Looking for the Future in all the Wrong Places

A Glasgow Walk

Second visit to the Second City (come on, where else is? Manchester? Birmingham?). Well, strictly speaking, third, but the first time was when my eye was untrained, and was spent mainly watching friends get stoned while watching Curb Your Enthusiasm, so doesn't count. I was there to give a lecture, but used the opportunity to do some extensive flaneuring and to try out my new camera - hence, you will find a drastic decline in quality here from the usual. The walk progressed from the genteel Hillhead through Partick to Anderston, then through the centre of town to Glasgow Cross and Glasgow Green. I don't have a Pevsner for Glasgow so am unable to identify lots of these - any information is, as ever, greatly appreciated. Glasgow is perhaps the only city in Britain where I could unambiguously and definitively say that the Victorian architecture really is better than that of the 1940s-70s. Not so much because of the crapness of latter, but because the determinedly urban, powerful, dramatic nature of the former is extremely hard to surpass. However, given that as far as I can tell the largest concentration of old tenements is in the West End, it's hard to guess just how bad their proletarian equivalents were. Almost all accounts I've come across argue that they were very bad indeed, worse presumably than the straggling wastescape of the contemporary East End. The West End tenements below, though, are truly lovely. My modernist get-out clause here is that their order, repetition, lack of extraneous tat, and their unashamed modernity, exempts tenement fetishism from the peasant associations of the hooray-for-back-to-backs-and-gardens tendency in England. New tenements seem as unconvincing as new terraces though, as we will see.

There are a few bits of modern infill which largely just seem inept - importations from Manchester or Leeds, little yuppiedromes using, as is customary, five or six cladding materials at once, and far further than the 60s blocks from the consistency and focus of 19th century Glaswegian architecture, standing almost entirely blind to their surroundings, while at the same time scrupulously respecting the height limits set by heritage ideology. Hence, they manage to be both petty and bluff. Impressively. The first of these is about as good as it gets - it at least makes a bit of an effort, the other none whatsoever.

On the way to the city centre, one passes various institutional buildings - those of the University, which has a couple of fine Brutalist compositions - but also the Western Infirmary, whose long block on stilts is bracingly warlike, and its concrete looks clean and shiny in the cold sunshine. Nearby, however, overshadowing it, are the red sandstone explosions of Kelvingrove Art Gallery and Kelvin Hall.

Kelvin Hall is the first example on this walk of a building type which seems peculiar to Glasgow, and which will run throughout this post - the near-skyscraper, the building which wants to be a skyscraper or, in this case, appears as the lost, truncated top of a skyscraper, with its preceding 20 storeys chopped off. The manner in which it dramatically forces itself upwards, its lack of tastefulness and the air of melodrama make it undeniably Americanist, the assemblage of obelisks and globes on the tower nearer to Raymond Hood or Eliel Saarinen than Edwin Lutyens.

At Anderston the contradictions of Glasgow architecture are especially vivid. There are a series of interlinked blocks of flats, and the contrast with the tenements is horribly unfair. The windows are absolutely tiny, as against the generous height of the tenement ceilings, and the chromatic complexities of the red and blond stone are near to the cheapest plattenbau concrete panels. The walkways attempt to add some futurist appeal to it all, but even they look poky. The overwhelming impression is grim, but to be frank, not uninterestingly so – the bracing Siberian air gives a Low-esque patina of tragic, imposing grimness. A 'ladies' hair and beauty salon' called Intrigue certainly helps this impression along. Across the road, postmodernist tenements seem to have ceilings as low as the modernist barracks they face. Still, at least they don't declare their distrust of their inhabitants as loudly as the ubiquitous CCTV does.

Then there's a massive rupture, where the ordered, only intermittently interrupted city is torn apart, in favour of the motorway landscape where the M8 meets the Kingston Bridge. Wrongheaded as all this is, the first feeling on crossing it is awe, as you attempt to trace all the different directions that the traffic is going in, vertiginously aware of how puny, how easily killed you are, and how terrifyingly close you can get to these channels of motorised death. The bridge across is extremely icy, which does not help. On the other side are blocks showing another Americanism, the weirdly Mid-Western style of Glasgow's commercial postmodernism. Inside this area is a completely self-enclosed alien landscape, in amazingly close proximity to a preserved Victoriana.

Then we get to the Grid, and the blocks that make up commercial central Glasgow, where the one-time vigour and independence of the city's ruling class is still palpable. Another version of Glasgow Americanism is that of Miami rather than Mid-West: 'The Beresford', a 1938 building which has variously been offices for ICI, a Halls of Residence, and is currently - obviously - luxury flats. Again, it appears to have weirdly little to do with Glasgow, or with the independent line of proto-skyscrapers that it developed at the turn of the century (more of which in a moment). Nonetheless, the way it has accommodated so many different functions at least partly qualifies it as an example of Manhattanism as defined by Koolhaas. Like many of the tallest pre-war buildings in Glasgow it's at the bottom of a hill, as if they didn't actually want to create a skyline.

The central grid means that Manhattanism makes more sense here than anywhere else in the UK, and the city's architects clearly knew it during the period where this was – after London, New York and Berlin – the fourth largest city in the world. Today, the only attempts in the grid to skyscrape are a tallish recent hotel by GM&AD and a decent post-war curtain wall by George Square. The pictures below, though, are all examples of the (if you will) halfscrapers of 1880s-1930s Glasgow, and the internet is quiet on who the architects might be. A variety of styles are employed – Flemish Gothic, Beaux-Arts, etc – although you can often discern the metal frames that lie beneath, and the distant inspiration of the likes of Daniel Burnham or Louis Sullivan. None of them ever manage to leap out of the grid, but you can tell they want to, that they're just itching to transcend their 9 or 10 storeys up to 20 or 30.

James Salmon designed the two Glasgow office blocks which seem most keen to make this leap. Salmon's buildings are as sachlich in their technical display as anything by the Chicago School, who were themselves inspired by Glasgow architects like Alexander Thomson (they certainly held the latter in higher regard than Glasgow Council seems to, given that his astonishing churches in the Gorbals and St Vincent Street feel decidedly lost). Salmon's hard to photograph 1899 'Hat-Rack' building uses large expanses of glass, its gaunt symmetry veritably pricking upwards, its bays seeming to predict Auguste Perret. Even more interesting is Lion Chambers, one of the strangest buildings I've ever come across. Constructed using the then cutting-edge Hennebique Concrete system, it was so experimental that it's apparently almost impossible to restore. It is currently held up with string so that it won't completely fall apart, but is derelict and noticeably crumbling. A combined office block and chambers for solicitors, it includes some very dubious looking concrete judges on the façade. The block seems to mash several different buildings together, with one part seeming like a glass and concrete Chicago skyscraper, another side all Scottish baronial, with the front a bizarre composite. This freakishly original building was surely the potential point of take-off for the Scottish skyscraper that never occurred.

One of the tall office blocks of Victorian Glasgow is Charles Rennie Mackintosh's offices for the Glasgow Herald, a craggy, cranky thing which barges into a small side street. Famously, Glasgow's visitors are enthralled by the variety of available 'Mockintosh'. I pop along to one of the Glasgow School of Art's tours of the building, which is given by an amiable former textile student who clearly knows next-to-nothing about architecture, but is keen to tell us it's all about nature, symbolism and stuff. The dizzying library, with its lighting effects borrowed from – oh yes – American skyscrapers, is worth the asking price, but is given about as much attention as the question of how annoying it apparently was to have been educated in the 'concrete monstrosity' opposite. They really ought to employ some of the architectural enthusiasts in the city who are now likely to be jobless. The Lighthouse, the architecture centre that attaches itself to the Glasgow Herald building, recently went into administration. Its small exhibition on Mackintosh provides far more insight into his work than the tour you pay a tenner for at GSA. A city whose architectural inequalities are as gross as Glasgow's should not be even thinking about closing a facility for architectural education, but as it is you can go to the viewing platform at the top and see it completely empty, as the strange and complex skyline is presumably less interesting than pondering what the ogee windows of GSA were 'about'.

One of the exhibitions at the Lighthouse is on 'labour' - more specifically, a set of proposals to reindustrialise this once overwhelmingly productivist city. I don't think one falls into Spiked Online-style Neo-entrepeneurialism in thinking this a marvellous idea, abandoning the pernicious tyranny of the servile service industry and the patronising tourism represented by the Mockintosh, through creating jobs that might induce some degree of pride or purpose. Sadly the actual images and proposals, ranging from the usual greenery to some melancholy images of abandoned mines, lack the libidinal force that could make this idea really convince. At the top of Page & Park's Lighthouse extension you can see, atop the hills that overlook the metropolis, a series of wind turbines, which make the same case more simply, with elegance and succinctness. As things are, this is an idea very far from anyone's agenda. On the train, I spot graffiti alongside the vast, derelict steelworks which closed in 1993. An SNP logo, and the words 'SAVE RAVENSCRAIG, SAVE SCOTTISH STEEL'. The steel for BDP's 2001 Glasgow Science Centre was made in Gdansk.

I wanted to see the People's Palace, as a ferrovitreous tribute to Glasgow's finest (ahem) 'deconstructionist', Entschwindet, but also to see the Glasgow tube. Which is...cute, the only architectural evidence that we are in the (musical) home of Twee, aside perhaps from the laughably provincial pomo buildings that house Mono, the Pastels' vegan cafe and record shop (and I suspect you can guess my opinion on the Pastels also). So I took a roundabout route, which entailed amongst other things a wander round Laurieston, New Gorbals, where I saw Norfolk Court, the place above, which is the most striking thing on the way into Central Station. It's colossal, nearly as wide as it is high. Like the similarly gigantic Whitevale/Bluevale blocks, Sighthill or Red Road, it's hard to make a case for it on strictly architectural grounds - no clever detailing, no smart angles, no textured surfaces, no futuristic extrusions, just a gigantic slab (two, specifically). What it does is display power, and presence. Here we are, if you don't like it then fuck off. It's a tower about to fuckin' chin ye. It's also, according to some accounts, popular with tenants, who are less than pleased about proposals for, alternately, demolition and clearance or recladding and transformation into yuppiedromes. This riverside site is prime real estate, and is being left to rot until a suitable plan for cleansing is agreed.

From there, across the river, passing the arrant Mancunian tripe above, to Glasgow Cross and then to Glasgow Green, and to the sandstone baroque/ferrovitreous People's Palace, next to the Doge's Palace, or rather its transliteration into a redbrick carpet factory. Before that, though, this - a piece of 1990s axial planning, where an arch from a completely different building was aligned perfectly with the stern Grecian temple opposite, though certainly not with the obelisk on the other side. In the middle, if you click on the photo above, is a white-bearded gentleman wondering what on earth is going on here. Elsewhere on the Green, a zoom lens can indicate surviving industry, sat next to the Last Year in Marienbad angular topiary. On the other side is 'Homes for the Future', a peculiar scheme which I profiled for BD, and which is not entirely bad once its utterly non-Glasgow nature is assumed - the walkways of the part facing the green are particularly, well, interesting.

The People's Palace features, among its interactive exhibits, the desk of John Maclean, Britain's first Bolshevik Commissar, under some '80s neo-expressionist murals of insurgent Glasgow. The items - pamphlets, papers, artfully scattered - on the desk are under glass. In the Crystal Palace at the back, the huge airy space is filled with the sound of Cliff Richard's 'Mistletoe and Wine'. Red Clydeside seems to have been quiet since the bizarre suicide of the Scottish Socialist Party, which rose and fell with equal abruptness. A wander round the corner, to a Red Bookshop, where, as I stock up on Workerist literature, the elderly owner guesses my politics (the badges are a bit of a giveaway - 'I used to make ones like that') and engages me in conversation about the weather in a viscous-thick Glasgow accent. 'It's started already', he says. 'It's terrible. And from here it's only going to get worse and worse.' Afterwards, I wonder if he was actually talking about the icy cold outside or actually meant, y'know, the weather. The landscape around is a mess of waste, surface carparks and unambitious 'vernacular' housing. It sharpens itself up as you get to Glasgow Cross, and then to the 'Merchant City', an uneasy mix of yuppiedrome infill and more 1860s-30s grandiosity. Here, as elsewhere, you see a combined and uneven credit crunch, dereliction and shininess sitting next to each other, trying to pretend it isn't happening.

George Square is where the grid of central Glasgow opens out for brief breathing space, and is the last place in Britain to have been occupied by the army, unless you count the theory that the military were reinforcing the police in certain areas during the Miners' Strike. In early 1919, the British government were absolutely convinced that this was to be the place where Bolshevism would erupt. A pitched battle here between police and demonstrators led to reinforcement with tanks, and a brief military occupation of the entire city, with the Red Clydesiders taken by surprise, left wishing they'd taken Maryhill Barracks in time. It's too cramped here now to imagine an insurrection beginning on this spot. The lions and the stark, abstract cenotaph are one thing, but the light architecture that fills the square in the run-up to Christmas is something else entirely. On the way up I saw countless freight trains packed with Chinese containers, which is as good an indicator of Christmas' imminence than any advent calendar, as we stock up on tat from the places that still make stuff. Looking at the seasonal George Square, you have to stare very hard to imagine it as the site of revolutionary action. It's hard, but not impossible. You'd just have to utilise the carousels and decorations in some strategic manner.