It's time we tried to rebuild the ambition of Scottish Modernism

The National

3 days ago

There's much to say about the Serbian fabrics master. In his 60s and 70s heyday, Klein sent multi-coloured tweeds from the Borders to the world's leading fashion houses.
The building just saved was Klein's collaboration with the leading modernist architect (and fellow Borderer) Peter Womersley, who also built Klein's family home close by.
I want to begin in a visceral way, triggered by the current photos of the 1971 studio in this week's press reports. It's essentially intact as an elegant, angular structure – but how neglected as a sight.
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Water-damaged, graffiti'd, mossy, glass walls shattered … It's as if the modernism of the place itself had been under attack.
Of course, the real reasons are prosaic. Built in Klein's first burst of success, the studio (latterly promoting local textiles) declined as the weaving industry did in the Borders. It's laid derelict for the last 20 years.
The site has been secured by a brace of august institutions: National Trust for Scotland, Scottish Historic Buildings Trust and the Klein Family Foundation, with the National Lottery Heritage Fund indicating it will fund and support.
Does the Klein studio mean we are finally deciding to treasure and preserve our Modernist past in Scotland? Has our mood shifted on this? Because up till recently, it has mostly seemed vengeful and neglectful.
I'm a fan, though maybe inescapably so. As I revelled in the grid windows and load-bearing columns of these Klein-Womersley buildings, a long-buried memory came to mind. My comprehensive school, St Ambrose RC Secondary, built in 1961.
My feelings about my experiences there ('76-'81) would honestly be both treasurable and vengeful. But to adapt Le Corbusier's phrase, architecturally it was indeed a 'machine for learning'.
Photos on the web show angular glass corridors bearing shuffling teenagers from block to block.
A Guernica-scale metal sculpture, composed of forces and objects, sets you up for the tender mercies of the tech studies building.
In retrospect, I was ripened (and toughened) in the grids of High Modernism. Right across from our Victorian family home, surmounting the West End park, two 14-storey high-rises loomed. All manner of teen troubles tumbled out of them, for me.
So believe me, I can understand the ambivalence about reviving Modernist ruins.
Yet still, there's something about their confidence and optimism that remains compelling. Particularly from our current era's standpoint, where hope for the future feels more fractured and tentative than ever.
On a recent music-biz photo session, we sought out Modernist – indeed, brutalist – scenes and textures, across the expanses of Glasgow.
It was a thrilling brief. We found ourselves glorying in the rough-casting of overbearing concrete structures, loving the infinities implied by paving stones and steps. Given the next Hue And Cry album is 'electro', in the broadest sense, it felt that a celebration of big, confident engineering was a good backdrop.
Yet big, confident engineering often sits at an angle to the hearts and minds of residents and users. The Modernist 'megastructure' (as the architects put it) that made up the bulk of Cumbernauld town centre was guided by cutting-edge theory at the time.
Flows made up of humans, shops, transport and meeting places were elaborately modelled; the whole place was designed so that structures could amend and adapt themselves. It had the spirit of utopia about it.
But the ambivalence about the current demolitions of Cumbernauld's megastructures is manifest. The 2024 book Concrete Dreams: The Rise And Fall Of Cumbernauld Town Centre talked to many locals.
'They had used [the city centre], they were fond of it, they had lovely stories attached to it and they understood the kind of utopian idea of it and why it was being built', said co-author Alison Irvine. 'But yet they still want to get rid of it as well.'
In Glasgow, the blind spots of 20th-century post-war Modernist planners – most obviously their slavish devotion to car use, and to towerblocks replacing tenemental living – is evident to the everyday citizen of the city.
There seems to still be 'future ambition' (in council plans) to roof over the M8 at Charing Cross and make a park out of it. But the smashing of social bonds and continuities can barely be pasted over.
Maybe, to return to the Bernat Klein buildings in Galashiels, we need to make the modernist case at the level of domesticity, community and creativity. Glasgow School of Art's Bruce Peter is the author of the forthcoming volume Modernist Scotland (the book is currently close to its crowdfunding deadline).
Peter lays out 150 post-war buildings, built from 1950-1980, making a case for their preservation (where they still exist).
What a tour he provides! There are small-scale sci-fi extravaganzas I'd never heard of. Like the Dollan Baths in East Kilbride.
Or Womersley's miraculously balancing triangular stand for Gala Fairydean FC. Or Aberdeen University's tomorrowlandish engineering building.
There seem to be many poignant Modernist churches, tucked away in Scottish locales. Poignant, as they were built in an age of secular dominance – though nowadays they look like exactly the kinds of luminous spaces we need (religious or not) to get our heads together.
Go visit St Columba's Parish Church in Glenrothes, or St Francis Xavier's in Falkirk, or St Charles Oratory in Glasgow's Kelvinside. We should still attend to the parlous decay of St Peter's Seminary in Cardross, whose demolition would be such a loss to this tradition.
The tumult of Modernist style in Peter's book makes you reassess buildings you'd taken for granted. Like the sandstone consistency of the 70s extension to the old Mitchell Library in Glasgow, whose solidity and reliability I've leant on for many decades. (Its interiors are well described as 'resembling a luxury hotel in Moscow').
Or even my home town's Monklands Leisure Centre, which I can now see as a brutalist masterpiece of swooping and corrugated concrete (as opposed to somewhere I could grab a ping-pong table).
There are many more exquisite examples of the Scottish Modernist tradition in this book. Peter ends with a plea against the 'eyesore' charge often made against modern-era buildings.
'It is apparent that many people are unable to distinguish between superficial decay spoiling the appearance of a building and the potential of its underlying architecture', he writes. 'When buildings of any kind are neglected or derelict, it is necessary to make leaps of imagination to envision how splendid they could look if sympathetically renovated.'
Exactly this case seems easily made for the Bernat Klein studio. What awaits it, according to the renovation team, is an archive of Klein's most notable fabrics, alongside education programs.
Klein used tweed techniques from the Borders area but crammed multicolours into the threads, taken from the colourations of the Borders.
And his clients: Coco Chanel, Christian Dior, Balenciaga, Pierre Cardin, Yves Saint Laurent … Oh, to be so blithely adorned in dreams. (Although the nightmares of the Cold War, and the Holocaust, of course subtended every escapism.)
We should try to recover at least the optimism and ambition of Scottish Modernism – if we can keep its buildings and methods relevant to our current scale and agenda: community-centred, planet-challenged. A possible goal for Klein's soon-to-be ex-ruin.
The crowdfunder for Bruce Peter's Modernist Scotland is still running at https://www.crowdfunder.co.uk/p/modernist-scotland