IN THE BELLY OF THE COOL BREATH'D EARTH

One of the benefits of living so high off the ground is the ability not just to include the weather's more subtle movements within our own wanderings (mental and physical) but for the weather to include us within it. This, of course, is a matter of truth that is normally relegated to the domain of small talk, but is really deserving of a much larger arena. How the weather affects us, our moods, our behaviour, our mental processes, is never really in doubt when living on the 17th floor. You can feel the weather inside you as it plays out before you. One becomes, necessarily, by virtue of this idiosyncratic skyscape in front of you, more attuned to it.

This becomes all the more immediate when the occasional fog envelops the high-rise. An aura of blueness may surround the building, yet it penetrates to the very core of the body. The body breathes from within this cloud. The fog becomes part of you. There is movement, and moisture, and cohesion.




The Fog from the 24th floor.

HORIZON

A living thing can be healthy, strong and fruitful only when bounded by a horizon; if it is incapable of drawing a horizon around itself, and at the same time too self-centred to enclose its own view within that of another, it will pine away slowly or hasten to its timely end.

Friedrich Nietzsche 'On the Uses and Disadvantages of History for Life'.

Samuel Taylor Coleridge once remarked of hills that surround a city:

The first range of hills, that encircles the scanty vale of human life, is the horizon for the majority of its inhabitants.

Coleridge knew that the horizon needn't be so shallow, so 'egocentric', so singularly encapsulated within itself. Phenomenologically, the perceptual field or landscape (and you'll know what I'm talking about if you live in a high-rise or a house on a hill) has numerous 'internal horizons' as well as the external one that envelops it. Essentially, the horizon is limitless, and without boundary. It needn't be confined to the curvature of the Earth. It is a matter of depth, of expansiveness, facilitated to a large extent by vision rather than weather.

As David Abram says in his essay 'Merleau Ponty and the Voice of the Earth':

The experience of depth is the experience of a world that both includes one's own body and yet spreads into the distance, a world where things hide themselves not just beyond the horizon but behind other things, a world indeed where no thing can be seen all at once, in which objects offer themselves to the gaze only by withholding some aspect of themselves - their other side, or their interior depths - for further exploration.

Essentially, it is this 'further exploration' that interests me. And of course, this babushka principle of body within body. As Abram later asserts,

A renewed attentiveness to bodily experience, however, enables us to recognize and affirm our inevitable involvement in that which we observe, our corporeal immersion in the depths of a breathing Body much larger than our own. [...] Examining the contours of this world not as an immaterial mind but as a sentient body, I come to recognize my thorough inclusion within this world in a far more profound manner than our current language usually allows.

For this complexity and complicity, there is poetry. Kenneth White, the Glasgow born poet and traveller, refers to this 'horizon' and 'body' a great deal in his work. From his poem 'Walking the Coast' he writes,

Knowing now
that the life at which I aim
is a circumference
continually expanding
through sympathy and
understanding
rather than an exclusive centre
of pure self – feeling
the whole I seek
is centre plus circumference
and now
the struggle at the centre is over
the circumference
beckons from everywhere

Getting beyond the ego, into the geo, mapping the self back into the world, this is the beauty of the high-rise: it allows for these horizons to be seen, to come forth; it ventures the eye and the mind into the world - it enlarges and enriches 'identity'. The flesh of the body is reconnected with the flesh of the world. The struggle at the centre is over.

'The Horizon Hitherto' - Bellahouston Hill from the 17th Floor



'Layered Horizons'

With such a widescreen on the world (and there's a lot of worlding in front of these 17th floor windows), there is a real cartography at work, in front of you, that reveals a multiplicty, a multiformity, and a largeness that, inexorably, draws the mind in. It is only a matter of time before the body follows.

TO THE LIGHTHOUSE!

The following are just a few pictures from the Lighthouse building (designed by Charles Rennie McIntosh for the Glasgow Herald) in Mitchell Lane. The refurbished building is truly an exploration not just of sight from its two observation towers but in touch and feel as one gets to grips with the variety of materials and designs used throughout the building. The interior, as every building should, ignites the sensuous within, and so begins a relationship with animate and inaminate.

The view from the observation room on the 6th floor. A carpet of coalescing rooftops reveals the city as one unified and integrated creature. There are few city rooftops that can compete with the sheer textural variety of Glasgow's.

The wonderful spiral staircase leading to the McIntosh Tower - a real haptic experience!




The north-east view over the centre, and Buchanan Street's cupolas and domes.




The west view from the McIntosh Tower in Mitchell Lane.

THE MAN WITH A CLOUD FOR A HEAD

HI-RISE WI-FI

To be sure, when living in a block of flats, one becomes very quickly aware of the porous nature of concrete and the tunnelling capacity of sound. When I inhabited a communist squat block in Warsaw, it wasn’t just sound that travelled. You could tell you were knee-deep in a Warsaw winter by the smell of the national stew ‘bigos’ wafting up from below, that cabbagey-sausagey smell unmistakeable. Shared sounds and smells were an intrinsic part of the experience of living in a communist-built block. This was accompanied by a strange sense of community, to the point where after 3 years I had seamlessly synchronised myself (at least temporally) into my neighbours lives.

When living in Rabat in Morocco the concrete was so perforated (facilitating ventilation in the hot summers) that I couldn’t just hear the troll below me and her afternoons of satellite TV but the guy below her too battering away at all hours of the night. This sinister soundtrack was compounded by the Arabic adage ‘do as your neighbours do, or leave’.

Here, in Glasgow high-rises, the insulation is a little bit better, and the summers a little bit cooler. Sounds are more muffled, if they are at all. Smells are more or less, with the exception of a tobacco-ed elevator, non-exsitent. But there is, thankfully, something that does travel through these thick demarcating walls - and which is more welcome than all the others put together - the wireless waves of broadband. Whence exactly it comes I am not entirely sure, but it comes. Living within a frequential stone’s throw of some 130 apartments has its advantages. Gone is the 30 quid a month direct debit, and the dodgy service that invariably accompanies it. Here, on the seventeenth floor, I simply open up my laptop and off we go. Bloody marvellous! Hi-rise wi-fi. Just how it should be.

BLUE AFTERNOON




Looking at Kirkton and Kingsway high-rises from the 6th floor of Lawers Tower in Lincoln Avenue one blue November day.

A ROOM WITH A VIEW

What modern man wants is a monk's cell, well-lit and heated, with a corner from which he can watch the stars.

Le Corbusier

As a ‘denizen of the celestial region’ and with an oceanic view that encompasses virtually the whole city as well as a sizeable portion of the country and the night sky I continually feel as if I’m privy to a secret dimension that has hitherto been relegated to panoramic restaurants, hilltop observatories and aeroplane portholes. In other words, to places that require the cost of admission. Not only is the rent invariably cheaper in a Glasgow high-rise but the ineluctable enrichment of the imagination that comes with the upper floors is priceless. It’s a win win situation, especially when you consider what your window could be looking out onto: an expressway, a lifeless piece of spare ground, someone elses kitchen, a retail park. Irrespective of how much time you spend in it, the view from your ‘living’ room had better welcome a certain serenity. Otherwise, that traffic’s going to take its toll.



'Looking in to someone else's kitchen'

HEIGHT, SIGHT, LIGHT & DEPTH

'Depth [...] is the announcement of our immersion in a world that not only preexists our vision but prolongs itself beyond our vision, behind that curved horizon.'

David Abram (Merleau-Ponty and the Voice of the Earth)

One of the many perceptual benefits of living in the sky is the welcome sense of depth that an enlarged view necessarily bestows upon the viewer. This is not simply a case of height and sight which enable this width of field, but of the varying degrees of light which pour over the city throughout the year. Volume, contrast, and distance are all imparted upon the observer with varying degrees of success. If you’re attentive enough, you come to appreciate not just the seeing of the object (and its various corresponding properties) on a crisp clear day but of the not seeing too, on those oft-washed days when the clouds descend to block our view. This invisibility of the object is a kind of parallax view in itself, a necessary component of perception that allows us to appreciate the object (in spite of our not seeing it) in its entirety. A sense of depth is thus conferred upon the viewer, a sense that not only allows us to understand more clearly the object in question but to clarify our perception of that which surrounds and gives way to it.

ON THE BUTTON

‘Position’, as any serious poker player will tell you, is one of the most important aspects of the game. Depending on where you are at the table in relation to the dealer, a game can be won or lost, irrespective of the cards dealt. The most privileged position at the table is called ‘on the button’. The player ‘on the button’ effectively becomes the dealer and thus is afforded the powerful posture of seeing every other player act before he in turn has to decide what to do. In strategic terms, and as far as advancing in the game is concerned, understanding position (and being able to exploit it to the full), becomes one of the most significant aspects of ‘poker’.

THROUGH THE SQUARE WINDOW

Its not just Glasgow’s high-rise flats that can offer us a view of the city and the enveloping country; the city’s wealth of internal hills and drumlins and their blossoming tall buildings can do that too. The following pictures are examples of exactly that, and show views from five tall structures in and around Glasgow’s epicentre. They include a lighthouse, a science tower, an observatory, a cinema, and a library.

The Glasgow Science Centre of which the Science Tower is a part is a recent addition to Glasgow's ever-changing cityscape. In spite of initial teething problems involving a few ballbearings, the Science Tower eventually opened in 2004. It was at this time the tallest fully revolving freestanding structure in the world. Since it faces into the wind it normally faces west, and here we have a typical view from its visor looking over the Broomielaw, Yorkhill, Partick and beyond. The Kilpatrick Hills can be seen in the distance with the knobbly upthrust of Dumgoyne to the right. Spectacular views and well worth the wait!

Level Eleven of Glasgow University Library is dedicated to Fine Art and Philosophy. Standing as it does on the summit of Gilmorehill the building (not one of Glasgow's prettiest) offers uninterrupted views all over Glasgow. Fine Art and Philosophy have never been better accommodated. The building, designed by William Whitfield, was built between 1965-68. There are some wonderful images and info detailing this phase at -

http://special.lib.gla.ac.uk/exhibns/month/sept2008.html

The 'Lighthouse' in Glasgow, formerly the 'Glasgow Herald Building' was completed in 1895 designed by the architectural firm Honeyman & Keppie, of which Charles Rennie McIntosh was an apprentice. It is a wonderful building which offers two outlook points from which to marvel at the city. This one looks north and east across Glasgow's intricate roofscape. From the other, the McIntosh Tower, one can admire the meandering River Clyde and the largest glass roof in the world (belonging to Central Station).The Lighthouse is currently home to Scotland's Centre for Architecture.

At the time of opening in 2001 the UGC Cinema in Glasgow, at 62m high, was the tallest cinema in the world. It boasted 18 screens with a capacity for 4,277 people. But its real treasure was a '19th screen' at the top of the building offering uninterrupted views of the city to the east and south and the Campsie bank to the north. Why anyone bothered with any of the other screens was beyond me, and besides this one, in the spirit of the true Scotsman, was absolutely free.

From the wonderful Paisley Observatory looking towards the Kilpatricks.

TO THE HIGH-RISE

It could be argued that living high up in a high-rise increases one's attention to the world, inculcates an alatheic gaze upon it, increases one's state of alertness. Weather is more evident in its wholeness, its metamorphic wanderings. The city, upon which one gazes, reveals itself as an animal that lives and breathes, comes and goes. The high-riser becomes a sort of astronaut looking out on the beautiful entity that once he could not see for being totally and utterly enmeshed within it. It is only with his removal to the upper floors of the high-rise that he can now come to understand the greater implications of the world.

Moreover, as an 'axis mundi', a pillar that connects earth to heaven and all four points of the compass, it is not just the world that is engaged by the high-riser. Seventeen floors up, the night sky becomes all the more apparent. The cosmos states its case. Our state of being alert ('all'erta' meaning 'at the watchtower') is never in question. The beautiful whole appears.

LE FIN DU MONDRIAN

Wherever you are in the world you don't have to go very far to see something spectacular. Take this high-rise in St. George's X for example - most people wouldn't give it the time of day, yet to look at it, with the shadow of the high-rise in front of it cascading, is pretty spectacular. The colours and shapes fuse together to create what could well be a vast canvas or sculpture that, if miniaturised, could well find itself onto a gallery wall. This is the thing with 'art': at a fundamental level it is nothing more than the capacity to instil wonder in the viewer and enable them to appreciate something from a fresh perspective. Art engenders the 'insignificant' with significance. Whether pianos hanging upside down or pianos clothed in felt, the incongruity and displacement of the subject awakens us to it. Yet, if we are already awake (alert as opposed to inert), it stands to reason that we no longer 'need' art, the gallery becomes redundant. The whole world then becomes its own gallery, interactive, hands on, sensual, involving. Here, contrary to that other gallery, the imperative is 'please, do touch' -

ELEVATOR

Living on the 17th floor necessarily implies an intimate relationship with that metal box of vertical motion otherwise known as 'the lift'. Lifts in high-rises do not differ much in shape and size (they tend to be the standard 8 person, 600kg, type), yet what they lack in physical variation they more than make up for in personality. Granted, this 'personality' may not be to everyone's liking, but it makes 'elevating' an experience that one tends not to forget in a hurry.

The psychosocial dynamics of vertical transportation are worthy of a thesis. Depending on your point of view, elevating can be an 'ascent' or a 'descent' - rarely is the traveller indifferent to the experience. The spatial configuration of the lift engenders all sorts of nervous interaction - it gets real animal in here at times.

Yesterday morning, a wee fat wumin and her wee fat dug got in on the 14th floor as we were descending. Smiles were exchanged but no words. She seemed a nice soul. The dug gave me the once over and ventured to smell my legs before being corrected and gathered up by the wee wumin. The ground floor approaches and the door opens. The dog bolts from the arms of the wumin and hightails it past the two elderly ladies waiting in the lobby.

"No dogs allowed in the lift," one of them says to the wee fat wumin.

By the time this imperative has been uttered the wee fat wumin is halfway to the front door. She yells back fairly forcefully, " Awww, shut up!!" And then a step or two after, a large sigh and, "Every fuckin' day!"

The two elderly ladies, as I negotiate my bike out past them, are not impressed.

"Would you listen to that mouth?!" one of them whispers to the other.

MY FANCIES

My fancies are like fireflies
Specks of living light twinkling in the dark.

In spite of its relative rarity on Earth, due principally to its lightness [no pun intended], neon is the fifth most abundant gas in the known universe after hydrogen, helium, oxygen and carbon. The excited light of neon has always... excited... me. Extracted from air where it is found in trace amounts, neon plays a grand role in Glasgow's nocturnal landscape, all the more evident from seventeen floors up.

At night, the city spreads out like some grand cadaver with a constellation of illumined vessels. Car headlights become the corpuscles moving along these neon-lit arteries. The body of the city breathes quietly at night. One could say it almost sleeps. The initial orange glow of the neon slowly shifts into red as evening gives way to night. This 'redshift' doesn't just cast the city in a strange glow, it allows us to see the dark too. Great swathes of impenetrable darkness... here, there.... here...

FROM GREENSIDE RESERVOIR

Hills and high-rises have a lot in common, not least their capacity to aerate the viewer, both brain and body. The proximity of the Kilpatrick Hills to the high-rises of Knightswood is evident from the window. These are the hills and braes that create Glasgow's north-western rim and run westwards from Milngavie to Dumbarton and northwards to the fringes of Loch Lomond. As remote places go it's difficult to beat the Kilpatricks for their complexity of hills, lochs, reservoirs and moors. The fact that they can be easily reached from the city (it's a forty minute cycle from Kinghtswood) makes them even more appealing.

Greenside Reservoir is just above Duntocher behind Cochno Farm. It's a wonderful entry point into the Kilpatricks which quickly leads into its heartland and its highest point, Duncolm. From Greenside itself, looking down the gorge, cleft out by the rugged persistence of the Loch Humphrey Burn, the view of the western and southern parts of Glasgow are quite wonderful. Every time I come up here, it is completely devoid of any human presence. It is this sense of remoteness coupled with Greenside’s lofty perch above the city, evidenced in the stunning view, that gives this place its magic.

The view itself clearly shows the high-rises of Kirkton (the five white towers just to the left), and a little less clearly those of Kingsway, Lincoln and Yoker. (Click on the photo to enlarge it).



The view north, from the top floor of Kirkton High Flats, to the Kilpatricks (on the left) and the Campsies (on the right). The way to Greenside Reservoir lies just off picture on the left.

HIGH-RISE

The Emporis Standards Committee defines a high-rise building as ‘a multi-story structure between 35-100 meters tall, or a building of unknown height from 12-39 floors’. What the Emporis Committee doesn’t say is that the modern-day high-rise is the continuing expression of the age-old symbol of an axis mundi: a pillar that connects earth to heaven and the four compass directions to one another.

High-rises are nothing new. They are as ancient as the pyramids. The skylines of many important medieval cities had large numbers of high-rise urban towers. Wealthy families built them for defensive purposes and as status symbols. The residential Towers of Bologna in the 12th century, for example, numbered between 80 to 100 at a time, the largest of which (The Two Towers) rose to 97.2 metres (319 ft). Further afield, in Florence, due to an excessive number of high-rises clotting the skyline (even medium-sized towns at the time such as San Gimignano are known to have had 72 towers up to 51 m height), a law of 1251 decreed that all urban buildings should be reduced to a height of less than 26 m.

An early example of a city consisting entirely of high-rise housing is the 16th-century city of Shibam in Yemen. Shibam was made up of over 500 tower houses, each one rising 5 to 11 storeys high, with each floor being an apartment occupied by a single family. The city was built in this way in order to protect it from Bedouin attacks.

A little later, an early modern example of high-rise housing could be seen in 17th-century Edinburgh where a defensive city wall defined the boundaries of the city. Due to the restricted land area available for development, the houses increased in height instead. Buildings of 11 stories were common, and there are records of buildings as high as 14 stories.

Though some of Glasgow’s high-rises may give the impression of being ancient, having sprung up out of the primordial swamp, most were built in the building boom of the sixties when modernism and austerity went hand in hand. The city is currently involved in a program to un-block Glasgow’s skyline with a large percentage of buildings set to be demolished. But others, like Kirkton, have been spared the whip, and have in fact been re-clad. Though they may not be everyone’s cup of tea, high-rises are, primarily for their verticality, remarkable microcosms of relations and connections.

Shibam in Yemen.

IN EVERY LIGHT: EXPERIMENTS IN SEEING

Bliss is not born of ignorance, it is born of contrast.

The following compendium of pictures proffers the same scene, gazing south-east across the city of Glasgow, from the 17th floor, taken at various times of the day and year. It presents part of the Glasgow skyline as a series of highlights which, depending on the time of day or year and the density of cloud cover, evoke wildly different sensations.

Call it an experiment in luminosity. In fact, this isn't so much to do with brightness as it is to do with shade, and contrast, and the cloud. It is an exploration of 'nuance'.

These widescreen windows of the 17th floor form an elemental television, and these pictures here are varying frequencies on a single channel.







'Aurora musis amica'

NIGHT FLIGHT



From 6 up at Lincoln looking to Kirkton and Kingsway and one in Yoker (2nd from right).




From 17 up at Kirkton looking to Kingsway flats.




'Traces of Neon'

SONG FROM THE SIXTH FLOOR

Sadly, Lawers Tower on the corner of Kestrel Road and Lincoln Avenue (along with the rest of the entourage of high-rise flats here) is earmarked for demolition in 2010 due to subsidence. My friend Andrew Smith lives here on the sixth floor, and has enjoyed the theatrics of this Atlantean sky for some twenty years. The sky has so invested itself within him that sometimes he actually thinks he's a cloud. The western aspect affords him views of the Kilpatrick Hills, and, plus ultra, to the Cowall peninsula's slender bumps some 60 miles away. The variegations of a fickle west coast Scottish sky are numerous and spectacular. I have often tried to persuade him to record some of it, if only to show others who are critical of tower blocks that it is not all doom and gloom up here. Quite the opposite. It is a screen upon the world, and its ever-constant flux. The short video here on my tiny canon ixus proffers just a smattering of what is on show every night of the year with these songs from the sixth floor.

From the sixth floor of Lawers Tower, looking west.

SONG FROM THE SEVENTEENTH FLOOR

From this height, and with such a widescreen vista piercing my eyeballs, it's hard not to sing the praises of living in the sky. My brother lives here on the seventeenth floor in one of Knightswood's many high-rises. With views over Glasgow to the west and over Scotstounhill, Jordanhill, Govan, Braehead, Cardonald and beyond to the south, the whole of the city is laid out before you. This is further enhanced by the sheer variety and quality of light that scuffs this blue green hollow. Weather can be watched in its entirety as one might watch a play. The topography of Glasgow's integument can be examined in greater detail. There is, in short, and quite paradoxically, a more sincere connection to the land and the weather that belies one's 17 floor removal from it.

Looking south-west towards Kingsway flats and Yoker (on the far right). Some late evening cirrus cumulus.




Cumulonibus clouds with some faint 'mamma' (udders) forming beneath.




A great cutting shelf cloud splits the sky and bathes the city in a strange ethereal glow.




The spayed rays of a backlit alto-cumulus.




Some early evening alto-stratus, with something of a ghostly roll cloud moving in underneath.

FROM THE 11th FLOOR TO THE BASEMENT

Level eleven of Glasgow University Library (on Gilmorehill) is an outlook tower par excellence. It is no wonder this is where the philosophy section is located. Any librarian will tell you that the arrangement of books in the layout of a library is a factor of some significant import. This reminds me of the instance when the Borders bookshop in Buchanan Street did a little re-arranging of its biblic tenants and in so doing relegated its philosophic section not only to the furthest reaches of a windowless basement (from an airy, enlightened second floor) but to that unbecoming corner adjacent to the toilets. I remember thinking at the time how symbolic this was. Where, at the bright and breezy entrance fluttered the myriad pages of all the populist 'shit-lit', the stuff of real quality was nowhere to be seen. The philosophy section was now a token slot in an otherwise 'bestseller bazaar'.

In one of the benighted philosophy books down in that boggy dungeon corner, there is an epigram that reads:

It is philosophy that makes man understandable to man, explains human nobility and shows man the proper road. The first defect appearing in any nation that is headed toward decline is in the philosophic spirit. After that deficiencies spread into the other sciences, arts, and associations.

Jamal al-Din al-Afghani

LINCOLN HIGH FLATS

A friend remarked that the Lincoln high flats from this vantage point (the seventh green at 'Royal' Knightswood) and in this particular light resemble giant USB drives plugged into the integument of the earth. He suggested that they were alien in nature, intent on downloading certain core produce from the centre of the earth. Although I agreed in principle with his outlandish premise I thought that perhaps these aliens were uploading and not downloading, which could explain the wierd behaviour of certain tenants. What exactly these uploads might comprise of was never really ascertained however.

Like great stone flowers sprouting from the undergrowth, Knightswood gold course is supervised by these great towers.

Looking from Kirkton High-Rise.