as ‘Spies for Peace’ broke into URBAN REALM SUMMER 2017 URBANREALM.COM

the Regional Seat of Government in Warren Row, Berkshire and leaked the classified network to the press. In its latter years, under Ministry of Works control, it operated as the ‘Scottish Central Emergency Government HQ’ until 1983 before being finally decommissioned and handed to Lothian Council in 1984. The site was purchased by a developer and lay empty for years, becoming a hot spot for urban exploration, vandals and thieves. In 1993 a fire ripped through the facility causing damage to some of the internal areas.

During the Cold War period both sides of the Iron Curtain explored this archaic form of architecture and constructed underground fallout shelters in preparation for a nuclear attack. Switzerland still maintains a civil defence law stating all inhabitants must have access to a fallout shelter; a practice continued to this day with underground bunkers constructed to accompany new buildings across the country.

In Britain, most government bunkers were constructed during the early 1950’s until the early 1990’s. Cultybraggan in Perthshire and Ballymena in Northern Ireland were amongst two of the more modern examples built. The bunker at Barnton Quarry is type ‘R4’ that originates from the ROTOR programme. The construction initiative led by the Ministry of Air appointed Mott Hay & Anderson as the design consultant, the civil engineering firm specialised in tunnel and road solutions within Britain and were involved in the London deep level shelters during the Blitz. The scheme created a network of >

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BARNTON QUARRY

modular facilities prefixed with the letter ‘R’. These structures were crucial in re-establishing an updated air defence strategy for the nation, one that needed to cope with the modern threats posed in the Atomic Age. The modular underground bunkers were constructed using the ‘cut and cover’ technique, where a large hole was excavated to suit the facility type size requirements. This was then lined with a course gravel substrate to account for movement and drainage, a reinforced concrete slab was poured on top, then a layer of waterproofing membrane before a secondary concrete slab was laid. At Barnton Quarry the external walls were also reinforced concrete, up to 3 metres deep with a coat of bitumen paint for waterproofing. The roof, concrete cast in steel troughs was capped with a final top mound of soil that blended with the surrounding landscape and removed any trace of what lay beneath. Interior dividing walls were a mix of brick and timber frames, lined with cork, clad with boarding and finished with paint. Access to the tunnel was via the single-story structure used by fighter command at the quarry level.

Other subterranean facilities around the country were accessed through unsuspicious surface buildings that resembled the local vernacular to detract any attention from eyes above.

Declassified files in the National Records of Scotland detail the scientific advisor’s branch of the Home Office civil defence department believed the R4 bunker would be strong enough to survive the scenario of a 3 or 10 megaton bomb, ground or air burst in the centre of Edinburgh. Reports alluding to attenuation factors of concrete walls and blast proof doors designed to withstand peak overpressures, demonstrates that the subterranean structure would be “virtually unscathed from such an attack” – (Crown copyright, National Records of Scotland, HH51/260) I vividly recall my first experience of visiting ‘Scotland’s Secret Bunker’ in my early schooldays; relatively soon after the Cold War ended. This awe-inspiring piece of history left a permanent impression, the journey through the subterranean spaces inspired a fascination I possessed for years. Eventually I had the opportunity to explore this further with my master’s thesis during my final year of architecture school. However, it wasn’t until after graduating that I stumbled across this restoration project, reigniting these nostalgic memories.

As the visitor descends the long access tunnel natural daylight decreases with every footstep. At the bottom of the slope, a sharp right leads through the threshold of where the blast doors used to be. Here you find yourself at the top of the main stair core; the starting point of the vast warren of rooms and corridors. The rectilinear plan measures approximately 37 x 19 metres and lends itself to a concept of clear functionality; the operations well occupies the heart of the structure stretching the full three underground stories in section. This nerve centre of activity is where the collated information would build the picture of a potential nuclear attack. Senior staff including the URBAN REALM SUMMER 2017 URBANREALM.COM

battle commander observed the incoming data from the upper offices that enclosed the edges of the information hub. The remaining rooms throughout were occupied by cellular offices, staff support facilities and the impressive plant equipment that exists on the bottom level. Fortunately, the plant room is one of the better-preserved spaces, whilst standing next to the air conditioning and filtration units, you begin to appreciate the scale of engineering and ingenuity behind the maintenance of this underground living environment.

Floors have been largely cleared of debris accumulated from the fire, vandalism and years of fly-tipping. The interiors have been stripped back to the bunker’s monolithic carcass.

The brutalist influence is evident throughout, where tactile reinforced concrete walls and columns still bear the marks of their timber shuttering. Accompanied with the exposed roof troughs there is a clear reference to the 1950’s movement in post-war British architecture, you can’t help but notice subtle similarities with the likes of the National Theatre in London

by Deny’s Lasdun. Exposed services in the form of electrical conduits mounted to surfaces snake up and over walls and mechanical ventilation ducts hang from the ceiling, threatening a sense of claustrophobia in some of the circulation zones. The intense heat generated from the 1993 blaze has left its mark with small areas of concrete spalling and exposing areas of rebar on the ceiling, allowing a glimpse into the construction makeup.

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Left - Restorers face an uphill challenge Right - Nuclear bombs may not have taken their toll but time has

In a meticulous effort to faithfully restore the Sector of Operations as far as modern building standards and regulations will allow, the team are consulting old photographs, drawings, archive files and eye witness accounts to piece together the fragments of the R4 plan before it was converted to suit the Regional Seat of Government requirements in the early 1960’s.

“God is in the details” as famously quoted by Mies van der Rohe, aligns perfectly with the team’s ambitions of retaining the authenticity of the bunker’s holistic appearance. Observing the process of how they carefully stockpile materials and artefacts that can be salvaged and sieve through the rubble for clues that tell the story of the bunker’s past, is a testament to the team’s respect for its history. In carrying out the restoration utilising the volunteer workforce a commendable level of attentiveness is achieved. With each layer stripped from a surface another piece of history reveals itself. Old construction techniques have left clues that help solve the puzzle and original spaces are hinted at from impressions left in the concrete screed floors.

The phased works see new walls constructed using modern day timber stud frames, infilled with insulation and clad with plywood and plasterboard in a contemporary take on the original details. Sustainability is embraced by reusing old strapping and framing where possible and extensively restoring the old ventilation ductwork. The restoration efforts are embodied in the steel roof troughs that are sand blasted clean of the lingering spray concrete finish, before they are

recoated in paint that has been colour matched to the original MOD colour palette.

Mechanical and communications equipment that has been stripped of its precious metal components and copper wiring for scrap has prompted the team to utilise a nationwide bunker network of likeminded enthusiasts to procure authentic replacements. Light switches, signage and fittings are slowly being sourced from other bunkers and auctions around the country to be installed.

With the fall of communism in the early 1990’s the government took the decision to slowly phase out the bunker programme due to a reducing risk of nuclear war. Most of the MOD underground bunkers have since been sold on the open market for private use, have been transformed into public museums like ‘Scotland’s Secret Bunker’ at Anstruther or have sadly been demolished.

Historic Scotland have recognised the importance of what this typology symbolises from a period when heightened anxiety was felt globally. Tertowie House nuclear bunker in Aberdeen was granted category B status and Viewmont Council offices nuclear bunker in Stonehaven category C. This is a welcomed approach in preserving these unique artefacts before time takes its toll. With today’s news echoing themes akin to those felt during the Cold War era, history seems to be repeating itself on the political frontline. It is perhaps fitting that these underground structures are being repurposed.

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WAVEGARDEN JOHN GLENDAY

Most of the hard graft has already been done thanks to over a century of digging

SWE L L DES I GN SCOTLAND AND SURFING DON’T NECESSARILY SLIP OFF THE TONGUE IN THE SAME SENTENCE BUT THAT HASN’T STOPPED A HARDY BAND OF THRILL SEEKERS FROM MAKING OUR EXTENSIVE COASTLINE THEIR OWN. NOW A WHOLE NEW AUDIENCE COULD HAVE AN OPPORTUNITY TO SEE WHAT ALL THE FUSS IS ABOUT VIA A WAVE (IF NOT CLIMATE) CONTROLLED INLAND VENTURE NEAR EDINBURGH. WE SPEAK TO THE DAREDEVIL DESIGNERS BEHIND THIS FEAT TO FIND OUT HOW THEY INTEND TO FINALLY REALISE KING CANUTE’S DREAM WITH THEIR MOSES-LIKE VENTURE.

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Scotland has developed an international reputation for surfing courtesy of an extensive coastline and tempestuous seas but a lack of accessible, all-weather facilities has stunted growth in a sport still struggling to make waves at international events.

That could all be about to change however, with plans by Tartan leisure to fashion an inland surfing centre at the disused Craigpark Quarry, Ratho, potentially enabling the country to be Olympic ready by Tokyo 2020.

Think of a quarry and you might imagine a typical Dr Who episode with Tom Baker prancing around a moonscape of shattered rocks but at Craigpark much of this landscape is submerged beneath a chilly fresh water lagoon replacing 400,000 tons of whinstone extracted from the 1850s through to 1990. What remains is the perfect canvas for such an unorthodox venture and it is into this landscape that Martin Stevens of HarrisonStevens steps, scarf billowing, to begin the task of converting a 43m deep man-made bowl of blasted rock into a family friendly environment for the adrenaline driven and spectators alike.

Stevens said: “We’re always very conscious about

delivering something that’s right for the place. There are lots of Wavegarden projects in the pipeline but we were very keen that Surf Scotland was embedded in the landscape, embracing that cold-water culture of hoodies and fleeces. One of the first things we made sure to safeguard was the fantastic backdrop of that 20m cliff face, it’s not ground breaking in that they’re exactly the same assets the climbing centre on the other side of the canal was looking to capitalise on 20 years ago.”

Plugging into Edinburgh’s canal network this surf and leisure facility will take the form of a manmade loch and builds on the success of the nearby Edinburgh International Climbing Arena to create a broader hub for outdoor enthusiasts. The Ratho climbing centre has had its struggles commercially and with a leaky roof which has proven problematic at best Wavegarden is embracing a lighter touch which will minimise disturbance and costs. In addition the team at Tartan Leisure are keen to diversify beyond watersports, offering visitors access to self-catering lodges, glamping pods, a waterfront café and restaurant, retail, a zip line and water tubing activities >

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WAVEGARDEN

Top - HarrisonStevens expect surfers to be bowled over by the former quarry Above - Not everyone will be hitting the surf

amongst others.

Stevens continued: “We’re trying to re-use as much of the site as we can and that’s why a lot of the stone from the rock face is being re-used as terracing and the sub base. It’s not just an aesthetic re-use of the site but a physical one too. That amphitheatre, the natural bowl of the quarry, is wonderful.”

Relieved of the requirement to build an expensive and failure prone roof Stevens is optimistic that a planning application for the site, still under consideration, will find favour with officials – citing a focus not just on the needs of surfers but on plants and wildlife too. Indeed the environmental and resource conscious design was a stipulated requirement of the build alongside providing a financially sound and suitable URBAN REALM SUMMER 2017 URBANREALM.COM

environment for watersports.

Making all this possible is a new generation of artificial wave machine capable of setting the flooded quarry in controlled motion with a synchronized dance of symmetrical cresting waves, providing the guaranteed swells and wakes which fans of the sport currently have to head to the coast to find and then at the whims of Mother Nature. Developed

by Spanish engineering firm Wavegarden ‘The Cove’ can produce high frequency waves with better quality and greater variety than the type you may be familiar with from your local municipal pool. This engineering marvel capable of generating symmetrical, consistent waves at the push of a button from a causeway bisecting the lagoon. It also doubles up as a

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Dank, overcast skies illustrate the prevailing climate. Wetsuits are not optional

walkway for the public to get up close and personal with the surfers, who will be free to practice everything from belly boarding to barreling to their hearts content without worrying about wind dying down. What’s more the development of new generation wetsuit capable of keeping you toasty in even the parkiest waters means there’s never been a better time to go to boarding school.

Building on the first Wavegarden at SurfSnowdonia SurfScotland will create an adventure leisure hub serving the Central Belt, just a short hop from Edinburgh along the Union Canal this sporting mecca will sit within a brand-new country park so those who don’t wish to get their hair wet also have something to enjoy. Drawing visitors to the shores of

the manmade loch will be a hub and arrival plaza capable of hosting events, while providing appropriate accommodation for facilities management, ticketing, a café. This will back onto the cove directly and from heresurfers can access the water from a handy boardwalk.

More than just a surf facility Wavegarden is designed to slot into the country park around it, with just four hectares of operational wave park amid 21 hectares of parkland. Turning to the interface between these elements Stevens said: “We were keen that the operational side of Wavegarden didn’t seem like a fenced off us and them scenario. We were very keen that the water body felt part of the park itself so the secure 2m fence boundary has been set down into the body >

Solid surface washrooms. Beautiful from afar, but come up close and you’ll see the light reflecting, sparkling, catching your eye. You won’t be able to help running your fingertips across its seamless edge.

Like most things in life, we discern what’s wonderful by how it makes us feel.

www.interplanpanelsystems.com 0141 336 4040 | contact@interplansystems.co.uk

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WAVEGARDEN

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Wavegarden dwarfs even the Ratho Climbing Centre

of the swale system. We’re working with a series of reed beds and wetlands to disguise that boundary and control the sites hydrology while acting as a wildlife corridor to re-establish an ecosystem.”

Overlooking this waterbound activity will be a network of camping pod terraces carved out from the surrounding cliffs, from which spectators will benefit from elevated views of proceedings from a clifftop walkway. Beyond this the landscape will be populated by meadow grassland, a gorse bush ridge and tree planting designed to grow into a woodland windbreak. This is expected to mature over the next 15 years to envelop the lodges and provide an important wildlife corridor, into which will be arranged a number of large outdoor seating areas for dining and gathering.

Peppered throughout this landscape will be a number of modular builds faced in timber for the hub, café and surf centre. These will be buiot off site. Stevens observed: “We will be looking over the course of the next few quarters how the architecture comes forward but we have identified as part of the early brief that we have one major building on-site for year-round activities such as café, ticketing and shops.

There’s then a municipal wet building where you get kitted out and a satellite building on the far side of the lagoon offering additional viewing opportunities and facilities for camping

pods. We’re looking at how all these buildings can come together as a suite.

Almost uniquely for a planning application the flood of public comments on the planning application have been unanimously positive, something that Stevens is particularly pleased with: “The first port of call for the keyboard warriors is your comments page and then the planning portal shortly after! It’s a huge credit to the way the client team has undersold their achievements in a way.”

Nevertheless Stevens does not underestimate the challenge which lies ahead, admitting that Wavegarden Scotland will not be first out the blocks. He said: “We’re probably not going to be the first people on the ground, three Australian projects are probably ahead of us but it’s part of that first wave of seven or so in play at the moment. With a prompt favourable outcome we’d be looking at a site start early next year and all going well we’d have people surfing by summer 2019.”

It has taken four years to get this far and it will take a further two to transform the present moonscape of the disused quarry into a watery Eden. Should Wavegarden make it this far surfers need no longer scour the globe for that elusive perfect wave because the mountain will have come to Muhammad.

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DUNFERMLINE JOHN GLENDAY

AS THE BIRTHPLACE OF ANDREW CARNEGIE’S PUBLIC LIBRARY VISION DUNFERMLINE HAD A LOT TO LIVE UP TO WHEN IT SET ABOUT REVITALISING ITS OWN LIBRARY. WE TAKE A LOOK AROUND THE TOWN’S NEW CARNEGIE LIBRARY & GALLERIES AS FIFE COUNCIL TURN THE PAGE ON A NEW CHAPTER FOR BORROWERS AND BROWSERS ALIKE. URBAN REALM SUMMER 2017 URBANREALM.COM

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Dunfermline’s new star attraction thinks outside the window box

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DUNFERMLINE

A new cultural hub for Dunfermline, a decade in gestation, has finally been born and the first wave of visitors to the revamped Carnegie Library and Galleries has arrived. The ambitious build has seen Richard Murphy Architects conjoin two existing B-listed buildings – the aforementioned library and a former bank, with an all new extension overlooking the grounds of Dunfermline Abbey. Playing host to exhibition space, a café, shop, library and reading room the facility houses books, museum pieces, archives and artworks the complex build being broken down into three main elements; a reading room, museum and art galleries.

Andrew Carnegie built a library in his home town of Dunfermline in 1883, the first of what would eventually become an estate of more than 2,500 libraries. It cost £5k at that time which in context is well over half a million pounds today and survives largely unscathed from the latest package of works, which is the fourth major extension to the library. In doing so Fife Council continues a proud tradition of public investment into the 21st century but is a library and museum really the best way for Dunfermline to embrace the future? David Walker of the Carnegie Development Trust told Urban Realm: “We have to move and adapt to modern time, libraries need to embrace the fact that people have online applications and I think books

are perhaps making a comeback. The important thing is it’s making information available to people who can’t afford to go out and buy books and have access to them. At a time when children are falling behind in reading it’s more important than ever to ensure Dunfermline and places like it, have access to libraries.”

A library is just one third of the equation however as the town was also crying out for improved storage and access to its collections. With Dundee pushing ahead with its own V&A design museum investing big on facilities such as this is no longer an option but a necessity in order to remain relevant, particularly with an ambitious visitor target of 1m per year.

Steve Grimmond, CEO of Fife Council, said: “Several hundred thousand visitors already come to Dunfermline every year, this will push it well beyond a million.”

Murphy commented: “Architecturally each is unique.

The reading room for example draws from Alvar Aalto’s step section at Viipuri Library. Bookcases become desks opening the view out to the abbey and then the museum at the top is like a two storey casket. Within it we wanted to make lots of different spaces so it’s not just a big warehouse but something to explore in its own right.

“Two identical galleries can be used for separate exhibitions

Left - Bright colours and open spaces draw people through Middle - Dunfermline on the up Right - A restrained materials palette helps the architecture bed in

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or combined as one gallery, which is quite different with a view of the abbey. What is interesting about the building is there is no repetition. Everything is unique and thought of in its own way before being slotted into a central street so it’s not difficult to find your way around. There’s a journey which takes you up to the top and the final moment of that journey is a big cube like window in the corner.”

From an unassuming start in an innocuous alley the museum presents itself behind a dramatic swinging door connected the main atrium. Taking the form of a rock fissure cleaving new from old, it has the height but not the volume expected of a civic hub. Was that a design decision or a constraint imposed by the site? Murphy said: “We had the idea right from the beginning because the site was so constrained.

The big problem from the competition was getting into the building, we had the idea of hinging the front façade but that got vetoed by Historic Scotland so that prompted the council to buy a car park off the trust - because otherwise you just couldn’t get into the building.”

It’s not quite a secret but there is an element of surprise for people. Is that part of the journey you designed? Skirting the need to build an extravagant Bilbao, Guggenheim or V&A? “There was no elevation, the building site did not reach the

street so it was inevitable unless you knocked down the bank.

Other competitors did, Neil Gillespie knocked it down and opened up the street. There are two doors from the bank and Historic Scotland said ‘why can’t you use those?’ I said sure, but they don’t say ‘this is an entrance to a museum’ - that’s the issue.”

The scale of what’s been delivered and its complexity; building and working with two historic buildings, each of which has been painstakingly preserved, must have meant you had your hands full? “The atrium wasn’t too challenging, all we did was turn two windows into a door. The connection of the façade to the back of the bank is worth having a look at because we took away the rubble to slip the new façade of steel while we held the whole façade up. There’s a lot of detailing and complexity in it, that’s quite normal for us, but there are only two main materials on the outside; corten, ashlar sandstone a bit of glass but that’s it.”

Is it fair to say that architects raise their game for big cultural commission like this or do these commissions inspire the best of architects? “I think the fact that it was an architectural competition is the important bit of that conversation. Tragically not long after this competition was won Neil Baxter fired the guy who runs competitions at the >

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DUNFERMLINE

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Contractors were constrained by the historic confines of a tight town centre site

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DUNFERMLINE

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Left - A narrow atrium cleaves old from new Right - The cultural complex fronts onto the Abbey graveyard

RIAS and there’s been no competitions since of any significance run by the RIAS. I’ve noticed just recently that people in London are now running competitions in Scotland which is a tragedy. For a long time, Charles McKean organised brilliant competitions and we won two of them; they were very well run then Sebastien Tombs came along and it just faded away.

Then Mary Wrenn arrived and it was great, one of the first competitions they had was this one but not long after Neil came along and there’s been no more competitions.

“If they’re well run, and that’s the big question, competitions bring out the best in architects and they certainly bring out the best in us. We’ve won a lot of competitions in our time and find it’s quite stimulating. I’m a little bit wary of open competitions as your chances of winning are fairly remote but then you’ve got to get on the list for limited competitions.

We have won two open competitions but neither building got built,” Murphy reflects, adding: “You need to be paid.” Murphy’s more recent competition experience has been less fruitful with the practice losing out to David Chipperfield to deliver a new concert hall for the Scottish Chamber Orchestra in Edinburgh, was that a sore one to lose? “There was that one, there was also the Ross Bandstand. There are also lots of buildings that should have been competitions such as the Museum of Flight and The Archive Building for the National Galleries. In Germany and Austria every public building with public money has to be an architectural competition.”

Bruce Dickson, regional director at BAM Construction, had the unenviable task of delivering this vision having first been attracted to the job as a welcome break from school estate work - and a dearth of heritage work, but massively underestimated the scale of difficulty in delivering it. Dickson said: “We didn’t understand the logistical challenges of working in such a tight space with a whole listed building and façade being retained. If you can think of a building material it’s in this job, we’ve got steel frames, concrete frames, concrete foundations, brickwork, stonework, timber cladding, steel cladding, big areas of glazing and three different types of roofing all in a very small area. Our design manager worked virtually full time on how to join all the interfaces together.

“The V&A is reckoned to be the most difficult construction project in Europe and the project manager Kenny Hodgson, who went from here to the V&A, said this was harder.

Effectively everything had to be delivered by transit van because you couldn’t get an artic in. Even concrete lorries had to be planned as just in time deliveries because with four concrete lorries parked on Abbott Street you’d bring the whole city centre to a halt.”

Dunfermline’s Carnegie Library and Galleries might be low key to the point of invisibility on approach but it stands tall on the shoulders of giants, proving to those who look beyond the cover that buildings don’t have to be bold and brash to make a big impact.

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BUILDING PRIDE ll

AKP JOINT MANAGING DIRECTORS IAN MCEWAN AND MARTIN ROWLEY OFFER AN INSIGHT INTO DOING THINGS DIFFERENTLY, 25 YEARS OF AKP AND WHAT MAKES THEM TICK. IAN MCEWAN - There was no plan. You see an opportunity and take it. I didn’t know where it would end up, but we earned a good reputation because we were doing things differently.

The origins of akp go back over 25 years, and it was a very simple concept which I wanted to offer the Scottish Construction marketplace, to offer something different, a more modern approach.

I formed the Andrew Kerr Partnership many moons ago, after learning my trade in my early years working for John Laing (now Laing O’Rourke) and Glasgowbased Lafferty Construction and then freelance surveying, estimating, design and project managing throughout my early twenties.

So, it just seemed like the natural next step, to combine the knowledge I had built up within contracting, commercial, design and management to offer the industry a Principal Contractor with a more

forward thinking approach. The business took off, and within three years, akp recorded a turnover of circa £10m, securing prestigious contracts including a complexed £9.5m project for Glasgow Royal Infirmary.

In 2014, one of my best decisions was made over steak and chips and few glasses of red wine. It led to Martin joining akp as Joint Managing Director. Martin had been a client, project manager, and consultant of akp for years so knew our portfolio and concurred with my vision of offering clients a modern approach.

We take pride in the building, and we build pride into the building. I am a building bore.

I like buildings and design, and I’m a frustrated architect

akp Scotland Limited, 3 Redheughs Rigg, Edinburgh EH12 9DQ 31 Carron Place, East Kilbride, G75 0YL Email: enquiries@akpscotland.com Web: www.akpscotland.com URBAN REALM SUMMER 2017 URBANREALM.COM

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Today I feel that akp sits as one of Scotland’s go to Construction, Refurbishment and Fit Out Contractors.

I love the diversity of projects we deliver which range from around £100k to £7m. Most recently we completed a high end fit out for Registers of Scotland in St Vincent Plaza, Glasgow. That was one fit out project which stood out for me. Then on the flip side we completed a £3m residential scheme in Troon last year which saved a derelict b-listed mansion house, and I must admit that project allowed the frustrated architect in me to be exercised. One of our current projects, Drimsynie House Hotel is a new build hotel and leisure facility extension worth £4.5m in Lochgoilhead - So, as you can see we do like variety.

MARTIN ROWLEY – Ian and I share the same values. If the people, culture and values are right, everything else falls into place.

I started my career as a 21-year-old hospital engineer at Glasgow’s Victoria Infirmary Royal Infirmary and quickly progressed looking after building and engineering at numerous hospital-owned properties around Glasgow. Thereafter I worked with Mowlem, E J Steel and more recently Arthur MacKay Building Services before Ian approached me to join akp. This did take me by surprise, but there was a synergy.

Both Ian and I are very hands on. Ian holds the front of house and estimating meetings while I look after project delivery and the operational aspects of the business.

Most jobs have their challenges and key is the way that you deal with those challenges. This is a rewarding job and the tougher the jobs are, the more rewarding they become. We’re approachable and easy to get on with. We don’t rule with a rod of iron, and we don’t have that approach to design teams either.

Moving to the present day akp are turning over circa £17m with offices in East Kilbride and Edinburgh and all with a respectable in-house team of around 60. Our Building Pride strapline is an ethos we promote and encourage throughout the company. We take pride in the building, and we build pride into the building.

As well as sharing values, Ian and I both share a sense of adventure. As a teenager Ian built a rally car in his parents’ garage, and competed in the Scottish Rally Driving Championships. Whereas I prefer 2 wheels and enjoy long, open roads, with a few bends – for my motorbike, so using my bike for site visits to Drimsynie in Argyll may be the answer!

You see an opportunity and take it. I didn’t know where it would end up, but we earned a good reputation because we were doing things differently

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HOUSING CRISIS JOHN GLENDAY

P E RSONA L I T Y BU I L T IN THE LATEST IN A SERIES OF ARTICLES TO DELVE BEHIND BRITAIN’S HOUSING CRISIS WE SPEAK TO TV’S IRREPRESSIBLE ARCHITECTURE AMBASSADOR GEORGE CLARKE TO ESTABLISH WHETHER THE NEWLY FORMED MINISTRY OF BUILDING INFORMATION IS BUILT ON STRONG FOUNDATIONS.

Anyone even remotely acquainted with the arguments surrounding Britain’s housing crisis may be forgiven for thinking we keep going round in circles but for Amazing Spaces star George Clarke the solution may prove to be exactly that as he explains why the best answer to one of our biggest challenges may be to think small.

Frustrated by a lack of initiative by established players telly man Clarke is putting rhetoric into action with the launch of The Ministry of Building Information (MOBI); an educational, research and development organisation focused on spearheading advanced home design and construction to challenge the wider housing sector to up its game.

Following hot on the heels of the ARH Mk1, the 3.5 tonne aluminium drum first showcased to viewers of the Channel 4 series has now been wheeled north for exhibition at the Ideal Home Show in Glasgow, a city with a poor track record at building rotating architectural set pieces. The mechanical marvel aims to turn architecture on its head although, unlike the ill-fated Glasgow Tower, Clarke is pursuing a distinctly domestic agenda. “There are a lot of rotating structures out there but they rotate horizontally, not vertically,” Clarke explained to Urban Realm. When I came up with the idea of a vertically > URBAN REALM SUMMER 2017 URBANREALM.COM

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George Clarke is a man on a mission to get Britain building

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HOUSING CRISIS

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Clarke hopes to clean up after taking his supersize washing machine for a spin

» If you can only be in one room at a timewhy not live in a vertically rotating house allowing you to create that one room as and when it is needed? «

rotating house everyone thought I was mad. Sometimes you question yourself whether you’ve pushed things too far to the point where it’s becoming ridiculous or are we genuinely getting something out of this.”

“As much as it sounds like a mad idea anyone living in a small property can only live in one room at a time.

You can’t be in the kitchen having a bath or asleep in the bedroom while watching telly. If you can only be in one room at a time why not live in a vertically rotating house allowing you to create that one room as and when its needed? The drum allows us to rotate it the flat walls allow us to make it practical and efficient as possible. The footprint of the interior is 3m x 3m so you’ve got 9sq/m of usable volume per room but if you times that by four you’ve got a 36sq/m house in a 9sq/m footprint.”

It may look like something which would ferry astronauts to Mars but Clarke is insistent that there is method to his madness, stating: “I’ve had people saying are you going to mass produce these and start selling them to the market? We haven’t set any agenda for it, it’s to inspire the industry to start rethinking about space and different ways of manufacturing affordable homes. We’ve done a one-off prototype to generate lots of questions

and hopefully lots of answers.”

But is building smaller really the answer in a country which already suffers some of the loosest space standards in the world? Clarke answered: “If you build smaller then you build cheaper and make properties more affordable. The problem isn’t building small its building dumb boxes. If you think creatively about small spaces and you design multi-functional furniture, well integrated storage and space in 3 dimensions rather than just a floorplate then building smaller isn’t a problem.”

Citing some recent examples of developments which have pushed the small is beautiful philosophy to its extremes Clarke points to the likes of Pocket Living in London which specializes in city centre starter homes for people who would otherwise struggle to gain a foothold on the bottom rung of the housing ladder and The Collective which offers a communal living environment for people who’d rather maintain the social connections.

Clarke believes they represent the tip of the iceberg however, stating: “We’re just at the beginning of how creative small spaces can change the way people live.”

Inspired by this approach Clarke is partnering with Teeside University to produce the type of Advanced >

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Left - MOBI aims to supply the building profession with much-needed skills Right - Based in the north east of England it will usher in new ways of making

Home Construction which the country is crying out for to plug a yawning skills gap and draw advanced manufacturing processes to the fore. Innovative thinking of this kind has been sorely lacking but with a worsening housing crisis Britain needs every home it can get. Clarke said: “If anything I think we’re going back in terms of standards. I was brought up in a 1970s-council estate which was actually really well designed, they had some of the best architects in Britain working on that project.

It had pedestrianized area, safe play areas. Now we’re building noddy box housing estates without any shops or pubs facilities, with isolated living.

“Any innovative thinking or creative design that’s going to improve the quality of Britain’s homes is going to help alleviate the housing crisis. We think it’s a crisis now but it’s going to be even worse for the next generation, it’s going to get way worse before it gets better. I’m fortunate enough that I got on the property ladder in the 1990s before it went completely and utterly ridiculously crazy. I’ll be able to pass my property down to my kids and hopefully they’ll be able to pass it on to theirs but that shouldn’t be the way it works. The property market shouldn’t be propped up through inheritance. Everybody should have the right to have a decent home.

“Every government over the past 30 years has failed URBAN REALM SUMMER 2017 URBANREALM.COM

to improve the housing stock and it frankly frightens the life out of me that it’s going to get so much worse before it gets better. We call it a crisis now but it isn’t close to being a crisis compared to what it’s going to be like in ten years’ time. The government can make grand claims to build 300,000 houses a year but there’s no point in building bad houses, we did that in the fifties and sixties and we’re having to tear them down. I’ve been to some new build houses which have been built too fast, dare I say built by people who aren’t skilled enough because we’ve got a massive skills shortage at the minute. Just because we’re building fast doesn’t mean we’re building well.”

Clarke refuses to paint the big housebuilders as true bogeymen however, pointing out that while they are part of the problem they are also part of the solution. The presenter said: “It’s easy to knock the big housebuilders and say they’re all terrible, they’re only in it for profit. Of course they want to make a profit, they want to make the biggest profit they can but it’s an important point for me to make that there is a systematic cultural problem in Britain around planning, how government release land and how the developers are set up - there are too many big developers who dominate the market rather than more small scale entrepreneurial developers.”

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To remedy these ills requires not just a policy shift but a cultural realignment to bring us onto the same page as countries such as Canada and New Zealand which despite sharing a common language and history have very different approaches to self-building. “I was studying in New Zealand and saw a development site with all the flagpoles, banners and hoardings and I asked how many houses are you building and they said ‘what? We’re building plot’. When we build a certain plot we specify a certain height but after that the buyer can specify any style or look they want’. It’s a self-build scheme and that’s standard in New Zealand but here it doesn’t exist.”

Rattling off some examples of paucity of thinking from evidence at home Clarke recalls one council which planned 2,500 new houses of which a token ten had been allocated for self-builders. “Ten”, exclaimed Clarke, “That’s ridiculous. It’s up to government s and council s who control land to make more available. If you want a selfbuild mortgage it’s a nightmare.”

In the wake of the Conservatives general election win is Clarke optimistic that anything will change? “The government published a white paper in January and it is probably the best paper I’ve seen from any government in quite some time”, Clarke said. “It talks about innovation and different modes of funding, it’s the first time the

government has openly declared that the housing market is broken and not working. Hopefully when the consultation finishes things will genuinely start to change.

At the end of the day the most fundamental thing is the property market has been left to the free market, it has become massively over inflated. 70 per cent of the price of a property is in the land, how did we allow land to become so staggeringly expensive. Properties aren’t affordable we need to build more council houses, we know that the private housebuilders don’t want to build affordable houses, they want to build private houses.

I hear it all the time, we’ve got rid of the affordable on another site down the road. It means maximum profits.

Government have got to step in, they’ve completely shied away from building council houses as we know them.

They’ve left it to industry to do and they’ve avoided it like the plague.

“The biggest problem is the lack of innovation in our industry. The level of innovation in R&D in the automotive, aerospace and telecommunications industries over the past 20 years has been fantastic but the level of innovation in the housebuilding industry is shocking. If Jaguar Land Rover want to release a new car it costs them half a billion pounds in R&D between the initial idea > and the finished car rolling off the production line. We

HOUSING CRISIS

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A hi-tech fabrication lab will bring a touch of Silicon Valley style glamour to the profession

don’t see anything like than that when designing houses, worse than that we don’t even apply our best architects to work on standard housing schemes. Quite often they don’t even have an architect involved never mind a big one. Why haven’t we got Rogers, Foster or Piano designing Britain’s housing estates? Because developers just aren’t interested. It’s making the UK home industry a very unattractive place for young talent. Other industries like Google, game design and Facebook are far more attractive. Very few people want to work in the building industry and hence why they’re not getting the skills they need. It’s a really worrying time.”

To pour salt in the wound the technological toolkit available to bring about change has never been broader but the innovative thinking required to make the most of these assets remains lacking. Clarke detailed: “We’ve got all that wonderful; technology and then you go down the road to the mass housebuilding estate being built right now and you’ll see bricklayers taking ages to lay bricks because its pouring with rain. It takes weeks to get a roof on and wind and watertight and ages for the plaster to dry out. It’s ridiculous and antiquated. Apart from improved insulation and better boilers and building regs,

we’re still building houses the way the Romans did. It’s unbelievable and beggar’s belief to me.

“It doesn’t mean that we should be building 22nd century science fiction housing out of space age gel.

I’m building some timber frame off-site manufactured houses in Tyneside, that can be built faster and cheaper than traditional houses under factory conditions. It took three years to come up with those designs and educate a manufacturer to build them. In some ways we’re creating a new industry to build better quality homes. Not everyone needs to go to University, I think that’s where Tony Blair got it wrong. Some guys, some girls just want to get their hands dirty and make stuff so I think there’s a real opportunity to create a better-quality manufacturing industry for homes with technicians and engineers rather than plasterers and brick layers.”

Structural Insulated Panels (SIPs) is one technology which could reshape the future of housebuilding in the UK but the country still lags in their uptake. John Langley, director of JML Contracts – a building services firm specialising in the sector, explained what role they might play: “… we lag behind the rest of Europe in this construction method and it is not yet widely adopted >

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across the sector. This is largely due to the slow adoption in the UK of new building technologies, despite the greater long term benefits, such as low energy usage due to the excellent insulation, limited thermal bridging, and inherently air-tight characteristics.”

One example of this approach is a new holiday house on the island of Harris, a standardises SIP kit design which was cut, engineered and supplied by JML for assembly on-site by local contractors. Outlining what makes this new approach possible Langley said: “We teamed up with Passive house architects, Architeco, we have together developed a range of ‘off the shelf’ passive houses for the self-build market. They have been rigorously designed, every aspect of the houses, from each stage of construction and build, through to the use and running has been carefully considered and precisely calculated to make efficient, warm, dry, light filled and beautifully practical homes.”

Issuing his own cry for revolution Clarke calls for a ‘housing revolution’ saying: “What’s brilliant is we know there’s a need, there’s a market there. If we build really good quality, sustainable, beautiful homes it would even reduce NIMBYISM. I understand the high-levels of nimbyism in the UK because if you look at the big housebuilders building low quality estates for maximum profit people don’t like seeing that. If they saw cooperatives and smaller younger developers who cared about the communities they were building g in and were affordable for their grandsons and granddaughters I bet they wouldn’t object.”

If there is to be a revolution it is unlikely to come from volume builders however with Langley stating: “Volume builders largely want only to meet current regulations and maximise returns. Currently, the SIPs industry is driven 100% by the self-build and custom design market. Despite the initial build cost being higher comparatively, the long-term benefits of low running costs, reduced energy usage and greater space creation capabilities that can be achieved with SIPs are more appealing to them.”

Despite an often-grim present Clarke remains hopeful for the future, stating: “No revolution happens overnight, unless its political, but we have great design talent, a knowledge economy and a lot of people who’d like to retrain in manufacturing and building. We’ve got a great opportunity to build lots of houses that are really needed, in some ways it’s an exciting time with a little bit of momentum out there with Pocket Living and Urban Splash to change the way we build homes.”

If that momentum is to be nurtured to the extent necessary to foster genuine change it will take more than the efforts of any one individual but with more and more people beginning to speak with one voice on the issue words may soon translate into action.

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This low-energy house design on Harris shows what can be achieved with Structural Insulated Panels

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COSMIC COLLISIONS JOHN GLENDAY

ON A BLUSTERY ARTIFICIAL HILLTOP NEAR SANQUHAR, DUMFRIES & GALLOWAY, STRANGE SOUNDS AND VISIONS ARE AFOOT. CHARLES JENCKS, HIGH PRIEST OF LAND ART, HAS DRAWN SUPERSTAR ARCHITECT DANIEL LIEBSKIND TO THIS REMOTE CORNER TO CONTEMPLATE LIFE, THE UNIVERSE AND EVERYTHING. URBAN REALM JOINED THEIR DISCIPLES TO SEE WHETHER THE PAIR ARE ONTO SOMETHING BIG.

Collisions might first bring to mind violent meetings of the car crash variety but for land artist Charles Jencks, creator of the arts landscape at Crawick Multiverse in the Borders and idiosyncratic architect Daniel Liebskind, such impacts can also give rise to extraordinary surges of creativity.

When these two stars collided in the tranquil environs of Sanquhar town hall it was the latter type of encounter on show as the pair held court one windy summer weekend of architecture, art and cosmology.

Cosmic Collisions, Birth, Rebirth and the Universe, melds seemingly disparate elements around the twin magnetic poles of its figureheads who are keen to encourage questioning of the nature and origin of the universe beyond a niche audience of jumper wearing physicists. Set against a backdrop of previously unpublished Liebskind drawings of spiral galaxies – inspiration for the architects £11.5m Ogden Centre for Fundamental Physics in Durham – together with a selection of paintings drawn by Jencks visualising the collision and merger of galaxies, Urban Realm spiraled into the Borders to observe the ensuing fireworks.

Famed for his willful abuse of Pythagorean geometry and a disciple of deconstructivism Liebskind cast his mind back to Ancient Greece, marveling at the birth of science: > URBAN REALM SUMMER 2017 URBANREALM.COM

© COLIN HATTERSLEY

STAR STRUCK

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Jencks conducts proceedings from his hilltop folly, Crawick Multiverse

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COSMIC COLLISIONS

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Daniel Liebskind has brought his crusade against right angles to Sanquhar

“It was an interesting question written on the entrance of the Platonic Academy, ‘Let None But Geometers Enter Here’. What is geometry? It’s where we are, it’s how we measure. It’s not a speculation of who we are but of space.

As I walked down that amazing, windy hill (at Crawick Multiverse) I thought about the fact that for less than a few centuries people have concentrated on the meaning of time rather than the meaning of space.”

Save for those trapped on the downward variety ‘everybody loves spirals’ continued Liebskind, adding. “I work that way. I go in circles only to get back to the same point, but not exactly the same point. It’s like a spiral. I thought about that as I designed The Ogden Centre for Fundamental Physics in Durham. If we take the spiral and apply it to a very modest office building what would we do?” Starting with a series of spirals rotating outward from the Cathedral Liebskind drafted a building plan bounded by those imaginary lines in three dimensions, prompting some ribbing from his old friend Jencks.

Liebskind explained: “Architecture seems very banal when we come from the cosmic because you’re thinking about the floor and simple things like the wall. How do you create something that’s interesting spatially? Charles asked

me some weeks ago, can I draw a plan of the building? I was baffled. Every floor is different, it moves in an irregular spiral but it has a centre. All the projections, soffits and voids are used for terraces and extending the sense of community. I had so much fun designing this building, it is modest but has impetus geometrically and spatially and if you walk around the building several times I’m sure you won’t be able to draw a plan of it either - that’s what makes a building interesting!”

Where space exists time follows and as quantum physicists grapple with various flavours of the multiverse and infinity in a desperate bid to find a theory of everything Jencks prefers the meditative surrounds of the Borders to the laboratory in order to arrive at his own understanding of nature. Ruminating upon the wisdom of Woody Allen, who once said ‘eternity is a very long time, especially towards the end’, Jencks explained the genesis of his own Crawick Multiverse. “I wanted to do a series of analogies about collisions, before I started on the Multiverse project, that shows Andromeda and the Milky Way colliding in that incredible dance. I thought by and large collisions are catastrophic like a car or train collision, which are often used by scientists as an analogy for galaxies colliding. >

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There’s a lot of destruction, no question. it’s bad for the dinosaurs and its bad for people. But cosmic collisions also produce beauty and billions of new stars, spiral galaxies when they meet have enormous fecundity.”

Asked whether he’d been on a collision course with Modernism Liebskind observed: There are tendencies in Modernism to be reductive, to reduce architecture to forms follows function per-se, which is not true. Everything is symbolic in some sense. The great architects of the Modernist period tried to communicate symbolic ideas, a glass or a white cube isn’t an ornament. Mies van der Rohe’s Neue Nationalgalerie in Berlin, the glass building with a black temple building at its top, is the most violent building ever built. They cut the hill, levelled it and put this amazing thing on top of it. There’s nothing naturalistic about it. Architects have many different tendencies and the Holocaust followed by the bombing of Hiroshima has changed the tenor of humanity.

“It’s not a coincidence that architecture has always attracted authoritarian personalities, all dictators embrace architecture. From Rome to Germany to China and Donald Trump powerful builders who want to build new things have an authoritarian streak in them. That’s why I’m a great believer in democracy, it builds consensus in an open society. But democracies are vulnerable to alternative facts, is there such a thing as truth? I believe that there is. I think science is a community of reason, which prevails over fantasy and superstition. Science is a model which society can progress for the truth.”

Commenting on their enduring friendship Jencks joked: “I’ve known Daniel for 35 years, we haven’t always agreed. We do agree about that!” Liebskind added: “I read Charles’ book (Meaning in Architecture) in 1969, it’s still one of the classics in the field. Architecture is a cultural flow beyond being a technical field because every building communicates - even the most empty-headed building with a glass façade - because it tells you very, very rapidly that it has nothing to tell you! All you need as an architect is optimism, you don’t need mathematics, as Corbusier said when he was asked what is architecture? ‘You have to read a couple of books and travel, that’s all it is.’

Recalling their first non-physical contact, to Liebskind’s evident surprise, Jencks continued: “We had a meeting in hyperspace. We have had arguments but you were a great friend and I was a great friend of Hejduk but you wrote me a letter saying. ‘How dare you say that about John Hejduk’.

I was trying to be ironically positive about John and you read it as an insult! We share a deep affinity, see the way we point at each other.”

Catching up with Jencks and Liebskind at the Merz Gallery in Sanquhar, where artwork from both designers is currently on show, Urban Realm asked whether the revolution in physics that has taken us from a classical > URBAN REALM SUMMER 2017 URBANREALM.COM

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Liebskind’s latest work, The Ogden Centre for Fundamental Physics, marries science and architecture

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COSMIC COLLISIONS

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Left - This marble collage illustrates Jencks’ fascination with whirlpools Right - Ancient customs and cutting edge science are smashed together

understanding of the universe to quantum mechanics, shows we are overdue a similar revolution in architecture?

Jencks said: “I wrote a book on The New Paradigm in Architecture, predicting that we are on the tipping point.

We’ve absorbed all those new theories but architecture is built at our scale, not at the quantum world - it is the classical world.

“In many ways the answer to your question is yes, but slowly and through the computer, which is our telescope, our post-modern way of getting into the world of selforganising systems. Daniel is a key part of the new paradigm but these paradigms are built like palimpsest on top of one another and we’ll never go back to a single paradigm, we have an irreversible pluralism in our world now.”

Liebskind added: “Virtual reality was invented 2,500 years ago by Plato when he said, ‘The Sun shining in the sky is not the real Sun, there is a Sun above that Sun. The Sun of ideas.’ The difference between virtual reality and everyday life is why architecture is such a test of reality because it has to negotiate between the mind and the body. It’s not an intellectual thing, you’re born with it.

“I’ve always wondered why great scientists and even Avant-garde artists often live conventional lives. If you look at Picasso or Kandinsky their paintings are incredible but

they were agreeing to live in a box inside an apartment building. How can humanity accept itself living in a box on a 30th floor? That’s the paradox. When I first tilted a window off the orthogonal it was considered a scandal, intelligent people said it’s not acceptable to tilt a window.

Why is it not acceptable? Why is making a wall at not an exact right-angle taboo?” Jencks interjected: “Because they’ve been reading too much Pevsner! Susan Sontag famously wrote in the seventies that all these Avant-garde artists are renegades when it comes to music or cinema but not architecture. People are very conservative in many ways. Linguistically you’re still speaking the language that Shakespeare would have known. Then you have Prince Charles and the idea of integration of English culture around a certain style of architecture.” While Liebskind is relaxed in the face of such visions, observing that it’s simply ‘not possible’ Jencks cautions that ‘under fascism it’s possible but not in a democracy.”

By planting their flags in the Enlightenment both Liebskind and Jencks are keen to reset our relationship with architecture, a profession which some might argue is losing its way. By reaching out and looking up they hope to elevate what can become lowest common denominator game - and are clearly having a smashing time in the process.

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EMPLOYEE OWNERSHIP JOHN GLENDAY

The Collective Architecture team are going strong having recently marked Employee Ownership Day URBAN REALM SUMMER 2017 URBANREALM.COM

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FROM COLLECTIVE TO PAGE\PARK ARCHITECTURE HAS A HISTORY OF DEMOCRATIC WORKING BUT WITH A NEW WAVE OF COMPANIES NOW FOLLOWING IN THEIR WAKE; FROM ADP TO BENNETTS AND ANDERSON BELL + CHRISTIE ARE SUCH EXCEPTIONS BECOMING THE NORM?

As practices grapple with succession planning, a fairer division of the spoils and a more diverse leadership employee ownership has lots to offer but for practices of an egalitarian bent employee ownership also comes with numerous positives. Outlining what some of these might be ADP managing director David Heslop revealed why his practice took the plunge in February: “We were looking at what we needed to do to ensure that the practice could continue for a further 50 years and what was the appropriate structure for us to be a sustainable organisation,” said Heslop. “We’d been an LLP and we felt that had restrictions for us going forward, we didn’t want to have problems of succession in the practice which is traditionally where a lot of organisations fail.”

In common with many practices ADP finds itself contemplating succession planning with the owners expected to lay down their set squares and pick up their golf clubs in a few short years. Rather than deal with these issues in a state of blind panic however Heslop set the ball rolling five years before anyone was expected to retire – ensuring that the business could plough a steady course when the inevitable change finally did come.

Outlining the thought processes behind these moves Heslop said: “We recently received an Investors in People gold award and we thought that putting employees at the centre of how the business is run and organized was important for us. Employee ownership looked like the best route and sat very well with the culture of the practice.”

Not all forms of employee ownership are created equal however and as Heslop points out there are numerous ways of structuring yourself. Explaining ADP’s particular approach Heslop continued: “We consulted the Employee Ownership Association and read widely on the options. You can do it through individual share ownership, but we decided to go for an indirect route where the shares are owned by a trust, the John Lewis model, which owns the shares on behalf of the >

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EMPLOYEE OWNERSHIP

Left - The team at ADP Edinburgh survey their surrounds Right - Bennetts Associates, now an employee-owned trust, have grown to a staff of 80

employees.”

If ownership structures differ then there is even greater variance among architects themselves, with Heslop conceding that the model is not for everyone.

He said: “Architects who rely on a dominant individual with a strong personality to run the business might have some trouble with it. But for those that wprk more democratically, I think it suits them very well.

Construction professionals such as Arup have been employee owned for a very long time.”

Scotching suggestions that democratisation of ownership can hamper decision making Heslop says: “That is not the way it works; the practice is run by a board and they carry out the central management functions of the organisation. One of them is an employee director elected by the staff so there is employee representation. The practice has to be run in accordance with a constitution which sets out a range of principles which are the values of the practice, that’s been agreed by the staff and it’s the boards responsibility to run the practice in accordance with those principles.

“We have an employee council and a representative from each of our studios sits on that and their job is to hold management to account against that constitution.

What it means is that the management of the practice doesn’t have to be consulted on every decision that’s made provided its making those decisions in accordance URBAN REALM SUMMER 2017 URBANREALM.COM

with the constitution. In many ways, it’s actually easier than a partnership because if you had 10 partners it can be hard to get agreement to do things but provided management is happy that its making decisions in accordance with the constitution we can just get on with it. The quality of the design and service we provide to our clients is one of the principles we manage our practice by, it gives people more autonomy as designers and architects. I think it’s what most people want and the structure allows them to do that.”

Architecture has been hit in recent years by the sudden passing of larger than life figures such as Zaha Hadid and Gareth Hoskins, highlighting the need for change in the eyes of many. Heslop states: “They’re the sort of organisations which were led by individuals, sole characters with a high architectural profile. Succession is a problem in those sort of organisations. What happens when Zaha is not there and the entire reputation of the practice is built on her personality? It causes them a problem. We’re a different type of practice, more democratic with design autonomy to individuals rather than one central character.

It’s a very rational approach based on an understanding of what we are as an organization. The hard bit has been the past 30 years and getting the practice to where it is at the moment. We want to leave it in a state where it can prosper in the future. Anyone

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who has contributed to getting us where we are gets to share in that success. Our plan is to return to growth of between 10 and 12 per cent per annum. The reason we want to do that is not megalomania it’s that we want to create opportunities for people to build their careers within the organization. If you don’t do that you don’t create roles for people to move into and becomes too top heavy.”

A more recent convert to an employee ownership trust comes in the form of Bennetts Associates with co-founder Rab Bennetts telling urban Realm: “We’re not democratic in the sense that we vote on what we do but we have a management team of five director and eight associate directors and it’s a pretty flat hierarchy in the sense that we have completely open discussions in the office as much as we can. Converting ownership to an employee trust is the ultimate symbol of how inclusive

we are. Whatever age we are if we ever got run over by a bus and another owner came in everybody would hate it, they’d all leave! So what’s the point in that?”

Denise Bennett confirmed: “The old notion of partners holding all the equity and then young people having to take a mortgage to get the money to buy a share of the partnership is just impossible. Young people can’t afford it. They’ve got student loans, mortgages and families.” Rab added: “The model we often use is Davis Langdon the property surveyors where you buy in, take a big mortgage and a big salary to pay for the mortgage.

They sold Davis Langdon to Aecom in 2010 and all the best people left. A series of property consultancy firms then sprang up across London all from Davis Langdon, each of them 100 people strong.”

Andrew Harrison, partner at Co-Ownership Solutions, has been appointed by Anderson Bell + Christie to help oversee the legal and financial implications particular to its own migration to an employee ownership business structure. Outlining some of the advantages of this approach Harrison said: “There are lots of good people who want to be in a position to run the show but might not necessarily have the money to do that. For me one of the principle benefits of employee ownership is that there is no bar to talent. There are academic studies which show employee owned businesses are around 10% more productive and profitable than non-employee owned businesses.

One of the issues is that historically there were no tax benefits to employee ownership but since 2004 there were two major pieces of tax legislation; one to benefit an owner who sold to an employee trust and one for the employees themselves through the advent of an tax exempt bonus.

“Employee ownership is not a new thing, there have always been workers co-operatives but it probably hasn’t been seen as particularly exciting and ultimately because there weren’t any tax benefits the professional adviser networks would never suggest selling to their employees.

They would recommend a trade sell to a competitor or a management buy-out or in the worst-case scenarios shut your doors, liquidate the business and flog everything you’ve got. When business owners see examples of successful employee ownerships it’s an affirmation for them of something that’s real and sensible.”

With ownership comes greater responsibility and as more practices embark down an increasingly welltrodden path it can only be a good thing that the diversity of our design community is on an upward tack.

At the very least it will cushion against any future shocks but if done well it holds out tantalizing prospect of ushering in a new generation of architects willing to share the risk and rewards of their endeavours. >

Michael Wolchover Photography

• •

• • Will Rudd Davidson Ltd Consulting Civil & Structural Engineers 43 York Place Edinburgh EH1 3HP Tel: 0131 557 5255 Email: edinburgh@ruddconsult.com

For 35 years we have been providing a proactive Structural and Civil Engineering service for a variety of public and private Clients.

With a gradually increasing staff level now approaching 70, spread between our Edinburgh and Glasgow offices, we provide assistance on building and infrastructure projects of most sizes throughout the UK. We are particularly proud of our building projects in Scotland, where we have provided support to many highly talented Architectural practices.

We recognise the value of BIM and have recently further invested towards our goal of complete Revit drawing production.

www.ruddconsult.com

Will Rudd Davidson Ltd Consulting Civil & Structural Engineers 100 Brunswick Street Glasgow G1 1TF Tel: 0141 248 4866 Email: glasgow@ruddconsult.com

Keith Hunter Photography

LOOKING FOR A NEW CAREER OPPORTUNITY?

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EMPLOYEE OWNERSHIP

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WOR K I NG CAP I TAL WE’VE HEARD FROM SOME PRACTICES WHO HAVE RECENTLY VENTURED DOWN THE PATH TO EMPLOYEE OWNERSHIP BUT WHAT OF THOSE WHO HAVE LONG SINCE ARRIVED? HERE COLLECTIVE ARCHITECTURE OUTLINE THEIR OWN EXPERIENCES OF THE PAST DECADE. When Chris Stewart Architects became Collective Architecture in 2007, employee owned practices were certainly not a new concept, however we couldn’t help feel that we were embarking on relatively untrodden ground. Since then, the practice has gone from being something of a curiosity amongst our contemporaries to part of a growing wave of practices across the UK that are choosing to embrace employee ownership as an alternative business model.

Although no longer an anomaly, we’re still often asked how the business model works. In reality there is no straightforward answer; there is no law that defines the co-operative model.

Businesses who wish to operate in this way must choose an existing legal business structure and adapt it to suit their own requirements whilst adhering to company law. In Collective’s case, we are a private limited company, owned by an Employee Benefit Trust which allows democratic control by all eligible members of staff.

Being a co-operative rests of two interdependent principals, ownership and participation. Equal financial ownership of the company sets the foundations for an organisation where all members share control. At Collective Architecture each member of the practice has equal say in how the practice operates, to enable this level of participation discussions surrounding business operations and company finances must be transparent.

The co-operative ethos goes beyond just financial and business strategy, it impacts on how we deliver projects and practice as architects, as one member explains, “There are great opportunities to investigate aspects of architecture that are of particular personal interest to me. This helps to develop specialist skills that benefit both individuals and the practice.”

The biggest challenge for a co-operative business is creating a structure that allows each member to fully participate in decision making; maintaining this structure is particularly demanding as practice grows. We were always aware that size was critical to the practice’s structure and any expansion would need to be carefully managed; how should we embrace our ambitions as a practice without compromising our co-operative values? In 2007 Collective Architecture was formed of 14

members, within 3 years the practice grew to 25, and now the company has a staff base of 40.

The type of work we do has also changed, we now have a greater range of arts and cultural buildings including the Glasgow Women’s library, Calton Hill City Observatory and Chambers Street for Edinburgh University. Our housing commissions have increased in size and complexity, with Anderston Regeneration and a major new development of Victoria Infirmary for Sanctuary Homes currently underway. As we started to take on larger and more diverse projects, the way we work inevitably had to evolve.

Maintaining effective participation for all our members has required us to frequently re-evaluate and improve our structure and internal processes. We have found that we can’t rely on internal reflection alone, learning from the experiences of other employee owned companies (both new and old) and also seeking advice from external organisations. Support and mentoring from Co-operative Development Scotland, Employee Ownership Association and the Scottish Chamber of Commerce has been invaluable to our success as a practice. Establishing a second office in Edinburgh in 2016 was a huge and exciting step for the practice.

After working for 10 years to develop a way of working in one open plan studio in Glasgow, we now face the challenge of how we adapt our structure to make sure that our members based in a different city feel empowered to contribute to practice wide decision making at the same level as those based in Glasgow.

As we reflect on the first decade of Collective Architecture, operating as an employee owned business has been hugely rewarding, but not without its challenges. Our collaborative working practice has allowed us to share our successes and achievements, but also work together within difficult economic conditions for the industry as a whole. If one thing the last ten years has taught us it is the importance of a practice maintaining an environment that nurtures talent and allows us to create the best architecture we can. We look forward to continuing to evolve and refine our practice over the next ten years.

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LDA Design’s St Vincent Plaza landscaping has opened up a once forlorn corner of Glasgow URBAN REALM SUMMER 2017 URBANREALM.COM

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WALK THIS WAY WITH URBAN REALM AS WE EMBRACE THE GREAT OUTDOORS FOR OUR LATEST LOOK AT THE CURRENT LIE OF THE LAND. OVER THE FOLLOWING PAGES WE COVER NEW GROUND WITH SIX INDUSTRY HEAVYWEIGHTS WHO HAVE BEEN BUSY NURTURING THEIR OWN GREEN SHOOTS OF RECOVERY OVER THE PAST YEAR.

Q&A Kirstin Taylor, Director, LDA Design What has been your best work of the past year?

Winning the backing of the public on the Union Terrace Gardens was a major achievement given the contentious nature of previous proposals. Bringing the local community along the design development journey was really key to the success of the project and this collaborative approach something that we’re really passionate about at LDA Design as we truly believe that design is a social endeavour. The success of the engagement process really shows in the ultimate level of public support for the project. It’s not something we can leave there, ongoing activation and participatory events will be key in ensuring the future success of the Gardens which we hope is restored as one of the city’s most active and celebrated public spaces.

How do you explain that there is more to landscape architecture than meets the eye?

As Landscape Architects we are intrinsically focused on the synthesis of people and place. Landscape forms the dynamic backdrop to our lives and is part of the shared memories and feelings which bind people together as ‘belonging’. Landscape Architecture is therefore about something much more fundamental than ‘planting’ and ‘green space’ which it can often be perceived to be primarily about.

At LDA Design, we take an interest firstly in how physical, cultural and emotional associations can be used >

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to inform a narrative in the public realm which strengthens the connection between people and the place. We then think about function, seeking to maximise opportunities for social interaction to ensure our proposals will create a sociable and sustainable place and we think about places as multi-faceted spaces where social, recreational, ecological and educational opportunities all combine.

How do we quantify the quality of life boost that good landscapes offer?

One of our key design initiatives includes research into ‘Biophilic Design’, based around people’s innate connection with nature. Within towns and cities, nature and people’s connection to it can often be displaced and with this diminished connection to nature, the increasing pressure on urban space and the ubiquitous technological presence, people have increasingly less opportunity to recuperate their mental and physical energy. Even simple visual connections with nature have been proved to have demonstrable benefits to stress reduction, mood improvement and cognitive performance.

Through our design approach we focus on reconnecting people with nature. This can be achieved through simple means, such as the introduction of seasonal planting within the urban realm; connecting people with natural processes through the integration of SUDs and rain gardens to deal with drainage within our city’s streetscapes and in the integration of social life with ecological life of a place, such as providing series of social opportunities, activities, play, seating within parkettes where micro habitats are established.

Looking ahead, do you see grounds for optimism?

At a time of great social unease and divisiveness, more value is definitely being placed on the creation of places where people belong. I do think there is also a growing appreciation that the only way we will be able to build the number of homes we need in towns and cities which already feel dense and congested is by making sure that that all new development is well designed. And that means changing the order we approach development, by starting with people and how they live first, then working on the spaces and places that support this, and only then sorting out the buildings. This means bringing the landscape architect in right from the start to direct thinking about the balance between space and building, and the new connections which need making. It also means bringing the local community along the design development journey. This collaborative approach is something we’re really passionate about at LDA Design and the appetite for it is growing, which does make me optimistic that in the future we will create better places to live, work and play.

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City Design Co-operatives Govan Riverside Path leads the way forwards

Richard East, Landscape Architect, City Design Co-operative Ltd What has been your best work of the past year?

The last year has seen the coming together of 6 years worth of hard slog on the creation of the new riverside walkway at Govan. The path is now substantially completed and is at last open for use. We have been involved in every stage of the project from the 1st scramble along the Hogweed infested route, to feasibility and design stages through to construction.

There have been many technical challenges, not least the rebuilding 30m of collapsed river wall above the Glasgow subway. It has been an intensive piece of work with plenty of frustrations and on occasions not a little heartache. A passionate client and dedicated team have made the project come together, reclaiming a piece of derelict waste ground and establishing a new public space on the Clyde in Govan…proud to be involved.

Looking ahead do you see grounds for optimism?

After more than 30 years in practice at City Design Coop we have seen many changes in how the Landscape profession works. Budgets have always been tight: landscape architecture is at the bottom end of the

© CHRISTOPHER SWAN

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The lush grounds of ERZ’s Royal Edinburgh Hospital offer a therapeutic space for patients and staff

construction industry “food chain”. But as budget cuts have been rebranded as value engineering it has become clear that some developers don’t place a very high value on Landscape design. In recent years the landscape budget attached to a project has increasingly been used as an unofficial contingency fund. The development world has become more cynical and a good quality environment is still an irritating challenge to profit margins for too many organisations.

Yet there are still some great initiatives emerging in the public and third sectors. In Glasgow the installation of more cycle friendly routes, the public realm development of Sauchiehall Street and the city centre Lanes initiative all point to a desire and positive vision to lift the city to a new level through the design of the environment – even in a period of unparalleled government budget cuts. There are clear grounds for optimism in the “social world”.

Rolf Roscher, Director, erz How do you explain that there is more to landscape architecture than meets the eye?

I think Ronald Reagan was quoted as saying ‘If you’ve

seen one tree you’ve seen them all’ and Confucius as observing that only a fool sees any two trees as being the same.

There can certainly be an understanding gap in the perception of what constitutes landscape, how it is formed and how it can be shaped.

In a project context, we work hard to communicate the underlying considerations, why things are as they are, the processes that have defined or that will reshape a place. These agents of change often include a complex mix of natural and human processes. It can obviously be a challenge to communicate complexity simply.

The communication of influences and processes that shape a landscape (built or un-built) is perhaps most directly demonstrated in our green infrastructure strategy work, where this is very deliberately set out, although it runs through our work at all scales.

How do we quantify the quality of life boost that good landscapes offer?

There has been a good deal of research and study of the impacts of access to and use of good outdoor space. This includes therapeutic, physical and mental health benefits. The quantification of outcomes obviously helps to inform decision making and to

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Gourock Waterfront by Hirst capitalises on a stunning natural setting

direct funding. This research and study work is clearly extremely useful and its findings need to be widely communicated.

Amongst our current and recent projects, we have designed landscapes for people experiencing a range of physical and mental health issues, spaces for use in the context of end of life care, spaces for young children and everyone in between. The improvement in quality of life is a fairly universal goal, the detail of how we design to enable it is what varies.

What has been your best work of the past year?

We have a number of exciting projects working their way through to reality at the moment. St Peter’s seminary, the Prince and Princess of Wales Hospice, Dunoon waterfront and Royal Edinburgh Hospital are all quite different and exciting in their own terms.

ERZ is celebrating ten years of practice this year, so we have been reflecting on our work over that period.

We have produced packs of postcards that have been posted out quite widely. The post cards celebrate the range of our work over the past ten years.

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Paul Miller, Partner, Hirst Landscape Architects What has been your best work in the past year?

There has been a variety of things. Working on the restoration of a number of large scale surface mines has been an interesting and rewarding experience. A couple of LVIA based projects we have undertaken have proven to be genuinely informative in terms of site development options and we have completed the design stages of a number of school projects where we have been able to influence and lead on site plan development. I was particularly pleased with how the scale and form of the main external space of one of our care home projects has worked out in terms of its relationship with the building and surrounding landscape. Picking up a couple of awards for Gourock Waterfront was also a nice finish to 2016.

How do you explain that there is more to landscape architecture than meets the eye?

It is probably still true that most people assume landscape equals planting or garden design and are surprised when I

© FRANCIS WARE

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Newcastle’s Blue Star Square by LUC embraces the city’s rich industrial heritage

tell them what else we do. For people outside the industry, I think it is helpful to have a couple of examples or locations that they might be familiar with. Within the industry, I think there is increasingly more understanding of Landscape Architecture and the Institute has produced some good publications geared towards potential Clients. We still can’t take our role for granted though and I find that we need to be passionate advocates of our profession on a daily basis.

Having a proactive approach and a willingness to get involved is essential.

How do you vary your approach at large and small scales?

The same core principles still apply regardless of scale in terms of analysing the site and the Client’s requirements and expectations. The key to any successful project is about understanding the particular qualities of a site, identifying the opportunities that might be presented, judging the scale correctly and appreciating the devil in the detail! I think it is also important to be practical and realistic about constraints and budget limitations and to look for opportunities to make the most of what is available.

Looking ahead do you see grounds for optimism?

There is definitely a greater appreciation of landscape design but by the same token, we need to keep working to promote and advocate our profession and the benefits it can bring. The uncertainty surrounding Brexit and the future direction of Scotland is an obvious concern for us as a business, as it is for the whole of the construction industry but for the moment we remain optimistic.

Rita Pacheco, Senior Landscape Architect, LUC How do you embrace sustainability in your work?

‘Sustainability’ embraces the understanding that life on earth is an expression of an elegant dynamic of multiple complex adaptive systems and that these shape and develop the landscape. The ‘landscape’ is planetary; one cannot say where it ends nor where it begins as the natural processes happen uninterruptedly through time. I have worked as a landscape architect mainly in southern Europe and during the past three years in Scotland. The

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RankinFraser’s Oriam Sports Performance Centre is just as impressive off the pitch as on it

lack of water versus its abundance; the warmth and dryness of the intense sunlight versus gloomy mossy corners; the temperature amplitude; flora and fauna dynamics; the air quality and the way people interact with their environment are all elements that shape the landscape. Embracing sustainability is done by understanding this connectedness and addressing both the ‘needs’ category of design besides the ‘wants’, insisting on its urgency.

How do you vary your approach at large and small scales?

Working at a territorial scale has attached to it a degree of ecological, social-cultural and economic complexity entirely different from when designing a public realm scheme, a city square or a small private garden. On a large scale, one makes strategic approaches/decisions, and these can have a significant impact on a local scale in the long term. It is on URBAN REALM SUMMER 2017 URBANREALM.COM

a larger scale that the greater ecosystem is protected, by inquiring multiple scenario possibilities and systematically comparing these before recommending a solution. At smaller scales, complexity is easier to understand, and a deductive method usually informs each choice. At this level, one is dealing with details. Though the risk of having an impact at the level of territory or landscape is much smaller, the proposal materialised is visible and will have a direct consequence on people’s lives.

Looking ahead do you see grounds for optimism?

I believe that design is a tool that can produce opportunities for us to look forward and creatively collaborate to respond to change. I perceive new bottom-up grassroots movements that are happening all around; coupled with top-down institutionalized approaches being questioned (from within) and efforts invested in breaking old ways of doing, as signs

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of change. I see citizens coming together to address global issues, social-environmental artists, civic groups, activists and local communities collectively assembling spaces and taking responsibility at their scale. That did not happen in the past.

My enthusiasm lies in the collectiveness and the potential that ‘respect’ brings – towards the other(s) and subsequently towards the natural environment. Yes, I am an optimist.

Chris Rankin, Co-founder, rankinfraser landscape architecture What has been your best work of the past year?

It is impossible to state a ‘best work’ as each project has its own challenges and successes. One project we are particularly pleased with however is our work at Oriam.

Whilst the project is not perhaps overtly ‘Designed’ – a lot of time went into technically resolving levels and detailing, especially around existing retained trees to allow this large building to sit comfortably in its landscape context; adhering to Dieter Rams maxim that, “good design is as little design as possible.”

© KEITH HUNTER

How do you vary your approach at large and small scales?

I am not sure that we do. The work of the practice ranges from large scale master planning to private gardens and installations. Regardless of scale we seek to apply the same level of spatial, historic and cultural contextual research, respect for the existing landscape character and the enhancement of the landscape condition through simplicity of means. This approach is evidenced in projects such as the landscape led residential masterplan for Fasque Estate and the design of a garden for a private house sitting on a cliff top looking out to the Firth of Tay and St Andrews Castle.

Left - This stunning private house nestles within the shadow of St Andrews Castle Right - RankinFraser’s minimalist approach avoids the temptation to over-design

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Govan Riverside Path (Phase 1) The new riverside path at Govan has involved the client and team in lengthy negotiations with land owners, the authorities, and neighbours, and there has been extensive engagement with the wider community. The aim has been to reinstate the path along the riverside last used in the mid 60s and until 2 years ago impassable due to decades of illegal dumping and rampant Giant Hogweed. At the heart of the proposal is the promotion and strengthening of links between the Riverside Museum and the extraordinary collection of ancient stone carvings displayed within Govan Old Church. Subsequent phases of the project will look at the incorporation of art works and interpretive material.

The project has been funded by the Big Lottery, Central Govan Action Plan, Derelict Land Fund, Town Centre Community Capital Fund, GCC Walking and Access Fund, Central Scotland Green Network and Sustrans.

Team: Gardner and Theobald Clyde Design Partnership Lightfolio City Design Co-operative Client: Govan Workspace The team acknowledges the valuable help of Glasgow City Council in bringing the project to fruition.

City Design Co-operative Ltd, 4 North Court Glasgow G1 2DP Tel: 0141 204 3466 Email: mail@citydesign.coop

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Royal Edinburgh Hospital (Phase 1) ERZ Landscape Architects were commissioned as part of the multi-disciplinary design team to prepare the master-plan for the redevelopment of the Royal Edinburgh Hospital campus in Morningside, Edinburgh and subsequently to design and oversee delivery of the first phase of the project.

The first phase is a £40 million acute mental health and brain injury facility. The buildings are principally single storey and organised around a total of 20 courtyards. Each courtyard is contained within the building footprint (open to the sky), with the internal circulation routes wrapping round the courtyards, to provide visibility and assist easy orientation for patients and staff. Day spaces within each ward typically open to one edge of each courtyard to enable an easy indoor / outdoor transition and barrier free access for patients to the external environment.

As each ward is focused on a particular patient group, each courtyard is accordingly designed to respond to the patient group’s particular needs, these include acute mental health, IPCU, older people’s mental health and brain Injury. The courtyard spaces essentially create a new realm of clinical and therapeutic space that complements the internal ward areas.

Surrounding the phase one buildings, key elements of the estate landscape have been protected and reinforced. Notably the orchard (one of the few remaining large, long standing orchards in urban Scotland) has been retained and opened up as a usable space for patients and visitors.

Top – Talking therapy courtyard.

Middle – Orchard area, meadow and loop path.

Bottom – Central breakout courtyard

Landscape Urbanism Design Strategy

erz, 21 James Morrison Street, Glasgow, G1 5PE Tel: 0141 552 0888 Email: info@erzstudio.co.uk Web: www.erzstudio.co.uk Twitter: www.twitter.com/erzstudio

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Gourock Waterfront This project comprises the regeneration of 3Ha of Gourock’s town centre and waterfront, including over 1Ha of long derelict and visually blighted land at Pierhead between the town and the railway station. The project was completed in January 2016 at a cost of £5.2M by Riverside Inverclyde (RI) on behalf of Inverclyde Council. The objective was to improve the experience of residents, businesses and visitors to Gourock, through making it a more attractive and convenient place to live, work, socialise and visit. To achieve this, the following major interventions were conceived and developed: • Land reclamation to create a continuous accessible waterfront for the town centre, linking the existing car park, Pierhead and the railway station.

• Improvements to traffic flow and parking in the town centre via the creation of a one-way system with new waterfront street, incorporating an eastbound carriageway for the A770, a new route for the N753 National Cycle Route and Inverclyde Council’s Core Path 1E. • An eastward extension of the existing car park and significant sea defence improvements.

• The creation of new public open space on Pierhead, with

landscape and public realm improvements to improve the stations visual setting and its connection to the town centre.

• Rationalisation and extension of the Network Rail car park to increase capacity and relieve pressure on adjacent public parking.

A key challenge of the project was to re-connect Gourock town centre with its waterfront whilst accommodating wholesale changes to traffic circulation and parking capacity within a tight budget. A robust public realm and landscape framework was therefore created for the proposed layout, incorporating strong pedestrian links with the town centre, reconnecting the Station and opening up the waterfront. Simple paving design combined with strong planting and robust, visual elements such as stone-faced gabion walls, curved railings and distinctive lighting columns were developed to unify the area and provide it with character.

These improvements have helped Gourock to capitalise on its intrinsic qualities and stunning coastal setting to make it a more attractive and sustainable town centre.

Since its completion, the project has received a number of accolades including ‘Best Townscape Regeneration’ in the 2016 Herald Property Awards and a Saltire Society Special Award Commendation.

Hirst Landscape Architects, 18 Royal Terrace, Glasgow G3 7NY Tel: 0141 332 0292 Email: p.miller@hirsts.co.uk Web: www.hirsts.co.uk

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Newcastle Science Central Since 2011, LUC’s design team has acted as the landscape architect for Newcastle Science Central – a new urban quarter in the heart of Newcastle. As one of the most significant urban regeneration projects in the North East, the area occupies the 20ha former Tyne Brewery site.

LUC was responsible for the first phase of public realm for the large regeneration project. The brief defined strong aspirations for a distinctive high quality public realm which promotes environmental sustainability whilst providing a range of fully accessible, dynamic and multi-functional spaces.

LUC was responsible for the delivery of permanent public realm for a network of streets as well as two new public spaces which will form the focus of future developments.

These will become activity hubs within the development, and are the focus of the first buildings. The project also has extensive areas of interim landscape with a public access

network to allow positive use of the future development plots until they are needed.

To date, a £7 million public realm project has been completed and this will be extended in due course to accompany the new buildings. The completed public realm has established an environment in which the pedestrian has priority with kerb-less shared surfaces throughout facilitating all-abilities access, consequently creating spaces of distinctive character which in many areas will lack the geometries of conventional streets.

The public realm has established new connections with the surrounding urban areas and has created strategic links for cycling and student movements. The first phase of works has incorporated two significant new civic spaces: ‘Blue Star Square’ and ‘Science Square’; these will become the key foci of social activity, events, science showcasing venues and information exchange.

The first phase of works was completed in December 2014.

LUC, 37 Otago Street, Glasgow G12 8JJ Tel: +44 (0)141 334 9595 Email: glasgow@landuse.co.uk Web: www.landuse.co.uk Twitter: @LUCtweeting

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FIRST LIFE

THEN SPACES

THEN BUILDINGS

Power to the park and the people Two thirds of people polled in a recent UK survey* felt that a sense of community has declined in their lifetime. It seems that as our towns and cities become ever more densely populated, we have never felt less connected to each other.

This is a sobering trend with serious repercussions. Many complex reasons underpin this disconnect, but how do we reverse it? How do we grow our towns and cities for the better?

Cutting through these complexities, LDA Design believes the answer might be simpler than we first think. By creating places where people belong we can help activate communities and bring people together. If this sounds obvious, the fact that new developments often get this wrong might suggest otherwise. We believe we need to prioritise a sense of community, and shape growth by leading with the landscape.

A landscape-led approach can create extraordinary environments that work for a more diverse society. Start with people and how they live, next work on the spaces and places that support this, and then sort out the buildings. By changing the order of our thinking, we can create well connected and more sociable and sustainable places.

Parks and green infrastructure have a massive role to play in knitting together new communities and regenerating older ones. Across the UK, investment in our parks has been under

threat but in Scotland backing remains robust. The Scottish Government has allocated a significant part of its City Deal regeneration programme to improving green space.

In Glasgow, the new £120 million Sighthill Regeneration Masterplan, which will create 800 new homes, also includes one of the city’s first major new parks in over 20 years. LDA Design is working with Glasgow City Council to create a new destination, enveloped by parkland, with a distinct character and appeal.

Further demonstration of this commitment can be seen with Union Terrace Gardens in Aberdeen, one of the most centrally located parks in Scotland. LDA Design is working with Aberdeen City Council on a new scheme to revamp the Victorian Gardens to provide a safe and lively cultural hub that’s usable and accessible by all.

Following a detailed and innovative approach to community engagement, LDA Design’s plans received overwhelming local support with a 91% approval rating. The new design celebrates heritage features, but also brings new amenities into the mix including a café and gallery. Part of the revenue raised from these commercial opportunities will be used to cover future maintenance. The £22 million revamp is a central component of Aberdeen’s City Centre masterplan and of wider regeneration hopes. *Wallis E. & Doron N. Pride of Place 2014

LDA Design, Sovereign House, 158 West Regent Street, Glasgow G2 4RL Tel: +44 (0) 141 222 9780 Email: info@lda-design.co.uk Web: www.lda-design.co.uk

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Lamer Island Battery Dunbar, Scotland Dunbar is a historic harbour town on the east coast of Scotland. This project concerns the design of a new public gathering and performance space within a former 18th C civil defensive bastion. The Lamer Island Battery was built in 1781 during the American War of Independence to protect the town from potential invasion. The site subsequently housed a hospital for infectious diseases and a military hospital until the early 20th C. Latterly it had come a ruin, but it remained full of potential due to its stunning location, fascinating history and intriguing topography.

Our design seeks to exploit the layering of historic uses on the site through the repair and conservation the historic structure whilst transforming the space through the contemporary integration of a new amphitheatre, artwork, planting and seating.

A thorough process of archaeological investigation

rankinfraser

landscape architecture

preceded and informed the design work. Further elements of historic interest such as a fumigation oven and hospital foundations were incorporated into the design as they were uncovered during the course of construction. Previously difficult to access, the site has been opened up to everybody through the introduction of an interpretive concrete path linking the revitalised battery to the harbour. A reduced but complementary palette of materials was introduced to animate the space including: timber (oak and larch) and concrete. A mulch of crushed shells was used around planted areas.

Interpretive elements were, wherever possible, integrated into the furniture and structure of the interventions so as not to detract from the stunning spatial quality of the battery itself. The artist Donald Urquhart was commissioned to make a site specific work, ‘Sea Cubes’, a series of stainless steel cubes engraved with drawings of foraminifera (microorganisms found in the North Sea).

rankinfraser landscape architecture, 6 Darnaway Street, Edinburgh, EH3 6BG Tel: +44 (0)131 226 7071 Email: mail@rankinfraser.com Web: www.rankinfraser.com

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LOST PERTHSHIRE MARK CHALMERS

B LAST ED PAST FROM DUPPLIN TO MURTHLY A DISPIRITING LINE OF VAST AND ORNATE PERTHSHIRE CASTLES AND COUNTRY HOUSES HAVE BEEN REDUCED TO RUBBLE OVER THE COURSE OF THE LAST CENTURY, WITH YET MORE STILL AT RISK OF VANISHING. IN THE WAKE OF ‘PERTHSHIRE’S LOST HOUSES’, AN EXHIBITION AT PERTH ART GALLERY, MARK CHALMERS TAKES IN THE IMPERILLED SIGHTS OF CULDEES CASTLE AND DUNALASTAIR HOUSE, ADDRESSING RECURRING DESTRUCTIVE CYCLES OF HISTORY AND DRAWING PARALLELS BETWEEN THE PROLIFIC POST-WAR WORK OF DUNDONIAN DEMOLITION CONTRACTOR CHARLES BRAND AND SAFEDEM TODAY.

BOOM!!!

It’s January 1949, and New Murthly Castle has just been dynamited. The explosion resounded across Strathtay, echoing off the hills and sending a cloud of debris into the sky. The fireplaces, staircases and panelling were removed beforehand and sold off; what remained was now a mountain of rubble.

The exhibition currently running at Perth Museum and Art Gallery, “Lost Houses of Perthshire”, explores what we’ve lost. Perthshire had more grand houses than most counties, and in the mid-1800’s, the city of Perth hosted several large architectural practices such as A & A Heiton, which specialised in building stately piles.

Only a few generations later, much of their work was destroyed by Charles Brand of Dundee, whose company began as a house clearance firm and ended up as undertaker to that Gilded Age. The Perth exhibition tells the story using archive photography, including shots from Charles Brand’s own archive which was later acquired by Dundee City Council. The images are sobering but fascinating.

“The question must arise as to whether the Scots take a peculiar delight in blowing up buildings, in addition to simply demolishing them.” Marcus Binney, John Harris and Emma Winnington compiled a report on the Lost Houses of Scotland in 1980, and they felt that, “Scotland seems to have specialised in dynamiting its houses. Scottish sappers and lairds delighted URBAN REALM SUMMER 2017 URBANREALM.COM

in making a thunderous bang.”

In the case of New Murthly Castle, the Brands’ photographer captured a dramatic scene. In those days, the world’s largest dynamite works stood at Ardeer in Ayrshire, and ICI Nobel sent specialists to Perthshire to blow Murthly up.

They bored into the ashlar with pneumatic drills, then strung charges of gelignite together with lengths of detonator cord.

Several hundred spectators turned up to watch.

Murthly lies at the western end of Strathmore, the 50 mile long valley which contains the richest arable land in Britain. Its farms were combined into grand estates which paid for the construction of many Big Houses, and that building boom escalated into a Palace Race between landowners. As the curator of the exhibition notes, New Murthly Castle is the perfect symbol of 19th century architectural extravagance, and of 20th century waste and disregard.

In 1827, John Gillespie Graham began building a new house for John Drummond Stewart, in part as a bid to outdo the recently-rebuilt Taymouth Castle near Killin. John didn’t live to see Murthly completed: even in 1830’s money, that would have taken £150,000. Instead it stood unfinished, and aside from hosting the occasional party, the house remained empty for over a century. Murthly was a folly to Drummond Stewart’s vanity.

As John Stirling Maxwell, the founder of the National Trust >

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New Murthly House was so solid it required explosives to bring down © DUNDEE CITY COUNCIL (DUNDEE’S ART GALLERIES AND MUSEUMS) CHARLES BRAND COLLECTION

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BUILDING

EACH HOME COUNTS BRE SUMMATE THE WIDER POLICY RAMIFICATIONS OF A NATIONWIDE HOUSING SURVEY WHICH LAYS BARE THE SHOCKING SCALE OF FUEL POVERTY The Each Home Counts (EHC) Report, was published in December 2016. This article provides a summary of the report’s recommendations and how this might be used to shape future policy and legislation in Scotland and the wider UK. BACKGROUND Over 4 million UK households are currently in fuel poverty; with over 44% living in the lowest energy efficient dwellings and 78% of these people classed as ‘vulnerable’. Scotland, Wales and NI are worst affected, although pockets of England such as the North West, Cornwall and the North East are badly affected too: 35% of all Scottish households are classified as ‘fuel poor’, rising to over 50% of all households in rural Scotland. Whilst nationally, fiscal and structural changes to the approach used are needed to eradicate fuel poverty, improving the thermal performance of dwellings and engagement with householders have critical roles to play. Colin King, Director of BRE Wales and expert in the ‘unintended consequences of retrofit’, states that: of the large number of ‘improved’ properties he has inspected, many were not done to a highly effective standard. Often with the consequence leaving vulnerable householders in a worse position than prior to these improvements.

Despite years of government financial support and publicly funded promotion and customer support programs, the number of people in fuel poverty has continued to rise.

As a result, in July 2015, the Secretaries of State for the Department of Energy and Climate Change (DECC), now part of the Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy (BEIS), and the Department for Communities and Local Government (DCLG) jointly commissioned an ‘Independent Review of Consumer Advice, Protection, Standards and Enforcement’ for home energy efficiency and renewable energy measures in the United Kingdom’.

EHC REVIEW The Review focuses particularly on the rights of the ‘customer’ and covers:

• Consumer advice and protection What supports consumers’ decisions ahead of the installation, and what assistance is available when things go wrong?

• Standards framework What ensures that the right products are fitted to the right properties in the right way during the installation?

• Monitoring and enforcement What ensures that poor quality work is dealt with effectively, and do arrangements for audit, compliance-checking and sanctions provide sufficient assurance of this?

This Report makes 25 recommendations in all, to improve the key elements of these approaches, including: • Consumer Protection; • Advice and Guidance; • Quality and Standards; • Skills and Training; • Compliance and Enforcement; • Smart Meters; • Home Energy Technologies and • Application to Social Housing.

An overview of the recommendations in each area can be seen in the final report: www.gov.uk/government/ publications Central to the recommendations are wide-ranging changes that are required to deliver the assurance and peace of mind for consumers that the right retrofit product(s), for the right reason, to the right standard will be recommended; will then be installed by a competent work force with right knowledge, skills and application, and finally if failure does occur, a clear and single mechanism for redress is available.

BRE is in the process of developing training materials to support people at all levels in the industry to improve understanding of the issues, increase the quality of installations and achieve better outcomes for occupants of buildings where retrofit measures are being undertaken.

Scottish Enterprise Technology Park, East Kilbride, Glasgow, G75 0RZ Tel: 01355 576200 Email: CertifiedThermalProducts@bre.co.uk Web: www.bre.co.uk/certifiedthermalproducts

LOST PERTHSHIRE

© DUNDEE CITY COUNCIL (DUNDEE’S ART GALLERIES AND MUSEUMS) - CHARLES BRAND COLLECTION

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Left - Sentimentality had no place in austere post-war Britain Right - Destruction continued long after bombs stopped falling

for Scotland, said in 1937, “This unfinished house, for dignity, proportion and beauty stood quite alone in its day and is still without rival.” Yet the conservation movement was in its infancy then, and the National Trust for Scotland’s founding aim was to protect wild places from development, rather than to save buildings, so it didn’t step in when the decision was reached to demolish Murthly.

Given its sheer bulk, the house presented Charles Brand with a challenge. First, the four flanking towers were pulled off their footings using a hawser attached to a huge Caterpillar tractor, then the central block was blown up by ICI’s men, using four tons of gelignite. The rubble became a quarry, with stone from Murthly used to build houses for the North of Scotland Hydro Board’s staff.

Walter Stahel, a Swiss architect who coined the expression Cradle to Cradle, was one of the first to put forward the concept of a Circular Economy which encourages us to reuse, repair and recycle. His work goes to prove that there’s scope for architectural thinking everywhere – yet the recycling of building materials began long ago, perhaps in the Dark Ages when medieval masons liberated stone from Roman ruins.

Stahel’s ideas have been seized upon in recent years, but their application is patchy. The closure and redevelopment of

hospitals, particularly Victorian insane asylums, was triggered by the Care in the Community Act and reached a peak at the turn of the 21st century. Some were lost to the hydraulic pincers of the demolition man’s full-slew machine, but many have been converted into flats.

The dismantling of railway infrastructure in the 1960’s, and the conversion of many into bike paths, began with the Beeching “Axe” – although some closures were reversed with the reopening of the Airdrie-Bathgate route and part of the Waverley Line. Similarly, waves of schools, hospitals and tower blocks were built during the post-war boom, then brought down half a century later by Charles Brand’s spiritual heirs, Safedem of Dundee. The Red Road Flats are an infamous example of their work.

Church construction went in spates: a boom after the Reformation, another after the Great Disruption, and a smaller peak after World War Two. Since then, the slow retreat of organised religion means that more church buildings are now used for other purposes than remain as places of worship.

Churches were fortunate, in that many were listed.

By contrast, the destruction of mansion houses and castles after the Second World War came about before they had any statutory protection. Victorian architecture was deeply >

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LOST PERTHSHIRE

Left - The romantic facade of Dunalastair House stands unloved Right - The interior fares no better

unfashionable by the 1940’s, and in his book “Scotland’s Lost Houses”, Ian Gow reckoned that over 200 major houses have been lost in Scotland since 1945, including vast 19th century mansions such as Perthshire’s Abercairney and Millearne.

Marcus Binney put the figure even higher, estimating that Scotland lost more than 450 houses of “architectural pretension” between 1900 and 1980, with over 60 of those in Perthshire alone. Duncrub Park, a Baronial-Gothic mongrel, was demolished in 1950, the year after Murthly, and Dupplin Castle was pulled down in 1967. Dupplin was a Tudor folly, designed by William Burn and known today only in picture postcards.

The late Charles McKean, Professor of Scottish Architectural History at Duncan of Jordanstone College of Art, said: “We may live in a different world from the one Gow shows in his book, but houses are still being demolished and many are now marooned by the land-holding laws. It’s not a battle won.

When these beautiful big houses were built all those years ago they were occupied by complete communities. That is not the case now.”

The Lost Houses exhibition presents tableaux of bewhiskered shooting parties, and a matriarch reposed on a settee like Grandma in Carl Giles’ cartoons. If they appear stern URBAN REALM SUMMER 2017 URBANREALM.COM

and unforgiving, perhaps they realised the era of gracious living was coming to an end. Many baronial houses, like Scone Palace and Glamis Castle, have become heritage attractions in order to survive.

What the exhibition doesn’t explore is the shape of the conservation movement in Scotland while all this destruction was going on. Perhaps the first milestone was Thomas Howarth’s book about Charles Rennie Mackintosh. It was published in 1952, which was early enough to contribute towards saving the Tenement Flat and Scotland Street School from Glasgow’s motorway planners.

Henry Russell Hitchcock’s plea to save Caledonia Road Church was published in 1965 – too late, because many of Greek Thomson’s Glasgow buildings were already rubble.

Today the church is still a shell, and the Egyptian Halls await salvation. Robert Matthew was more successful: in 1970 he spearheaded the Conservation of Georgian Edinburgh Conference, which is credited with protecting the New Town from comprehensive redevelopment.

Arguably it took until 1974, with the Destruction of the Country House exhibition at the V&A in London, and the founding of SAVE Britain’s Heritage the following year, to bring Lost Houses to the public’s attention. However, neither

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books, exhibitions nor pressure groups managed to solve the underlying financial issues.

In the post-War years, death duties led to much destruction: today the tax system is still loaded against historic buildings. Restoration work is VAT-rated, whereas newbuild work isn’t. The 90% business rate relief on unused buildings was recently abolished. Those measures, taken together, tacitly encourage the demolition of disused buildings.

Although Perthshire’s more recent lost houses aren’t included in the exhibition, Ardoch House at Braco was pulled down in the 1980’s, Ardargie House at Forgandenny was demolished in the 1990’s and Achalader House near Blairgowrie was lost as recently as 2012. So the cycle of construct-and-demolish continues, unabated.

We know what remains a little better, now, thank to the Buildings at Risk Register. Culdees Castle near Muthill and Dunalastair House in Strathtummel have both sat abandoned for decades. Dunalastair, with its fairytale silhouette and spectacular setting overlooking the Tummel and Schiehallion, was built in 1852 by the Perth architectural firm of Andrew Heiton & Son. It lived for exactly a century.

Dunalastair was later bought by the Tennents brewing family, then the chairman of the Caledonian Railway, and finally

requisitioned during World War Two. Afterwards it became a school for Polish refugees, who set fire to the dining room. As a result, it was vacated in 1952 and has stood as an increasingly ruinous shell for the past few decades.

Meantime, the largest and grandest of them all, Taymouth Castle, provides a counter-balance to all the destruction.

Taymouth was the seat of the Campbells of Breadalbane, whose lands stretched over 400,000 acres from Perthshire to Oban. Originally built as Balloch Castle in the 1500’s, it was demolished then rebuilt by William Adam in 1733.

The castle was rebuilt for a second time by Archibald and James Elliot: only the Adam wings were retained, and the new Grand Tower was completed in 1809. In 1842, the cycle continued. James Gillespie Graham rebuilt the east wing again, and linked it to the main building to create the Banner Hall. By now, the castle was palatial, with several hundred rooms and some of the finest plasterwork in Europe.

By the end of the Great War, the Victorian age had faded and the Campbells of Breadalbane had lost their fortune. The estate was broken up to settle enormous gambling debts, a fact underlined by the mirror-inlaid ceiling in a turret room, reputedly used by Lady Campbell to cheat at cards.

Taymouth Castle was sold in 1920 to a consortium which >

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LOST PERTHSHIRE

Left - The splendid main tower of Taymouth Castle appears secure Right - The opulent Banner Hall

converted it into a hotel, installing Art Deco lifts and turning the deer park into a golf course. Like Dunalastair, Taymouth was requisitioned in 1939, in this case as a war hospital. It later became a resettlement centre for Polish refugees, then a Civil Defence School, and finally a school for the children of American expatriates.

By the late 1970’s Taymouth had fallen into disuse, except for occasional dinner parties – a fate it shared with Murthly.

The castle’s owners spent the 1990’s trying to sell the estate: Madonna was apparently interested, until she discovered she wouldn’t be allowed to close the golf course to the public.

Finally Taymouth was bought with the intention of turning it into Europe’s first “seven-star” hotel. Restoration work started in 2002, when McKenzie Strickland Architects began to undo decades of unsympathetic alterations, and work has continued through a couple of changes of ownership. Intricate mouldings have been recreated, and gentle cleaning of the Chinese Gallery’s ceiling revealed its original colours.

Taymouth has been saved; still, the Lost Houses are heritage, too. Those ghosts of progress, which can’t be redeveloped, restored or converted, emphasise the transience of people and their vanities. Sometimes Lost Houses can’t be saved; sometimes we just have to accept that architecture goes up in smoke.

URBAN REALM SUMMER 2017 URBANREALM.COM

» The largest and

grandest house of them all, Taymouth Castle, remains a counter-balance to all the destruction.

Taymouth was the seat of the Campbell’s of Breadalbane whose lands stretched over 400,000 acres from Perthshire to Oban «

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Left - Taymouth Castle still stands tall Right - The Chinese Gallery hints at what has been lost

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