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THE NEW TENEMEnt: TRADITION AND MODERNITY Friday, 10 May 2013, Mackintosh Building, Glasgow School of Art, 167 Renfrew Street, Glasgow A one-day conference at the Mackintosh School of Architecture on Friday 10 May 2013 Mackintosh Building, Glasgow School of Art, 167 Renfrew Street, Glasgow G3 6RQ Organised by Miles Glendinning (University of Edinburgh) and Florian Urban (Mackintosh School of Architecture), in partnership with the Mackintosh School of Architecture and DOCOMOMO- International, and with support from the Architectural Heritage Society of Scotland (AHSS) and the Scottish Centre for Conservation Studies (University of Edinburgh), the conference examined the re-emergence of the tenement as an urban building form. The tenement has been ‘reinvented’ all over Europe since the 1970s. The conference focused on the renaissance of this widespread and, until recently, very controversial housing type, which for the purpose of this conference was defined as dense flatted residences on a street block plan. Tenements are particularly prominent in Scottish cities and have been a symbolic battleground in the long- running confrontation of ‘history’ and ‘modernity’ in the built environment. There, and in many other European countries, nineteenth-century tenements inspired a variety of new buildings that adapted features such as perimeter block plans, variations of small-scale design, multifunctional spaces, and regional aesthetics to contemporary uses and preferences – in the process synthesising elements of ‘tradition’ and ‘modernity.’ While the New Tenement is now widely accepted as a desirable dwelling-type, the new vision of the city and its inhabitants is subject of on-going debates. This includes questions of difference and local identity as well as ideas about individual responsibility and the role of the state. Against this background, the conference contextualized the international ‘tenement renaissance’ since the 1970s and its continuation today. Because a number of presentations were submitted in PowerPoint form without any fixed text, these proceedings comprise those for which text have been made immediately available. It is intended in due course to add remaining contributions to the proceedings as and when transcribed texts cans be sourced. Organizers: Miles Glendinning (University of Edinburgh) [email protected], Florian Urban (Mackintosh School of Architecture) [email protected] Other Contacts: Ruxandra Stoica (University of Edinburgh), research and organization [email protected] Ambrose Gillick (Mackintosh School of Architecture), research and organization [email protected] Simon Green (Architectural Heritage Society Scotland) [email protected] 1 THE NEW TENEMEnt: TRADITION AND MODERNITY Friday, 10 May 2013, Mackintosh Building, Glasgow School of Art, 167 Renfrew Street, Glasgow Day Programme Registration Welcome – Christopher Platt, Head of the Mackintosh School of Architecture, and Florian Urban, Mackintosh School of Architecture SESSION 1 – The international tenement renaissance – the historians’ view Moderator: Florian Urban • Professor Richard Rodger, University of Edinburgh • Professor Kathleen James-Chakraborty, University College Dublin • Dr. Katharina Borsi, University of Nottingham Lunch break – speakers’ lunch in the Mackintosh Room, Glasgow School of Art SESSION 2 – New Tenements – Recollections of Pioneering Actors Moderator: Raymond Young, founder of ASSIST architects, Glasgow, Theodor Winters, chief executive S.T.E.R.N. Berlin • Wolfgang Förster, Head of the Department for Housing Research and International Relations with the City of Vienna • Stuart Gulliver, Professor Emeritus of City Development, University of Glasgow, former director of Scottish Development Agency Coffee break SESSION 3 – The New Tenement – Current Practitioners and Standpoints Moderator: Neil Baxter, Secretary, Royal Incorporation of Architects in Scotland • Christoph Kohl, KK architects, Berlin • Karen Anderson, Anderson Bell + Christie Architects, Glasgow • Ken MacRea, Civil Engineering with Architecture Programme Leader, Mackintosh School of Architecture, Glasgow School of Art Concluding remarks – Miles Glendinning RECEPTION - Mackintosh Room 2 THE NEW TENEMEnt: TRADITION AND MODERNITY Friday, 10 May 2013, Mackintosh Building, Glasgow School of Art, 167 Renfrew Street, Glasgow ‘THE NEW-OLD TENEMENT: 19th-CENTURY LEITMOTIV OF 20th-CENTURY HOUSING’ by Miles Glendinning (Director, MSc. Architectural Conservation, Edinburgh College of Art) INTRODUCTION What I want to do in this paper is to interject a note of caution, and to argue that ‘the tenement’, as an idea The subject of this lecture, the Tenement, might well and a ‘thing’, far from being palpable and unchanging, seem a completely obvious, unambiguous subject. is in fact subjective, ambiguous, shifting – and certainly Almost more than any other building type of the past not inevitably fated to stay a central feature of housing two centuries, everyone has some idea what ‘tenement’ debates. I want to argue that ‘The Tenement’ has been means, and everyone has some idea that it’s a building not so much a fixed object but a fluid polemical device, type of wider cultural importance than just ‘mere a piece of political rhetoric dating from an age when architecture’. This is maybe because the tenement is seen housing was one of the most ‘political’ areas of public by many people as the specially Scottish contribution life. By ‘political’, I do not mean party political, but to urban housing, and thus as something which falls something concerned with matters of burning public especially within the area of ‘national identity’, an area concern, with conflicting ideals, which could only that has assumed such a heightened significance in the be made sense of by extreme polemical arguments. new era of home rule. Over the previous three decades, And this has a consequence for today, because while especially - the 1970s, 80s and 90s - the tenement has housing was inevitably ‘political’ in that way in the past, come to be viewed as something which is both firmly under the new market economy it’s become largely rooted in the Scottish communities of the past and depoliticised, and so ‘the tenement’, as an ideal, seems to also points forward to the uncertain future. In other be very slowly but surely slipping into the background words, it has come to appear an especially Scottish way again. of making sense of the housing problems of modern society, of rooting modern solutions in tradition and So, to begin with, the question of why housing had to in national community. It seems to be both a living be political and polemical? Well, over a period of about testament and a bridge to the future. 100 years, the era of mass society and world war, from the late 19th century until the 1970s and ‘80s, the main That idea was, for example, expressed in the very name domestic political issue in Scotland was class politics. Its of one notable 1980s housing project modelled on the focus was whether and how the conditions of the mass tenement pattern, in Maryhill, Glasgow. This project of the people, or what used to be called the ‘lower orders’ tried to combine innovative internal planning with of society, should be improved. The ‘housing question’ a classical exterior evoking the 19th century work of was probably the most impassioned and important Alexander Thomson. Some 20 years before time, it aspect of this system of class politics. Like other aspects called this combination the ‘21st Century Tenement’. of party politics, it was addressed through a series of And although the 90s saw a change in the architectural competing visions whose main feature was their highly style of housing towards a revival of modernism, still polarised, polemical character in relation to each other. descriptions of virtually all new urban housing projects The reason for this combative framework was as a way of in the past decade have made some reference to the motivating people’s zeal and passion, and defusing more inspiration of the ‘traditional’ tenement. It was seen as extremist positions. This general political passion about admirable for both social and visual reasons. It was seen housing was also paralleled by a more specific debate as a dense and sociable setting, in which all different about the architecture of housing, a debate which in social groups can freely mix, and whose wall-like facades Scotland and England had also been highly ‘politicised’ reinforce the public space of the traditional street. It since the late 19th century. This housing built form was seen as something that could combine a strong debate also took the form of a succession of polemical, moral and social authority with a direct, highly specific utopian visions of architecture and society, each one material aspect, because it is associated with a real, very vehemently rejecting its predecessor. Such a violent, distinctive object. So for all these reasons, it was seen as combative framework was doubtless essential, to act as something simple, directly accessible, and important to a lightning conductor, but it had the effect of concealing the wider community. the in many ways even more fundamental continuities 1 THE NEW TENEMEnt: TRADITION AND MODERNITY Friday, 10 May 2013, Mackintosh Building, Glasgow School of Art, 167 Renfrew Street, Glasgow ‘THE NEW-OLD TENEMENT: 19th-CENTURY LEITMOTIV OF 20th-CENTURY HOUSING’ by Miles Glendinning (Director, MSc. Architectural Conservation, Edinburgh College of Art) which also ran through the

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