Mine to mindscape

CHARLES Jencks has already made his mark on Scotland’s architecture, having commissioned Frank Gehry to design the series of Maggie’s Centres, constructed to care for cancer victims and their families, as a living testament to his late wife, Maggie Keswick.

He has also put his stamp on its landscape. The 3,000sq m garden sculpture he created at the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art in Edinburgh, Landform Ueda, is a leading contender for the 100,000 Gulbenkian award for Museum of the Year, with the winner announced next week.

But with the help of Scottish Coal, the American architect’s next landscape project could be his largest endeavour yet. Jencks has been drawing up conceptual ideas to reshape the environments of two open-cast coal mines. One is the Damside mine near Shotts and Allanton in North Lanarkshire, but the other is still to be named.

Put simply, the idea that Scottish Coal and Jencks are working from is this: that if you dig a big hole in the ground, you can either try and mould the landscape back to an artificial version of its former self, or you can fashion something entirely new.

What Jencks has to play with, potentially, are machines capable of moving millions of cubic metres of material, redesigning slag heaps and coal workings as a child might fashion a mud dam, into land art that will leave a legacy as large as any Stone Age monument or medieval motte.

"They are moving so much earth, that it makes sense not to just return it to a flat field," Jencks says. "Industry is a form of nature if we treat it right and take the trouble and time to design it, and that is why I’m working with Scottish Coal. It’s how to turn pollution, which is what, in fact, this is seen as, into a form of landscape."

Scottish Coal currently has seven operating coal sites, producing 4.5 million tons of the stuff a year, though it controls a total of some 10,000 hectares of land across the central belt, much of it farm land. Restoration plans are already formally agreed for some of them. An application has been submitted to turn one former coal mine, in East Ayrshire, into a 36-turbine wind farm.

However, "two of these sites, either the sites themselves or the land in close proximity, offer some opportunity for land art," says the company’s development director, Dacre Purchase, who approached Charles Jencks after a Sunday afternoon wandering round the Edinburgh gallery.

With his customary energy, Jencks rapidly turned around ten conceptual ideas. The company is now working on engineering versions and budgets for four of them. "Our business operates under a very heavy blanket of legislation," says Purchase. "Something that Charles designs on paper takes a hell of a lot of time to turn it into an engineering solution."

The most difficult thing for Scottish Coal to grasp, Purchase explains, was that in the open-cast mining business traditional thinking says you "extract coal in such a way as to keep your head down. You limit the visual impact and basically Charles’s proposals are almost the opposite of that."

Legally, Scottish Coal is required to restore areas it has mined to agricultural land; much of the Shotts and Allanton site, for example, has already been restored in the traditional fashion. But it meant that "no-one thought outside the box", says Purchase; planners opted for a safe mixture of sheep-grazing, footpaths, cycleways, tree planting.

But when you dig coal out of the ground, it’s much like digging your garden, he explains. The chunk of material doesn’t fit back into the hole. Rather than simply trying to restore the land, the next logical step is to create something with the material that has been moved.

"Charles is asking us instead how you create a visual impact, because that’s what land art is about." For Scottish Coal, he says, "the only difficult bit so far has been turning our thinking from gamekeeper to poacher".

Jencks’ ideas of land art are amply illustrated by the garden he has formed at Portrack House, the family home of Maggie Keswick Jencks, the writer and garden designer who died in 1995.

The 30-acre Garden of Cosmic Speculation is as unlike a traditional Scottish country garden as a Star Trek set; it is so space age that it is almost retro. Spiralling mounds and water ways, a Quark Walk and a DNA Garden, cosmic equations on a greenhouse roof and palindromes in the pavement, atomic models and even its very own black hole.

At the far end of the 30-acre garden is a railway track. As Jencks tells the story, the old four-arched bridge over the River Nith was vibrating to pieces under the weight of coal trains. When Network Rail came to rebuild it, Jencks took a natural interest in the new design and the result was a 210m, 15 million viaduct with a giant "bowstring" arch that took one of the biggest cranes in Europe to lift it into place on a spring night last year.

Jencks does not have much time for irony; his ideas flow too persuasively and earnestly to pause for self-doubt. As we look at the huge single span of the red rail bridge, a kind of mini-Forth Rail Bridge in a rolling Dumfriesshire river valley, he is expounding on his theories of industrialised nature and cosmic greenery, in a non-stop fountain of ideas, and I am wondering what the neighbours think.

I find out a little while later, at the nearby Ellisland Farm, a cluster of more traditionally charming white farm buildings where Robert Burns lived while he wrote Tam O’Shanter. A curator takes me to the spot where you can see, in the distance, the great red semi-circular spar.

"This whole place was littered with history and they stuck up this big bridge," he grumbles. "It’s an eyesore. They could have at least have painted it green."

From the remnants of the old bridge work, Jencks is busily constructing a series of mounds fashioned from earth and debris on a stretch of disused track, to resemble freight cars being pulled by a 1920 shunting engine. The engine was lying around in an old railyard until Jencks appropriated it for the work. Near the riverbank he is planning a "red rust garden" with chunks of metal carved from the old bridge.

"We are trying to build a garden of throwaways and we managed to get a throwaway train," he says. "If you put the right piece of junk in the right way in the right place, philosophically it’s like a weed. A weed is a beautiful plant in the wrong place."

The bridge’s colour is a measure of Jencks’ bold approach to landscape. "You had three options: you could paint it black, or green, or red. The problem with all colours is that they grow darker. I had in mind fire engine red."

In a series of amicable discussions with his neighbours, the colour was darkened. "They said they wanted something with more blue in it. My fear is that after three years it is going to be too dark."

The budget for the first of Scottish Coal’s landforms is reported to be close to 2 million. The company’s machines can reshape a site on the scale of that at the modern art gallery in about a week, Purchase says.

Jencks’ ideas for the coal sites do not centre on machinery. "One of my seven ideas is a wood, where you grow a dense forest and have a sculpture walk in it with white stone. You use the crushed white stone to make the path and then you locate sculpture along it. It becomes a sculpture walk in a dense forest. It could be very exciting."

Scottish Coal has already begun experimenting on a large scale with willow tree groves to produce an "energy crop". The fast-growing willows will potentially yield a harvest every three or four years of leaves and branches that can be chipped and baled as a "biomass" fuel, used on its own or mixed with coal to fire power stations.

The crop is greenhouse-gas neutral as the trees absorb carbon dioxide as they grow before it is released when they are used as fuel. Another of Jencks’ ideas incorporates this project, taking the living willow and weaving it into growing sculptures.

But there are other, more radical concepts, says Dacre. One would take the "bulkage" or "overburden", as the company calls it (to most of us, a slag heap), and shape it into an eye-catching landform that is greened with subsoil and topsoil.

"When you’re driving along the road, it captures your eye as a man-made piece of art," says Dacre; the Damside mine near Shotts and Allanton, for example, lies off the A71. "One is quite similar to the one at the gallery, but another is more angular, not like the pyramids of Egypt, but with an angular feel, while another has a curved feel."

Another version, he says, includes water features, cutting ponds that may resemble different countries in the world. "It’s whether the outlines of the ponds or lochs can be designed to represent something different; the outline of countries, or the outline of a woman.

"One example is that we have a piece of land that is effectively a convex curve as it currently stands. We would like to extract the coal. We can either put it back as a convex curve, or as a concave curve. In artistic terms that becomes clay that you can sculpt into land art.’’

The issue of what to do with industrial sites does not merely affect Scottish Coal. This week, France marked the closure of its very last coal mine. BP has built an advertising campaign around its conservation efforts. "If you think of the sites in Europe, think of East Germany, Poland, some of these sites are huge," says Jencks. " They are using land artists too. It’s an idea whose time has come."