Peter Jones: Why pictures of building sites are indeed inspiring

Published on Tuesday 12 January 2010 21:23

THREE things caught my eye in The Scotsman yesterday – plans to renew Dundee's waterfront and put an offshoot of the Victoria and Albert Museum into it; schemes to put a big new civic square on Aberdeen's Union Street Gardens; and Patricia Cain's award-winning paintings of building sites.

They all involve rebuilding. A happy coincidence? I don't think so. I reckon they are symbolic of the times we live in.

We are just clawing our way out of the worst recession since the 1930s. Such big events inevitably prompt people to do a lot of thinking and out of that comes creativity and progress. Having discovered just how insubstantial and insecure the rewards of financial services are, it is my belief that there is a general mood to look to build rather more substantial things and the items listed above are the harbinger of that new direction.

It is especially pleasing that these portents all involve art. You may think that there was nothing good about the depression era, especially as it led on to the apocalyptic disaster of the Second World War. But in fact it produced some of the most striking architecture that Britain has ever conceived – Art Deco.

The evidence of that is to be seen all round our cities – in the designs of department stores and cinema chains that spread around our city centres as new-fangled trams and buses made cheap public transport to them possible, in the still remarkably contemporary-feeling Scottish Office (now Scottish Government) building on Edinburgh's Calton Hill, and in the amazingly durable and eye-pleasing flats flanking Glasgow's Great Western Road.

The sense of civic worth that these buildings imparted, plus the revival of manufacturing through the motor industry and shipbuilding, gave Britain the economic and cultural vigour, within a few short years from the depths of depression, to plunge into war and emerge victorious.

It was quite a feat. Can we do it again, although this time can we please avoid the bit about the war?

I think we can, and we are starting in the right place. Cities are the engines of Scotland's economy, and if we can get their hearts right, the whole economy benefits. I watched Manchester's city centre being rebuilt after the IRA bomb devastated it in 1996 and the vitality it gave the city, along with the 2002 Commonwealth Games, was remarkable.

Dundee has been badly served by planners and builders over the years. The Stalinism of the former Tayside Regional Council's headquarters, the prisonesque frontage of the Hilton Hotel, and the drabness of recent office buildings along Riverside Drive have wrecked what should be one of the finest waterfronts in Britain, if not Europe. The redesign around a central park, providing the buildings are of sufficient quality, should give Dundee the kind of outward-looking heart it ought to have. The possibility that Frank Gehry might design the Victoria and Albert Museum outstation is equally exciting.

I visited Bilbao in the Basque country in the 1980s and saw acres of dereliction overhung with Eta terrorism and concluded that the city had nothing going for it. But Gehry's Guggenheim Museum has been utterly transformational, making it one of the foremost destinations in Europe.

By comparison, Aberdeen with its oil wealth should have one of the most impressive city centres in Britain. But Union Street, as shopping has decamped into nearby indoor centres, now looks rather dowdy. The gardens way below street level have always been a dank, forbidding place. Building over them to create a civic square at Union Street level is a great solution and could well revive the whole street.

Yes, I know there is a great row going on about an alternative plan for a contemporary art centre. If I correctly heard Sir Ian Wood, who aims to gift the city 50 million for his bigger plan, on the radio the other day, he thinks this art centre can be incorporated into his scheme, which sounds excellent.

Evidently, Scotland has the cultural creativity. What about the economy? If I am right about the mood of the times, we want manufacturing to expand. We tend to assume that, Ravenscraig steelworks, most of the shipyards, and much of electronics having long disappeared, there isn't much left.

Actually there is and, because what is left has been through such tough times, it is in good shape.

But where is the big growth that we need going to come from?

Renewable energy looks like a pretty good bet. I confess I have been highly sceptical that the wind power industry can either deliver all the power that its supporters claim it can, mainly because it is relatively expensive and its output is unpredictable.

I retain much of that scepticism, but I also must confess that I am impressed by the huge amount of activity that renewable power is, well, generating. In recent weeks I have come across a start-up Scottish company, NGenTec, which has a revolutionary design for a generator (the bit that, when driven by turning turbine blades, produces electricity) which could dramatically cut the costs of constructing and maintaining wind farms, especially offshore ones.

It has come out of technology designed at Edinburgh University, as have the graduates behind another new company, Renewable Devices, in Midlothian, which is building and selling domestic scale wind turbines that produce a decent amount of power and, crucially, are noiseless.

Now, it does not really matter whether renewable energy is Scotland's answer to power problems and carbon emissions or not. The point is that the rest of the world sees wind power as an important solution. And even more important, in a technology where the Germans and the Danes are suppose to be leading, here are Scottish companies making advances with big commercial and employment potential.

So I think Scottish manufacturing could well have a rosy future. As, apparently, does prize-winning artist Patricia Cain. If her paintings of building sites are as good as the critics say they are, she could be capturing an important moment in history.