Re-invention is only laudable if it adds something new and worthwhile. However, the architectural obsession with finding new and different ways of doing even the simplest thing recalls the forced product designs of the 1980’s. We suffered calculator watches; stereos with flashing LED’s, graphic equalisers and hundreds of buttons with obscure functions; and of course cars with talking, digital dashboards. In the 1990’s, once the Yuppie era of conspicuous consumption was over, minimalism returned – even though companies like Braun never strayed from simple, functional design.
Product designers re-learned the lesson that straightforward, intuitive and time-proven methods often work best. Architects, on the other hand, find that a bitter medicine to take. New “solutions” are offered to the housing “problem”, although we already have a medium density form of housing that works. The tenement has been discredited, cry the young turks (although most of them are at least fifteen years out of architecture school…), we must re-invent the tenement! Perhaps architects, and the people who set briefs for student architects, need something to exercise their creativity on. The tenement, a fundamentally urban building type which ain’t broke, doesn’t need to be fixed.
Magdalen Yard, Dundee West End
Never mind, what are the alternatives? We tried deck access housing, which became slums in the sky when the cold, wet circulation areas were forsaken. Instead of being “common” areas, they became no man’s land. Park Hill in Sheffield stands empty at the moment. We tried maisonettes, based on an English Garden City prototype, which offered too low a density – land is too expensive nowadays in inner cities. We tried courtyard housing, which worked well on the Continent, but never caught on here, despite the efforts at Cumbernauld. We tried the Radburn layout – low density suburbs with detached and semi-detached bungalows; we decided that they’re too bourgeois, at too low a density, and too focussed on the car. We tried point blocks, and discovered that they aren’t urban at all – they’re isolated from each other by windy alleys, and they do not promote any kind of cohesive sense of community. Hutchesontown “C” was demolished several years ago, and the Ardler slab blocks in Dundee are being flattened, one at a time. Each of these is a failed experiment from which we’ve learned and moved on, right?
Worryingly, students are churning out deck access schemes once more. Perhaps their tutors haven’t visited places like Pilton in Edinburgh, or Whitfield in Dundee, to see why deck access failed, and how badly it failed the people who live in it. Even more worryingly, the tower block is back in fashion once more, as if to compound the mistakes of the 1960’s. Instead of reading Muthesius & Glendinning’s book on the evolution of the British Tower Block as a cautionary tale, some people use it as an inspiration. Ian Simpson is exporting Manchester high rise living to Glasgow, and other exponents will follow suit. The only difference is that mortgagees are choosing to put up six times earnings, rather than rent-payers being decanted here against their own volition. That may make a big difference, but not in the total lack of urbanity which they experience when they leave their flat in the morning, ride the lift down to the car park, then sit in their SUV for half an hour on a stationary Clydeside Expressway. I use “urbanity” advisedly in this context.
Glasgow Harbour, Finnieston
Interestingly, Glasgow’s Homes of the Future exhibition (1999) showed off several housing typologies, including several medium density buildings. Today, the Highland Housing Fair (2008) doesn’t appear to address medium density housing at all. Perhaps the logic is that the rural, relatively sparsely-populated Highlands have no need for the tenement, or anything similar? If that’s the supposition, it’s wrong, because small Scottish towns, and even villages, built tenements. The best example I have to hand is Meigle, an ancient Perthshire village of several hundred inhabitants, and whose core has a couple of handsome, stone-built tenement blocks. They contribute to the grain of the village, and provide a lower cost alternative to the larger houses on the periphery.
Two more contemporary examples of Scottish architects looking at medium density and seeing something worthwhile, are Elder & Cannon at Crown Street in the Gorbals; and Page & Park at the Sinderins in Dundee. Interestingly, both practices are based in Glasgow, which has street after street of tenements of every age and colour, and in fact Page & Park’s modern tenement won an RIAS competition of 1983 to update the traditional form of the tenement. They put forward a four-storey blockwork building with a street frontage, communal stairs, a backland, and even a quirky take on the Scots gable. It sits well with its neighbours, matches the density of the surroundings, and appears to work well within its remit, which is to provide sheltered housing for folk who grew up in and subsequently lived in tenements for most of their days.
Pennycook Lane, Dundee
From the outside, this process looks similar to what Richard Dawkins calls cumulative evolution – when each small change adds on to its predecessors, after several generations creating a different beast, which is nonetheless identifiably related. Evolution is a completely different paradigm to re-invention, which usually means “revolution”. One final point – someone will probably say that a call for us to start buildings tenements again is reactionary. I put it to them that Modernist tower blocks, the first time around, were a reaction against traditional Scottish forms. The so-called New Urbanism which came after is a reaction to Modernism. That makes today’s new tower blocks a reaction to New Modernism, itself a reaction to a reaction … but please don’t tie yourself up with semantic dogma. It’s enough to know that Spence, Hurd, Reiach and their contemporaries recognised how important the tenement is, which is why they also adapted it for modern use.
The alternative to the tenement are the glum blocks of medium-rise flats which appear to have caught on in every Scottish city. I won’t say where the photo below was taken, as it’s interchangeable with every other similar block in every other step-and-repeat development. It is quite telling that Mickey Mouse features on the van sitting on front of the flats, though, since their elevations have a cartoonish quality – contrasting bands of colour, and big porthole windows. As in the blocks beside Aberdeen’s Beach Boulevarde, Dundee’s Marine Parade, and the regenerations of Leith and Granton, it must be seaside architecture if it features portholes. Like Disney's cartoons, the subtext is fun and a light touch, a gesture to what the water's edge used to represent. Is this the architecture parlante which we hear about?
Mickey mouse housing
The higher aim of housing is to encourage social interaction, and through it, social cohesion and that mercurial concept which Thatcher couldn’t grasp, society. The slum clearance programme which originated with Section 3 of the Housing (Repairs and Rents) (Scotland) Act, 1954 looked only at the symptoms of old decrepit buildings. It paid scant attention to the society which people formed in each close, and the divisive effects of decanting people to peripheral housing estates with few facilities. Quite apart from the difficulties folk had in reaching work, shops, swimming pools and cinemas – existing social networks were pulled apart. Tenements worked particularly well in Scotland during the previous 400 years, and one reason is that they brought people into contact with each other.
I guess the moral of this tale (if architecture can ever engender a morality tale) is that if you want to build dramatic things which photograph well, but disregard how Scottish families live, go ahead and build tower blocks. However, if you want to build homes for urban people, which contribute to the urban form by locking together to create streets, squares and avenues; which foster a sense of society (pace Jan Gehl), and which encourage streetlife; and which in the end acknowledge a Scots urban tradition stretching back for hundreds of years … then we don’t need to re-invent the tenement. It’s recognisable both as a building type, and as a functioning component of the city.
Fisher Street, Broughty Ferry
In the words of the great philosopher, “can you guess what it is yet?”
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