Dundee: the difference a bridge makes

 

Dundee before the road bridge: From the Ordnance Survey 7th series, 1950s. You can see there is already a ring-road avoiding the centre

Dundee is a case study of urban renewal, but to be more precise, an example of urban catastrophe. Dundee owes its grandeur, at least as far as the visitor can see today, to the dramatic 19th-century expansion of the town for industry, for linen, then jute, followed by a long decline; the presence of the biggest comic publisher in the UK seems to have done little to arrest the decaying fabric of so many of the older buildings. As the docks declined during the 20th century, there were attempts to bring the city back to life. The single biggest change was the building of the Tay Road Bridge, completed 1966. According to Wikipedia, the UK government was against it, but campaigns by local businessmen led to it being built anyway.

The result is a traffic nightmare. The bridge brings traffic right into the middle of the city,. To be fair, other cities, such as Newcastle and Glasgow, had a motorway put through the middle of them; but there was already a movement to put roads away from the city centre. Oxford resisted an attempt to put a ring road through Christ Church meadow. However, subsequent attempts to repurpose the docks and the industrial buildings now have to struggle against the effect of the traffic, which Dundee is probably now stuck with for the next hundred years. Pevsner describes Dundee as “the most incoherent” of Scottish cities. I’m not sure if “incoherent” is the way to describe it, but two sets of dual carriageways along the waterfront, cutting off the V&A and the waterfront from the rest of the city, is just a mess. The dual carriageways make it a city that gives priority to fast traffic, with a few pedestrian crossings. Today there are a few stand-out buildings, including the V&A, but individual buildings don’t make a city. It is possible to find some life in the city, but the visitor has to search for it in locations that would not immediately be noticed. Here are three representative buildings from the centre of Dundee.

Present-day Dundee, after the bridge: the Tay Road Bridge, opened 1966, brings traffic into the middle of the city

The V&A Dundee

This is Dundee’s trophy building. Like a footballer’s wife, the V&A displays its grandeur very ostentatiously. The stated brief to the architect must have been to create a statement, which is fine; but the brief has been interpreted in the most gaudy fashion, to be honest resembling some of the Victorian buildings in the centre, where showing off how much money you had spent was very much the intention.

The Japanese architect, Kengo Kuma, stated he was inspired by some extraordinary cliff formations near Dundee, comprising row upon row of  deep horizonal bands. But for devotees of form following function, the resulting building is false. There are indeed similar horizontal bands to cliffs, but they have been applied purely as decoration. They have no function in the building. On examining them closely, it appears each band has had an electrified strip attached to it to prevent birds landing. Clearly those bands have been a problem from day one.

The building comprises two main upside-down V-shaped blocks, interlocked so as to leave a walkway through the middle. Given the winds along the Tay Estuary, it is hardly surprising that this gap has created a wind tunnel, and does not make for a pleasant walking experience. This is one of many tell-tale signs that concern for visitors on foot was not a major consideration.

As you approach the main door, you notice a further questionable feature: each of the  main buildings is sitting in a pool of shallow water. Nothing grows in this water, and there were no ducks or fish. To keep this water looking clear means chemicals must have been added to it, so the water can remain clear (and sterile). This cheap trick went out of fashion with Centre Point in the 1960s, if not before.

The interior is as full of non-functional items as the outside. As with the exterior, there are many overlapping panels, this time of wood, against the walls. This might be good for the acoustics, but the wood slats have no structural function. Inside and out feels like a structure that has had pretty bits added after the load-bearing parts had been designed; the aesthetics were added later.

All the exhibition spaces are on the first floor, and on the two days we visited, the lift was out of order. Certainly, upstairs there are several good display spaces, and a café with a great view, so perhaps I shouldn’t complain; but for me, the magic wasn’t in the building at all; it was the sweet women (they were all women, it seems) positioned at the main entrance and at the top of the stairs, who chatted with all the visitors. I didn’t see anything like this in London. They made Dundee come to life. 

Outside the V&A, once you had negotiated the two dual carriageways carrying the traffic from the Tay Bridge through the middle of the town, it was a 10-minute walk past the anonymous railway station, hidden within a hotel front, to the main shopping streets, which looked very run down. Again, this was the responsibility of the planners. By building no fewer than three new shopping centres, the Overgate Shopping Centre, the Keiler Centre and the Wellgate Centre, the council had condemned the existing shopping streets more or less to dereliction. Each time we walked along the High Street, there were drinkers gathered around a couple of fast-food outlets. There were people waiting for buses; but little sign of anyone lingering. It was only at Dundee Contemporary Arts that you escaped the traffic and felt you were in a place where people were happy to congregate. 

Dundee Contemporary Arts

This was a revelation. A relatively small development from 1996, DCA is successful partly because it doesn’t try to make a statement. It combines human-scale centres of activity: a café, a print workshop, a bookshop, an activity area for children, and a cinema. Everyone we spoke to in the centre was friendly and open to chat. The projectionist, for example, saw we were interested in seeing the projection booth and his collection of old projectors, and invited us in at the end of the film for a quick guided tour. The bookshop had the most interesting new books we found in Dundee. 

The Verdant Jute Museum

The Jute Museum, a former jute works, is a remarkable survival from the hundreds of jute mills in Dundee. It was built in 1833, so is one of the earlier mill buildings, but today, its position in the middle of the main concentration of mill buildings in Dundee means you have to walk through some very run-down areas to get to it: empty buildings, a few half-hearted attempts to repurpose vast warehouses, lots of graffiti, few if any people living there. Imagine the contrast when you enter the museum and are greeted by a volunteer who gives you an enthusiastic overview, asks you to give her a shout if you have any more questions or get lost, and is later seen collecting the empty plates in the café to help the kitchen staff. That sort of good will is rare. The museum itself is a magical place, even if some of the captions and displays are somewhat dated; Dundee is lucky to have such a survival. 

Conclusion

Dundee has some lovely people; everyone was open and welcoming. My suggestion for the town would be to move the bridge, an unlikely proposal – yet, I’m sorry to say, that providing any number of trophy museum buildings will not fix its problems.

Two Cambridge Colleges: Newnham and Robinson

 

Newnham College Hall

A visit to two Cambridge colleges on the same day can be very revealing. One college, Robinson, was by architects trying to create a major statement; the other, Newnham, looked to me a space where people would be happy to live and study together. Put simply, one college looked happy, the other forlorn, as if the humans survived in it, rather than benefitting from the environment. 

Newnham College

The look and feel of Newnham was established by Basil Champneys (responsible for the buildings from 1875 to 1910), whose goal seemed to be to create a human-scale collection of buildings, each self-contained but linked by passageways, creating a partially enclosed area with a garden laid out in fairly regular beds. This is not an attempt at a major statement, and is all the more creditable for that. 

Recent additions to the original complex have if anything enhanced the space, completing an informal quadrangle with a cafe on one side. I enjoyed a cup of coffee looking at this view of the original gatehouse, now no longer the main entrance. This is human-scale architecture, with clever designs in the brickwork; not ostentatious, but thoughtful. I could imagine becoming very fond of this mixture of buildings and gardens. 

It was very instructive to cross the road and walk through the nearby Sidgwick site, with several of the main University buildings, including the History Faculty, the Library, and the Faculty of Law. Here were buildings without reference to each other, with a dreary paved environment all around. It was a confusing and messy group, that revealed all the more the sensitivity and tranquillity of the Newnham campus. 

Robinson College

Robinson, like Newnham, is made of red brick; but there the similarity ends. It is one big L-shaped development (no separate buildings), built 1977-80, designed by the firm of Gilliespie, Kidd and Coia – highly regarded modernists. Sadly, the result feels neither collegiate nor unified. The site was rectangular, and presumably the idea was to create buildings that resembled a castle entrance, with very high walls on two sides facing Grange Road. The entrance is certainly impressive: a powerful diagonal overlapping of blocks above a tall entrance,  with a lovely walkway up to the main gate. Inside, the intention was clearly to create a Corbusian walkway in the sky connecting all the main components. But the result is brick passageways, just more brick. As with many Oxford and Cambridge colleges, the gardeners do what they can, but they have little chance at Robinson. For much of the walkway, the gardeners have abandoned any attempt at introducing greenery. In my photo of the main walkway, there was a tiny signboard indicating a café – but the café was a sad, dark affair, and I didn’t go in.  A couple of people were smoking on the walkway. Pevsner optimistically describes the walkway as “bringing constant animation in term-time”. I would imagine the animation is from the users hurrying to be somewhere else: it’s not a space where anyone would willingly linger. 

Sadly, the garden side of the college isn’t much better. The monolithic structure of the college does not integrate with the garden. Climbing plants were introduced on the wall of the main hall, with disastrous results to the brickwork. When I visited, the plants, which were clearly damaging the structure, had just been removed, and the resulting brick looks dreadful. This is not a garden that you feel belongs to the college. 

There didn’t seem to be a very clear way through the college to the garden. I got lost and then found myself walking over a very noisy stream running underneath the college buildings. If there was a clearer route, I didn’t find it.

 Conclusion

Colleges are special places in which the users have little or no choice over the environment they inhabit. My conclusion from looking at these two colleges is that architects have a responsibility to create a congenial, as well as collegiate, space, that will be home for some years, for the students. One college achieves this magnificently; the other strikes me as an architectural statement that fails to create an integrated building and garden, a space that you would use, because you had to, but never celebrate. I would have sleepless nights at Robinson dreaming of the drawbridge being raised and having to walk all night along those brick walkways.