We are sliding further into recession – possibly a depression – and it seems the Westminster government is powerless to alter our course. This is not your average economic setback. The banking system – one of the main cogs of capitalism – is broken. HBOS (the former Bank of Scotland) and the Royal Bank of Scotland are in dire financial straits and it looks like they’ll end up being wholly nationalised. The faceless men in pinstripes have confounded the stereotype of the canny Scot, and destroyed our clearing banks. Perhaps this is the beginning of the end for capitalism? If so, the quibbles over Fred Goodwin’s pension are a sorry epitaph for Adam Smith’s greatest achievement.
Against this background, it’s worth remembering that Scotland’s financial sector is dispersed across the country, and some institutions are less reckless than others. For example, investment trusts such as Scottish Mortgage and Personal Asset in Edinburgh, or Alliance Trust and Mid Wynd International in Dundee, are perceived as cautious managers of other peoples’ money, and typically use far lower gearing (borrowing) than the carefree mortgage providers and sub-prime mortgage banks did. The recent merger of the Alliance Trust and Second Alliance Trust created one of Europe’s biggest trusts, the largest “generalist” trust listed on the British stock market – the giant of the global growth sector, as the Financial Times calls it. This also underlines that the Scottish financial sector is more than just an Edinburgh coterie of Fettes-educated fund managers and bonus junkies.
It was important that Alliance retained its headquarters in Dundee: the first of the ventures that eventually merged to create the trust was formed in the city in 1873. In fact, the investment trust itself was invented in the city by Robert Fleming, and fed by Dundee textile barons searching for a good home for their operating surpluses. Dundee’s investment trusts built a large percentage of America’s railway system, and Fleming became an advisor on several ventures involving Alliance Trust, later becoming a co-investor with them in railroad bonds and cattle ranching. The trust funded the whole Oregon railroad, and owned a large chunk of Texas – including the 800,000 acre Matador Ranch – until as recently as the 1950’s. A.T. also controlled the area in New Mexico where the Trinity atom bomb tests were carried out. If you ask how the West was won – it wasn’t through a “New World” pioneering spirit – it was won using Dundee money.
Scotland is still a stronghold of the investment trust, a.k.a. the “closed-ended investment company”. Other financial sectors, such as insurance – General Accident in Perth; and life assurance – Scottish Amicable in Stirling, plus Standard Life in Edinburgh – which was Europe’s largest “mutual” – were once pillars of the Scottish financial sector, but takeovers and demutualisations have reduced their scope. This has had a profound influence over architects, because these firms once commissioned prestigious headquarters from Scottish practices. Alliance Trust follows in that grand tradition, by commissioning Edinburgh practice RMJM: and also counters the gradual drift of P.L.C. headquarters away from Dundee. Low & Bonar relocated to London; William Low were taken over by the locally reviled Tesco; Bett Brothers were taken private by Gladedale Homes. However, it’s important to hold on to your wealth-creators, otherwise you will have no-one to commission buildings of real quality.
Enough of the economic history … what about the building? “Between dog and wolf” is a literal translation of “Entre chien et loup”, but the gist of this expression is more difficult to render into English. It alludes to the transitional hour of gloaming, when some things (for example the dog and the wolf) become indistinguishable. It also suggests a broader kind of transformation, such as where the familiar domestic scene changes into a wild, alien one. Alliance Trust’s new building falls between dog and wolf. It’s both a daytime building and a night-time building; plus a cross of European architecture with an Oriental approach. The result is a striking building which has emerged from a mystical place.
As a result of the merger between Alliance and Second Alliance, the newly-united Alliance Trust, which was spread across several offices in Dundee, found it needed room to grow and decided to concentrate its staff into one new building. The chosen site was originally Burns & Harris’s printworks, with a tall narrow Victorian office to the north of a 1960’s printing shed. The latter was a box clad in pebbly-looking exposed aggregate slabs, and a small corner was devoted to the dyeline and xerox copiers we relied on as architecture students battling against a pinning-up date. The site was cleared, and the hoardings went up late in 2007. The new building is a major step towards creating a street frontage on West Marketgait, which has had a piecemeal edge for the past 40 years, apart from Tay Works’ quarter mile-long facade. Alliance Trust helps to populate the street, finally remaking an urban edge opposite the redeveloped Overgate, into which half a billion pounds has so far been invested.
RMJM adopted a “SuperDutch” approach, creating a building faced in copper strip cladding and ribbon glazing. Alliance Trust’s copper skin floats over a glass skirt, with a giant electronic “ticker” streaming stock prices across the facade, Jenny Holzer-style. The antiqued copper has a darker tone, but a similar colour, to the Kingennie and Leoch stones used in many of Dundee’s older buildings including Alliance Trust’s former home, Meadow House, which was designed by James MacLaren in the 1870’s. The corners of the new building are picked out with glowing blue cold cathode tubes – producing a striking piece of night architecture – and allowing it to depart from the usual practice of floodlighting buildings. It’s a completely different philosophy, using incident rather than reflected light, and is both far subtler and more effective, in an age which has turned against light pollution and energy consumption. This is part of Alliance Trust’s canine/ lupine split personality: the building’s real character emerges when the gloaming falls
The building is steel-framed, with raking columns which carry the upper storeys over the entrance. In this, the SuperDutch architecture masks the influence of Chinese numerology, employed here because A.T. has strong links to markets in the Far East, especially Hong Kong. As a result, eight primary columns are ranged along the front elevation – the client requested that exact number because “8” closely corresponds with the Mandarin for “prosperity”. Similarly, feng shui also played a part: six storeys up is a penthouse top floor looking out to the Tay, peering over the top of the neighbouring HBOS main offices towards the horizon. As a result, Alliance Trust’s boardroom will benefit from one of the best views in Dundee – perhaps because the Chinese believe that those who have a direct view of a body of water are more likely to prosper. RMJM has evidently worked hard to create good omens, but the ravening wolf of Capitalism sits uncomfortably with the placid dog of Chinese mysticism.
The trust’s HQ has to sit happily within its Dundonian context; it has to satisfy the trust’s shareholders who each own a tiny fraction of the building; and it needs to compete with the buildings of the Square Mile and Canary Wharf in London, which Alliance’s competitors operate from. This is an example of a building which can act as a recruiting sergeant, convincing future employees of the firm’s aspirations. Given that, a cheap building would not only reflect badly on the company, it could positively discourage investment managers from joining the company. In the same way that the city is attractive to the financial community as a place to settle (with its genteel suburbs such as Broughty Ferry, the West End, and a “stockbroker belt” of outliers like Longforgan, Liff and Auchterhouse), the institution needs to take its part in the urban scene.
In approach and expression, Alliance Trust is a contrast to previous Scottish HQ buildings, such as Scottish Amicable, Standard Life and Scottish Provident, which used stone cladding to symbolise solidity. Perhaps HBOS and RBS should have taken that one step further, and developed masonry fortifications, given their currently embattled state. Maybe the copper cladding is a subtle reminder of the trust’s copper-bottomed surety? Whatever … the new Alliance Trust building is more important as a symbol of stability than a piece of architecture – but it succeeds as both.
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