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:
“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 (18171862)
“You can make as good a design out of an American turkey as a Japanese out of his native stork.”
—For the State of Illinois, U.S. public relief program (1935-1943)
“Westerners inherit
A design for living
Deeper into matter
Not without due patter
Of a great misgiving.”
—Robert Frost (18741963)