The first thing you notice on arrival is just how big the Glasgow 99 team has become. Dozens of people fill desks on an upper floor in a dour 1960s city council office tower right in the heart of the city ("and they all hate each other," remarks one local architect cheerfully, "because they're all going to be chasing the same jobs next year".) There are directors, organisers, managers, co-ordinators, officers, assistants, spread across nine separate departments. The sheer size of the operation - bigger than many a successful design practice - is totally unexpected. The salary bill must be huge but then so is the scale of the enterprise. Out of the £400,000 originally granted by the Arts Council for the event, a total investment of something like £35 million has been leveraged. Or so they say.
The figures are somewhat fluid: add in all the building projects, and figures of £60m or so for the whole programme start to be bandied about. How much of this would have happened without Glasgow 99 putting its label on it, is arguable. A lot is public, Lottery, and European money, with £800,000 of private sponsorship claimed.
Broadly speaking, there will be more than 200 events - the number keeps growing and one or two big exhibitions, such as Sudjic's own "Architecture and Democracy" are only now being organised to fill gaps. The programme comprises exhibitions, tours, masterclasses, conferences, workshops and festival activities such as that "Big Design Day" on May 30, billed as "Fashion, Food and Cars, along with outdoor theatre, live art and performance". Sundry big awards such as the Stirling Prize for Architecture and the D & AD awards will be brought to Glasgow. There is a commendable education and community outreach programme, and a series of five "Millennium Spaces" being created in outlying areas. These are getting to the point: for what Sudjic always knew he needed to do was to create permanent objects as a legacy.
Exhibitions and talks and suchlike vanish from the public mind like wills o' the wisp. But buildings, public spaces and saleable designed objects stick around. And so we have "the Glasgow Collection" of covetable objects, from a Seymour Powell designed watch for Linn Products (still only a prototype), to the "Ursula" stainless steel bath by Submarine (a Millennium product, already in production). There are lights and a great bolt-together plastic hair by One Foot Taller, a stadium lighting system by Graven Images, and so forth. Under its director Bruce Wood, the Glasgow Collection has itself received Millennium Product status as a "design service", for such it is. Of the 50 designs it has enabled, 15 or so will make it into production.
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Bath by Submarine |
