The bigger impact, however, will be made by two key building projects. The one on which most hangs is the "Lighthouse", which is a radical £11m conversion of Mackintosh's long-empty Glasgow Herald building into an architecture and design centre - architects being Glasgow boys Page and Park. The other is "Homes for the Future" on Glasgow Green, where a masterplan (again by Page and Park) has led to an assortment of houses and apartments by Elder and Cannon, Rick Mather, Ian Ritchie, Ushida Findlay, Wren and Rutherford, RMJM, and McKeown Alexander. It's a privately-financed thing, although Ritchie's block will be for a housing association rather than well-heeled loft-dwellers. The first phase of 100 homes is meant to be finished around half-way through the Year, whereupon the top deck of most desirable apartments overlooking the Green will be flung open as a kind of mini-Expo. Then - if economic conditions allow - more phases will be built, resulting in 300 homes by 2005.
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Homes expo on Glasgow Green |
One can criticise certain design aspects of "Homes for the Future" - the most glaring of which is the optimism with which the Scottish-Japanese practice Ushida Findlay has created a descending series of open north-facing terraces on its apartment building. In Glasgow's climate these are just not going to work. The whole scheme has been stitched together in one hell of a rush, but that's expos for you: by and large this is not too much of an architectural zoo and it will be fascinating to see the area develop.
Do I sound over-critical? Actually I'm looking forward to the Year enormously. Buildings aside, I want to see Stamp's Thomson exhibition, which will open the Lighthouse. I want to see Sudjic's "Architecture and Democracy". I want to see Rowan Moore's "Vertigo", dealing with the new high-rise cities of the Pacific Rim and elsewhere. The exhibition "Winning", by Sue Andrew and Ron Arad, dealing with the design of sports equipment, sounds good, as does Gerry Taylor and Claire Catterall's "Food" show. There are exhibitions on Frank Lloyd Wright, Mies van der Rohe, Alvar Aalto. Philippe Starck is in town, and the ageing enfant terrible of design post-modernism, Ettore Sottsass. There is a promising V&A-curated show on colour in design, called Red. The last design exhibtion of the year, "Identity Crisis" at the Lighthouse, is where curator David Redhead tries to define the 1990s through its objects.
So only the staggering price of plane tickets stands between me and a year of radical over-indulgence in architecture and design. And this, in the end, will be the test of Glasgow '99: just how good will it prove to be at pulling in the punters from outside? Can it achieve national and international, status, rather than serving its very culturally aware regional audience?
It has at least one bit of chronological serendipity running in its favour: all this happens the year before the Dome extravaganza in Greenwich. Glasgow has no single venue or event to compare with that, but its more piecemeal city-wide approach may well work in its favour. And even having rumbustious old Isaacs as cheerleader is no bad thing. He may have sown a minefield of discord at the Opera House, but just remember the triumph of the early Channel 4.
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Javier Mariscal bar in the Lighthouse |
