Long-distance Train travel has its compensations - as when a chance conversation with a stranger illuminates your thinking about something that's been on your mind for a while...
On Friday, I sat down beside a heavy-set young guy in a plaid shirt with a carry-out in front of him - he had clearly just come off the rigs - and an old chap with slicked-back wavy hair, and a face creased with laughter lines. Looked like he'd been a Rocker in his day, and when the offshore guy went to the toilet, the old chap offered me one of the beers - "he'll never notice..."
We got talking, and I discovered that before he retired, he was a rep for Morgan Crucible, selling fire protection to the construction and offshore industries. Since retiring, he delivers cars in order to make a bit of beer money, and today he was returning to Worcester after dropping off a Saab in Forres. So the conversation moved from buildings to cars, and he got around to the fact that he once worked for "a little company in Coventry called Standard-Triumph". I replied that the Stag was surely the best car Triumph ever produced, and he confided that after British Leyland took over Triumph, they quickly moved to close the Research & Development department.
Triumph Stag Mk2
After that happened, twelve of the men who designed and developed the Stag left Britain to join "a little company in Munich called the Bavarian Motor Works", and shortly afterwards BMW developed their first modern, unified range of compact sporting saloons and coupes, like the 3 and 5 series. Two insights occured at this point - firstly, this confirms what I've always believed about the styling of 1980's and 1990's BMW's. They look too much like Triumphs for the resemblance to be coincidence: for example, the lights and grille are contained in a narrow horizontal "frame" between bonnet and bumper; a pair of circular headlamps bracketed by arrowhead shaped light clusters which form the edge of the wing; a grille with blacked-out ribs, and a central bay which "advances". The characteristic "C" pillar applied to each model in the range. The fascia which curves around the driver. Need I go on? Perhaps this also explains why the Bavarians bought Rover in 1994...
BMW 5-series
Secondly, and more relevant to architecture is the fact that when you cut off the head, the organism dies. BL quickly destroyed Triumph's ability to develop cars, otherwise they would have continued to bring products forward, and would have retained their own identity. It's all about intellectual property, and the Germans understood that: this fact is also relevant to architects and designers, since so much of what we do falls into "research and development". Both our own ideas, and the materials we specify, are brain-children. We need to understand what it is we're doing, obviously, but we also need to understand how we fit into the bigger system. Sustainability is a very good example... and I'll illustrate my point using the specification of environmentally-friendly or "Green" building materials.
There are two different ways to look at building materials– the conventional way, to use Isaiah Berlin's great analogy, is to be a fox, knowing lots of different, specific facts about a range of materials. The other way is to concentrate on The Big Idea– perhaps to the exclusion of all else. This is what the hedgehog does. Berlin expands on this notion by dividing thinkers into two categories: hedgehogs, who view the world through the lens of a single defining idea, and foxes, who are fascinated by the infinite variety of things and for whom the world cannot be boiled down into one all-encompassing system.
Once, when we used a limited palette of traditional craft materials– stone, brick, lead, copper, timber– every architect had a good grasp of each one. He was a fox. When the systems approach burgeoned after World War Two– curtain walling, single ply roofing, cassette cladding– hundreds of new techniques and materials emerged, and it became difficult to know about every one of them. We retreated from being foxes, and when the Green movement turned mainstream in the 1990's, it enabled some architects to metamorphose completely into hedgehogs.
Their big idea is to build sustainability, which is fair enough… except that there are many different ways to measure sustainability. It isn't enough to look at embodied energy of manufacture, or ease of reuse and recycling, or anything else exclusively. As transportation costs rise and a low-carbon economy emerges, you need to consider where the product comes from as much as what it's made from, or how it performs in use. So we need to re-appraise our specifications, looking at materials which we can source locally. We need to become more like foxes, less like hedgehogs.
Now - in order to specify locally-made products, we need local factories, and if they're to last, they need to have R&D functions in Scotland, too. Otherwise, as happens with monotonous regularity, the inward investment from Japan, Korea or America uses Scotland as an assembly facility - with profits repatriated, but no high level work or headquarters functions here - which is expendable. The British Disease is short-termism, and these foreign-owned companies have caught it, too. It's easy to close a factory which lies so far away from the heart of the compnay. The Scottish Cure is to build up our own companies, so that we can source Scottish products, and guarantee a regular supply of jobs, too.
Meantime, while you pore over product catalogues, take a moment to consider what happened to the British car industry - Triumph, Rover, TVR, and now Jaguar and Land Rover for sale, too. Does the same fate lie in wait for Scottish building product makers? I expand on this idea in a forthcoming magazine article - so if you're interested, keep an eye out for it (plug plug!)
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