various grey cubes (an architectural journey through glenrothes - pt. 3)

this is it, our architectural journey is coming to an end in glenrothes, the last part will take us through the residential areas - macedonia (yes, really!), the glenwood centre, caskieberran and back to the town centre where we started.

we left at the green riverside park and just out of it, a steep set of steps lead to macedonia, a residential area consisting of smaller individual housing units with gardens. the area has a reputation for being deprived and a bit sketchy, however, on a bright sunday morning none of it is visible, they actually reminded me of holiday homes in hungary around the lake balaton (cube shaped single units were a huge thing in the hungarian countryside by the way, happy to write about them in a later blog!)

all the residential areas around glenrothes also have a number of underpasses and pedestrianised areas, these separated walking paths form bridges, underpasses and all these layers and their railings give interesting patterns and layouts - super inspiring to incorporate into textiles and i was often thinking about them as layered textures on the town - all these geometric, concrete shapes themselves can inspire more large scale, modernist designs.

the vision of dividing pedestrians from the car traffic sounds utopian on paper but have proved to be impractical and has probably contributed to the decline of the retailers in the town to be honest. the big building here is glenwood centre, a residential complex with a shopping centre underneath. you can notice some more of the planning mistakes here - there is an underpass that is filled in due to frequent flooding and there is a huge supermarket right outside the small retail units - guess what happened to these... because of how all these things turned out, the area has a sketchy, deprived reputation - and is now destined for demolition (there was an episode of the bbc’s “the council” (a very good series following the workings of fife council) in which a resident of the area was asked if he’d be happy if the council used some extra money to paint the staircases inside and he answered “what’s the point?”. the answer shocked me, although i understand that the improvement would have been tiny on the grander scale of things and probably temporary, but i also found it quite sad.)

through the underpasses the journey continues to caskieberran with more raised cubical units. while they are uniform in shape and size, there are individual differences and surface details between them. they do seem to have a little personality attached (and another such detail is the shape of street lights that change from street to street.) i always enjoy imagining the life inside such buildings and how different they must look inside too.

on this walk through the residential areas lead us back to the town centre where you could take a closer look to raeburn heights, a single residential tower block in glenrothes, looking tidy and renovated, surrounded by spacious car parks and i can’t help but wonder what the views must be like from the top floor. as we walk past, we come back to the town centre, the roundabouts, the underpasses and the strange layout of this new town.

on a final point, please let me link a study, okay this is not from scotland but norway, but it’s relevant - it was conducted with residents of an oslo housing estate. as the authors point out, the residents’ responses were focused on “what the landscape offers as home”, contrasting with “how experts often describe housing estates as what these landscapes lack”. let this be the concluding thought to this tour through this strange, quirky town! i hope you enjoyed this and please join me through the other new towns - if things go well, in a couple of months we can travel more across scotland and i can’t wait for another walking tour.

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links:

fife council to commit £1.5m towards demolition of glenwood centre in glenrothes (by neil henderson, the courier, 4 july 2019)

the council (bbc)

modernity, heritage and landscape: the housing estate as heritage (hilde nymoen rørtveita & gunhild settenaa, department of geography, norwegian university of science and technology, trondheim, norway, published online: 3 feb 2015, journal: landscape research)

the green and the grey (an architectural journey through glenrothes, pt. 2)

not having forgotten where we left off with our walk in glenrothes (read the previous part here), we are now ready to continue into the new year, aren’t we? let’s be curious and keep exploring our brutalist architectural journey through glenrothes. if i recall correctly, last time we were at the co-op and the kingdom centre, so let’s come out to the end of the street where the council buildings are - this is the focal point of the town and these buildings form one of the most spectacular landmarks of the town, sadly with a few ones already fallen.

there was glenrothes house (demolished in 2012) and kingdom house (demolished in 2020), and there is still rothesay house and fife house standing. together they form the headquarters of fife council, scotland’s third largest council, governing about 300.000 of us. my favourite buildings were actually the ones gone now - they were the original ones from 1967, first built to house the glenrothes development corporation (in 1967), which later became the office for fife council’s architectural services. of course architects will build the best ones for themselves (and of course my taste goes with theirs.) luckily i managed to catch kingdom house in its full beautiful form on my photos and i’m sharing below for you to enjoy. it’s the windows that got me, the sleek geometry, the angles, the smooth concrete and the not quite symmetric arrangement, that makes up a 3D pattern, a large-scale texture of smooth modules. and i also love the vertical blinds behind the windows and the neon lights that come out in a dark winter afternoon. i just love a modern facade and imagining the kind of work taking place behind it. i would have loved to go inside but it’s gone now and the “obituary” is just a dry warning on road closures to expect as the beautiful building gets taken away. so sad.

what’s remaining are the newer additions, the still concrete, grey and brutalist rothesay house and the more colourful-looking, extended fife house. the former is grey and textured, the latter has some white and green accents on the concrete facade which makes it interesting and is an intriguing pattern inspiration. i’m really not a fan of the postmodernist additions though, especially not the clocktower thing - nevertheless it’s all part of the townscape now and at least the mirrors reflect and double up the brutalist surroundings.

it's all very open and bright though, it certainly feels spacious and airy to me with the open car parks and roundabouts at the centre - i tried to emphasise this sense of openness with my photos, it probably helped that i visited on a sunny day. if a postcard is ever made of glenrothes (unlikely i know but why the hell not), i would pick these photos above - raw concrete window patterns and open, spacious roundabouts with tidy green centres is possibly the most accurate summary of this town. everyone who even has heard about glenrothes will mention roundabouts, they’re almost more famous landmarks than the buildings themselves. it’s very typical of the new town layout of course to separate cars from pedestrians and let cars take up the open, spacious roads. they are also perfect to place public sculptures too - glenrothes was the first town to employ a town artist and is known for its public art (and i might cover this in another blogpost because it’s super interesting!)

the sculptures used to be scattered across the town (and some still are of course) but a lot of it now has been moved to riverside park, just across the road from the council buildings. it’s large, spacious and green - if the road is for the cars, this is for the pedestrians, a massive green space for people to enjoy freely. apart from the sculptures and skateboard park, there are flowerbeds and duck ponds and woodlands - this is the largest green area of the town. the river of which its named after is the river leven - with bridges and obligatory philosophical graffiti - the latest addition being the creatively named river leven bridge, built in 1997, leading the B969 road over the park.

not far from the bridge, a steep set of steps lead out of the park into the residential areas where i’ll take you to next time in the final part of our tour. i hope you enjoyed this and are feeling inspired by the rich, deep facades and the open, inviting free space.

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links:

office block demolition in glenrothes leads to road restrictions (the newsroom, fife today, 07/01/2020 )

when natural cycles turn, brutalist windows can dream of trees (from hill to sea, blog post by murdo eason, fife psychogeographical collective, 17/04/2014)

glenrothes, fife (personal blog by anonymous author)

the co-op and the kingdom (an architectural journey through glenrothes pt. 1)

for those of you in fife this will be the familiar - yup, this one will be about glenrothes. i’m really into this town (the only new town on the east), so much so that i’m going to split my photo blogs into groups and go through this in more than one tour - please come with me for the first one through the town centre.

glenrothes is a new town in scotland, designated in 1948 and built and developed throughout the following years. the area has a history of industry in paper mills, and the new town was largely built for workers of a new coal mine, which, only after 7 years of operation had to close in 1965 due to technological difficulties. some industrial presence continued in the town though and fife council also moved their headquarters there.

as one of the earliest new towns in scotland, glenrothes was built and developed with a mixture of ideas leaving their visual impacts on its surfaces. the town won the disputed “carbuncle award” muiltiple times however glenrothes also received multiple awards in the beautiful Scotland competition - perhaps as a response to the negative publicity (and because the many open spaces and roundabouts are indeed quite floral)

the intention of my walks here is usually to find source of joy and inspiration for my textile designs. i know a few locals, who find humour and affection in their upbringing in this setting and i basically just aim to show the fabric of this place in a positive light. i have a lot of material though so i’m going to start right at the centre.

the town centre itself is a small pedestrianised area for shopping named “kingdom centre”, consisting of concrete alleys and arcades. the “old” town centre was once busier with shoppers, however, many of the premises today are unoccupied - like everywhere else, glenrothes has welcome suburban supermarkets on its outskirts and the car-friendly layout of the town has infact probably made it more attractive than elsewhere in the area. as in most brutalist new towns, roads for motorists and pedestrians were consciously separated, which resulted in many roundabouts and underpasses (the latter now a canvas for artists - official and unofficial ones alike).

out of albany gate at the main street of the kingdom stands the co-op building, an old department store opened in 1964. i’m not sure if this was built by separate architects or not - the kingdom centre and much of the town’s architecture is a product of the glenrothes development corporation which employed many architects at the time (with glasgow-born peter tinto as chief architect.)

the co-op this is also now empty and is destined for demolition although the plans were scrapped later. partly because of its asbestos problem (it’s now unsafe to enter too.) it’s also really interesting (in an obviously bleak way) to look at the decaying surfaces and imagine what they may have been like in the past.

it’s not my past and these are not my memories, yet i think i would miss this building a little bit, because i find it genuinely and objectively beautiful. (lord knows i hate the word “eyesore” and i find it so insulting and cheap.)

hey look here instead - the coffers on the concrete ceilings of the arcades was what inspired the co-op tileset. it’s a futuristic and human centred pattern with those edges rounded down. and the geometry of its upper facade is shiny and colourful, busy and geometric - playful and orderly at the same time. it was built for this town and its people and somehow these buildings still radiate the optimistic vision of its creators some decades later. i’m not a preservationist though and i believe in embracing the present - if it’s unsafe and unsuitable now to how we live, we can change it or make something else of it. but even if the building itself isn’t worth saving, perhaps the ideas that built them should be.

with the demolition halted, the future remains to be seen. there are now calls to use the building as murals for public art - something glenrothes has form on (i might just have an idea of a future blog post) for now, some works have begun on improvements to the exterior to make it safer while the long-term future remains to be seen. i hope you are now curious to continue this walk - stay tuned for the next tour!

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links:

co-op demolition plans spark regeneration hope for fife town (by the newsroom, 15 march 2017, fife today)

planned £1m demolition of one of fife’s worst eyesores scrapped, leaving its future in limbo (by neil henderson, 20 dec 2019, the courier)

get involved with discussion about the future of glenrothes (by the newsroom, 11 february 2020, fife today)

work to finally address one of fife’s worst eyesores set to begin (by neil henderson, 2 july 2020, the courier)