Can urban waterfront abuse be rolled back or eliminated? ... riversides and tributary open space strengthen common public domain, preserve natural environment, and decentralize the city into easily identifiable, livable entities[...] The river of the urban region - the most intensively used and most often abused resource on earth. Roy Mann, Rivers in the City
This afternoon I headed out into the rain and darkness and walked along to the new transport museum, The Riverside Museum, at Pointhouse Quay, a sort of misshapen lighthouse jutting out into the confluence of Clyde and Kelvin rivers. At around 4pm on a Thursday afternoon (mid-December) it was empty. In fact, the poor staff (probably bored out of their wits) outnumbered the 6 visitors (yes, I counted them) by about five to one. A sense of tragedy loomed large over the yellow-lit interior, 4 years in the making and just recently opened at a conservative cost of some 60 million pounds. I overheard one of the staff saying to another sympathetically, 'Aye, you can go if you want... we can manage'.
Zaha Hadid's iconic design has obviously not been well received. Glaswegians have an uncanny knack of seeing through the fake and the phony, and the simply nonsensical (when it isn't entirely hi-falutin). Removed, for some unknowable reason, from its former central and easily reachable location in the Kelvin Hall, the museum's new location on the Pointhouse promontory is as far from anything as you could possibly imagine. It literally sits at the confluence of the two rivers, with unsightly waste ground on both sides, perched as if on the edge of chaos. It is a lighthouse surrounded emphatically by darkness. As the journalist Steve Parnell noted:
But then, no-one's heard of Gareth Hoskins... especially the tourists. The city's main concern is obvious: build icons and, as Parnell writes, 'collect the work of signature architects', in order to attract visitors, money and outside investment. The new Hydro Arena next to the Clyde Auditorium will open next year (2013) designed by Foster and partners who also designed the auditorium. Cities are no longer cities, I have heard, but businesses.
This afternoon I headed out into the rain and darkness and walked along to the new transport museum, The Riverside Museum, at Pointhouse Quay, a sort of misshapen lighthouse jutting out into the confluence of Clyde and Kelvin rivers. At around 4pm on a Thursday afternoon (mid-December) it was empty. In fact, the poor staff (probably bored out of their wits) outnumbered the 6 visitors (yes, I counted them) by about five to one. A sense of tragedy loomed large over the yellow-lit interior, 4 years in the making and just recently opened at a conservative cost of some 60 million pounds. I overheard one of the staff saying to another sympathetically, 'Aye, you can go if you want... we can manage'.
Zaha Hadid's iconic design has obviously not been well received. Glaswegians have an uncanny knack of seeing through the fake and the phony, and the simply nonsensical (when it isn't entirely hi-falutin). Removed, for some unknowable reason, from its former central and easily reachable location in the Kelvin Hall, the museum's new location on the Pointhouse promontory is as far from anything as you could possibly imagine. It literally sits at the confluence of the two rivers, with unsightly waste ground on both sides, perched as if on the edge of chaos. It is a lighthouse surrounded emphatically by darkness. As the journalist Steve Parnell noted:
Despite all the PR guff about the Riverside Museum being “derived from its context”, and “flow[ing] from the city to the river”, the building could be situated anywhere and, as a self-proclaimed “soft shed”, could be used for almost anything. Like any good global brand, it is as diametrically opposed to a critical regionalism as could possibly be envisaged and is entirely bereft of any Glasgow character or reference...This is unfortunate for local architect Gareth Hoskins, who came second to Hadid in the competition.
But then, no-one's heard of Gareth Hoskins... especially the tourists. The city's main concern is obvious: build icons and, as Parnell writes, 'collect the work of signature architects', in order to attract visitors, money and outside investment. The new Hydro Arena next to the Clyde Auditorium will open next year (2013) designed by Foster and partners who also designed the auditorium. Cities are no longer cities, I have heard, but businesses.
Up on the top floor of the museum I came across a painting of Pointhouse Quay c.1831 by Thomas Fairbairn. It showed a pastoral if not entirely idyllic setting by the rivers with the Pointhouse Inn where the museum is located now. The surrounds too could be seen, the then narrow Clyde, the green verges rising naturally from the water's edge, the few cows, a couple of small sail-boats, a courting couple in the summer twilight. Now, some 180 years later, and especially if viewed from an aerial perspective (with the remnants of the shipyards, the detritus of industry, the new clammy constructions of 'luxury' apartment complexes and the spare grounds primed for construction, the scene is redolent, comparatively speaking, of some hellish nightmare. A vast improvement one might argue on the fume-filled scenes between the late 1800s and much of the 20th century when most of Glasgow was just an over-polluted workyard. Seen from these angles, how anyone can paint progress in a forgiving light is beyond understanding. And yet they do. The museum and Pointhouse Quay has been the subject of countless paintings thus far, all severely cropped to exclude the greater context in which it belongs. Individual existence itself has thus been cropped to exclude its greater context. The result is a fury of industry, of making money through the ultimately self-defeating act of external progress, without any sense of far-sightedness or where it's all going to end up. The new museum itself stands as some monumental (and costly) monolith to the machine age, to the futurist ethos of speed, violence, and a rejection of the past. It seems oddly appropriate that the museum is cut off, not by the rivers as one might think (since a flurry of ferries now serve the promontory) but by the expressway and its slip-roads a couple of hundred metres or so to the north.
'We are on the extreme promontory of the centuries!' declares the Futurist Manifesto. 'What is the use of
looking behind at the moment when we must open the mysterious shutters of the
impossible? Time and Space died yesterday. We are already living in the
absolute, since we have already created eternal, omnipresent speed.'
It is this speed, this rush and roar, that will ultimately, if it hasn't already, bring man to his knees. How much credence can you give to a 'philosophy' whose aim is to destroy libraries and museums?
I am all for museums (and a learning from the past not an indulgence in it), and it is not the museum that I criticize here, but the badly thought out process which led to this particular predicament of which you might say the museum is an innocent caught up in the action. No doubt they will quote their long-term view for the re-development of the area. But why develop it at all? What's wrong with just leaving it, and allowing it to return (with a little help) to the natural idyll it once was, its original nature?
What I am criticizing is the unthinking acquiescence to progress, to speed, and to violence masquerading as 'civilization'. Take a look at Thomas Fairbairn's watercolours, then take a look at what they've done in the name of progress to our land, to our blood, to our heart...If people do not wake up to this reality, in time, the idyllic nature of all places will be transformed (has it not already happened to the Self?) into something akin to this - a great steel machine, with a token tree as an epitaph marking the sad death of the soul.
What I am criticizing is the unthinking acquiescence to progress, to speed, and to violence masquerading as 'civilization'. Take a look at Thomas Fairbairn's watercolours, then take a look at what they've done in the name of progress to our land, to our blood, to our heart...If people do not wake up to this reality, in time, the idyllic nature of all places will be transformed (has it not already happened to the Self?) into something akin to this - a great steel machine, with a token tree as an epitaph marking the sad death of the soul.
'Pointhouse Quay' Thomas Fairbairn, c.1831.
Pointhouse Quay on the left, mid-picture, with the Govan Ferry near the Govan side, 1950.
Inaccessible and outlandish, the new Riverside Museum on Pointhouse Quay, 2011. Note The Science Tower aka. The Syringe, in the top centre of the picture which has been almost permanently closed since its opening in 2001 due to 'technical problems'. This was built at a cost (to the public) of 10 million pounds.
And finally, back to 1828 and the painter John Knox's The Clyde at Govan, with Figures and a Boat in the Foreground -
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