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Dualchas, house at Boreraig, Skye. Image James Benedict Brown

Bigger Architecture from Smaller Places

Concluding their recent history of Scottish architecture, Miles Glendinning and Aonghus MacKechnie noted in the early years of the 21 century in Scotland a ‘renewed desire to express ‘national pride’ in building’[1]. But having just stated their view that Scotland’s most creative and dynamic period of architecture had occurred when Scotland was a full partner in the British Empire, they were concerned about the form that architecture would take in the more narrowly focussed context of a devolved Scottish government, ‘without the supporting infrastructure of empire and world economic dominance’ and in a context of rampant global capitalism.

Some ten years later (the last buildings discussed in ‘Scottish Architecture’ were designed in 2001/2), can we say if Glendinning and MacKechnie’s concerns were justified? What path is architecture in Scotland taking in this new political and cultural context, with global capitalism still dominant (despite the crash of 2008) and do the results express ‘national pride’?

Glendinning and MacKechnie’s story of approximately 6000 years of Scotland’s architecture ends with ‘super-modernism’ piling yet more individualist display on top of the already individualist stylism of post-modernism – ‘grand gestures…in a context-free flamboyance’ as they put it, architecture as commodity sharing the values of the global financial system. Wrapped up in this description is of course the failure of modernism itself, and the failure to replace modernism with any alternative political or cultural discourse; this is partly because architecture had already largely abandoned its social ideals to become a commodity, but also because it was thought to be ‘arriere-garde’, i.e. not cutting edge or ‘avant-garde’, for architecture, while rightly still trying to be ‘modern’, to challenge ‘modernism’.

An alternative discourse can however be built on the ideas of regionalism and our growing understanding of the importance of sustainability. Kenneth Frampton, one of regionalism’s earliest advocates, specifically urges architects to adopt an ‘arriere-garde’ position, in the belief that ‘only an arriere-garde has the capacity to cultivate a resistant, identity-giving culture while at the same time having discreet recourse to universal technique’[2]. Concerns for sustainability provide plenty grounds for challenging modernism’s devaluation of man’s relationship with nature and its excessive worship of technology; and regionalism provides the basis for a refreshing alternative to modernism’s lack of interest in the particularities of locality or place and its preference for universal social solutions.

Approaching from the point of view of both regionalism and sustainability leads naturally to the conclusion that it is precisely in the narrower focus of devolving and smaller places that architecture can re-discover new social and environmental values in the 21^st century. At the smaller scale identity can more easily be framed, the particularities of people or the characteristics of place more readily responded to, and issues of orientation, climate or resources can be better addressed. New development approaches and project or procurement mechanisms that can provide more appropriate solutions than the standardised formulae of national economic methodology or global finance are also more capable of being devised at a smaller and more focused scale.   

Much is already happening in Scotland that demonstrates a focus on developing new approaches and solutions based on the particularities of local or regional characteristics. In places such as Stirling and Inverness, Architecture and Design Scotland have been helping to facilitate the production of new local plans based on a process which is people-centred and place-specific, holistic, inclusive and creative. In places like Neilston (and in over 140 other such places in Scotland) Development Trusts are showing that locally-owned development vehicles can come up with better plans for that place and translate them more readily into action. The Government’s recent Regeneration Discussion Paper Building a Sustainable Future put forward the possibility of housing associations becoming the principal anchor bodies of regeneration. Scotland’s Transition Towns are also showing that small-scale locally based models are effective at engaging people in the long-term sustainable development of their communities.

Dualchas, The Shed, Tokavaig, Skye. Image Andrew Lee

New architectural approaches are also emerging from the more particular focus taken in smaller places in Scotland. The work of Dualchas and Rural Design, both based on Skye, has recently been winning many plaudits. Both practices had projects short-listed for the 2010 Doolan Prize, Rural Design’s house at Fiscavaig on Skye won a Saltire Society Housing Design Award in 2010, and Dualchas’ Community Centre on Raasay won a RIBA Award in 2011. As part of their work both practices are developing an alternative language for a Scottish house, quite different from the ‘traditional’ white-painted cottage or farmhouse, which Daniel Maudlin in his recent study of the houses of the Scottish Highlands[3] has shown was an 18^th century invention largely designed to demonstrate social conformity with the post-union British state.  In their self-conscious desire to display, their hopeless unsuitability for the climate in which they were located and their profligate use of energy, these 18^th century buildings ironically have many parallels with the worst of modernist design.

While some of Dualchas’s houses in their 10 or more years of practice pick up on the general language of the white-painted cottage or farmhouse, the form of their most recent houses goes back to the house that prevailed before the 18^th century ‘British-isation’ of the highland house – the longhouse or black house, intimately suited to both its climatic location and its social context. But while following the form and feel of the long house these new houses don’t quote from it or copy it. The black house’s double stone walls and thatched roof are now replaced by the modern technologies of a structural timber frame, super- insulated walls and roofs, large double or triple-glazed windows, under-floor heating and exhaust air heat pumps.  Larger houses are composed of two longhouse forms set in parallel. Stoves and cooking areas are sometimes placed in the centre of a long living-room (as in a new house at Boreraig), oddly not unlike the black house where the open fire was in the centre of the living space. The exteriors are clad in a rain-screen of immaculately applied strips of larch, which not only uses a sustainable material, but matches the predominance of joinery skills over masonry skills on the island. Carefully orientated in the landscape, the large windows bring the outside and its colour in, designed as they are for people who are living there partly because of the quality of the landscape; this is in contrast to the small-windows of the cottages and long houses - designed partly to reduce heat loss, but also because the crofter or farm-hand viewed the landscape as something connected with hard work, and something to be escaped from at the end of the day. With their simple forms and carefully controlled detailing these houses also belong to the architectural family of barns and sheds - unassuming, restrained, functional buildings set apart from the normal canon of architecture.

Rural Design, The Black Shed, Skinidin, Skye. Image Rural Design

The houses of Rural Design share some of the characteristics of those of Dualchas but are less strict, more relaxed and have a touch of sentimentality to them. Rural Design have an affection for the casualness of the highland house, with its frequent assortment of lean-to’s and other accretions, and their new houses maintain some of this casualness with main forms often supplemented with additions. Big windows again scoop in the landscape/place, with wood-burning stoves often positioned directly in front of windows. From a distance The Black House at Skinidin could also easily be a barn, its entrance protected by two huge timber sliding doors. The house at Fiscavaig is neither long house nor cottage but more a simple container or large shed (with back addition) which tapers to a glass ‘mouth’ that swallows the landscape of bays and rocks and islands. The landscape is as in your face as could only be conceived by a holiday-maker client, but here this holiday-maker has become a home-worker. As with Dualchas, timber is the key material, inside and outside, so much so that the houses appear to belong naturally to the landscape.

Rural Design, 15 Fiscavaig, Skye. Photograph Andrew Lee

Well-designed for their location and climate, following specific cultural references from their place (for instance the long house), honestly using a simple range of materials, taking from modern technology what is most appropriate while making no attempt to disguise their modernity and play to a naïve image of the traditional, these houses indicate an architecture that is concerned with more than aesthetics or style, re-connecting itself to its place, and caring of its ecological and political context. Although expressed in a limited number of examples made for private clients in a very particular location, Dualchas and Rural Design’s work has the humble and democratic aim of what Dualchas call a ‘better ordinary’ and is a refreshing alternative to the grand gestures of post and super-modernism. It points the way to an architecture of meaning in a country rediscovering its ideals in the 21^st century.