<<
Part One
Midday,Glasgow--
darkened skies and rain seem to accentuate the city’s red and
custard sandstone, its dark spaces alternating with the light.
Black lorries, their windshields wicking away raw rain, traverse
the streets of George Square. In this city, weather is drama;
blasts of sharp wind blowing off The rivers Clyde and Kelvin;
rain that can come down in sheets one moment, then clear and front
a rainbow.
It has been a banner year for the
city, what with winning the designation UK City of Architecture
and Design in competition with more than 30 other municipalities,
including London. A near-daily roster of exhibitions, tours, and
educational projects has explored the very rich heritage of
Second City of the Empire, with particular attention paid to two
of Glasgow’s luminaries, Alexander “Greek” Thomson, and
Charles Rennie Mackintosh. Having first encountered Mackintosh’s
work at a Metropolitan Museum of Art exhibition a few years
ago, I was eager to see more.
In addition, the city has mounted
series of populist projects, from designing affordable housing
adjacent to Glasgow Green, close to the People’s Palace, the city’
social history museum, to hosting a variety of lectures and exhibits
that looked at the ways in which art and design informs life.
That efforts were made to appeal
to a broad base of city dwellers pinpoints a character trait that
distinguishes Glasgow from Edinburgh, its stodgier, elegant neighbor
just an hour away by train. The two cities have long enjoyed
a spirited rivalry, with Glasgow in the role of the scrappy underdog
-- as if its literature, with such books as No Mean City,
a classic on life in one of the city’s vilest neighborhoods, had
worked its charms too well. While Edinburgh is the seat of finance
and politics and the Church of Scotland, Glasgow has been a major
center for commerce. As commerce led to prosperity, Glasgow soon
became a center for artists and artisans. It still has its pockets
of poverty, a darker side of high infant mortality rates, teenage
pregnancy, poor health, and unskilled workers living on welfare.
But Glasgow is increasingly steam-cleaned and polished, a booming
metropolis that is as healthy economically as it is friendly.
For a visitor on holiday enamored
of the arts, Glasgow is a treasure trove, whether it is theater
rivaling that of London, its music scene, or its splendid art
museums. With only limited time, I want to take in as much of
the city’s architecture as I can -- and look at a tradition that
was first fueled in the early 18th century by the mercantile barons
who had made fortunes importing tobacco, cotton, sugar and rum.
The city boasts a cacophonous mix
of great warehouses and tenements -- (the term that covers every
kind of apartment block with a common entrance, from the cramped
slum to the elegant equivalent of a Manhattan brownstone).
And the trades which outfitted the great ships of the 18th and
19th century also supported craftman’s studios where much of Glasgow’s
extraordinary domestic iron and stained glass was made.
This is why, the guide at The Lighthouse tells us, on a
walk within the downtown district, most Glaswegians might tell
you the best way to absorb the beauty of the city is to look at
its buildings from the street level skyward.
We begin at The Lighthouse, which
originally housed The Herald, the city’s newspaper, a Mackintosh
building that has been radically recast by the firm of Page &
Park to serve as a permanent center for architecture and design.
From the tower I overlook a panoramic skyline dotted with chimneys.
It is not too hard to imagine Mackintosh, responding to the clouds
of dark billowing smoke, the industrial grime, the epidemics of
cholera, by creating buildings that let in light and are lightness
themselves.
In the Merchant City district, I encounter Alexander “Greek”
Thomson’s work in the flesh...streetscapes of warehouses where
he used Greek architecture as the base to incorporate the inventions
of the 19th century, from plate glass to cast iron. His
work, with its horizontal pull and the exacting attention paid
to detail, both exterior and interior, is said to have influenced
Frank Lloyd Wright.
Glasgow’s three main shopping
streets are filled with women in dark riding coats and trousers,
the men, often in double breasted worsted wool suits and French
blue tailored sport shirts. Glaswegians take fashion seriously,
whether it’s during working hours, or at night, when I see the
couples, the men in suits, the women in slip dresses, evening
coats, stiletto heels.
I make my way to the Hunterian
Museum at the University of Glasgow, for the permanent Whistler
exhibition and a tour of Charles Rennie Mackintosh’s house, which
has been painstakingly moved and embedded as a three-story cornerstone
of the museum proper. Like Thomson, Mackintosh’s most successful
efforts resulted when he was given complete control of all aspects
of a project. Of course, one of his primary gifts was his wife’s
artistry, which in this house melds seamlessly with his own. In
this house, where he and Margaret Macdonald lived as a couple
from 1906 to 1914, it is easy to see how Mackintosh took
Scottish traditions and infused them with Art Nouveau and Japanese
design. Even today these rooms seem fresh and startlingly
modern.
I will make it to one of the two recreated Willow Tea rooms,
which Mackintosh designed for the social crusader Kate Cranston
in efforts to encourage widespread acceptance of temperance. I’m
mildly disappointed, as the one I select has clearly become a
tourist trap. One of the things that I’ve enjoyed most about
Glasgow until now is the impression that my presence as a tourist
is neither here nor there to most Glaswegians.
On one of my final mornings here
I am up and out early, watching the children stream out of Central
Station in their blazers and ties. As the light grows stronger,
the buskers begin to set up for the day on street corners, opening
their music cases and pulling out their pipes and saxophones.
In a short while a raven-haired young woman appears as if an apparition
dressed in swaddling and moving swan-sized white wings on
pulleys. She startles the kids in leather, spiked hair and
platform boots, provokes stares and bemused smiles from
the rest of us.
I am bound for the Gallery of Modern
Art, a place full of work that is still seen as controversial;
much of it will make me laugh. But I stop in a cafe for
a cup of cafe latte, thinking of the homesick expatriate Scot
whose column I’ve read in The Herald this morning. He has
found New York City to be a morally virtuous place these days,
and its penchant for workouts and skim milk and decaffeinated
coffee has depressed him. He misses Scottish cream.
Overnight a rabblerouser must have
scaled the statue outside the museum, for the iron Duke of Wellington
is now wearing a construction cone as a cap. He looks a
lot less dignified in front of the former Cunningham mansion,
more like a reveler on a tear.
I will remember the wind and the
pulsing pneumatic drills of this robust, good-hearted place...and
Glasgow’s portrait of life as light and darkness will come back
to me as scenes of living theater.
Photo: Mackintosh
Room, Glasgow School of Art; Photo by Michael Graham.
Glasgow, Scotland © GSA Enterprises Ltd.
