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' -