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.

AEROPOLIS - THE HIGH-RISE CITY

Odi et amo.


The satirical poet Juvenal provides a vivid and unflattering, but not altogether impartial, picture of life in a Roman apartment block:

We live in a city supported mostly by slender props, which is how the bailiff patches cracks in old walls, telling the residents to sleep peacefully under roofs ready to fall down around them.

By the mid 4th century, there were 46,600 apartment blocks known as ‘insulae’ (islands), and only 1,790 ‘domus’ (villas) in Rome. Their heights, as well as their numbers, were something of a cause for concern; they continued rising higher and higher, even in spite of Trajan’s height restrictions of seven storeys.

At times, and places, wandering through Glasgow, I get to thinking of 4th century Rome.