Hutchesontown C - Design

Design

The aim was to replace 62 acres (250,000 m2) of slums in Hutchesontown with new low and high rise housing, schools and shops. The development consisted of three phases — A, B and C — each designed by a different architect. Sir Basil Spence and his assistant Robert Matthew were assigned their site in a series of meetings at the Department of Health for Scotland in late 1957 and 1958.

Hutchesontown C was commissioned in 1959, with Spence receiving assistance from a project architect, Charles Robertson. Spence and Robertson, partly inspired by Le Corbusier’s giant maisonette blocks in Marseille, designed two "colossal, rugged 20-storey slabs" featuring inset communal balconies. In revealing the design, Spence said to the Glasgow Corporation's Housing Committee that "on Tuesdays, when all the washing's out, it'll be like a great ship in full sail", a reference to Glasgow's shipbuilding heritage. He hoped to revive working-class life of the tenement back green. His remarks helped break down resistance to tall blocks among the councillors.

Read more about this topic:  Hutchesontown C

Famous quotes containing the word design:

    With wonderful art he grinds into paint for his picture all his moods and experiences, so that all his forces may be brought to the encounter. Apparently writing without a particular design or responsibility, setting down his soliloquies from time to time, taking advantage of all his humors, when at length the hour comes to declare himself, he puts down in plain English, without quotation marks, what he, Thomas Carlyle, is ready to defend in the face of the world.
    Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)

    If I knew for a certainty that a man was coming to my house with the conscious design of doing me good, I should run for my life ... for fear that I should get some of his good done to me,—some of its virus mingled with my blood.
    Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)

    Joe ... you remember I said you wouldn’t be cheated?... Nobody is really. Eventually all things work out. There’s a design in everything.
    Sidney Buchman (1902–1975)