Andy Campbell
Dress for the Weather
Q. Being a member of Guiding Architects, you provide tours around your local city of Glasgow for the public. This plays a crucial role in exposing the closer-to-home linkage of architecture and history. What influence has having these tours and engaging in discussion with the public played in the practice’s understanding of Glasgow’s lesser known narratives?
A. The tours and the research that goes into them have the aim of developing a better understanding of our home city where the majority of our architectural projects are situated. The engagement and discussions with folk always bring about a new avenue or question to explore. On a local level it can reveal a design evolution of a certain typology, for example The Pub which we have published research on, in relation to a specific place in a specific time. Understanding the narrative of how and why the design of this specific typology has responded to wider cultural, political and urban shifts helps us understand the city better and find appropriate responses through design for today.
On a more international level it has helped us understand the architectural and urban connections and relationships between Glasgow and other places around the world. The aim, for us, is always to use the tours to enhance our design skills in architecture and this greater breadth and depth of reference is really useful. We have taken people from all over the world around our city and learnt lots about connections and interwoven narratives between the urban condition here and in their countries.
Q. Of all the tools of research you use to engage with context and community, what have you observed as the most effective in its authentic revealing of a locality’s identity?
A. We view architecture very much as a social profession where conversations are key.
We like talking to people about architecture. This sounds really obvious and simple but we try and make people feel comfortable in talking about it. We find it’s useful to start with something and not just say ‘what do you think about this?’. The Typology Papers we’ve produced in the past offer something up for discussion and the tours give our interpretation of things over and above the historical story of it. The tours have lots of time between stops where people then chat to us and between themselves about the themes we’ve introduced. It doesn’t feel forced or agenda led.
We try and make space for this in our architectural projects. We’ve worked with photographers, artists, crafts people and others in the past to devise ‘architecture adjacent’ activity in parallel with the design process which both gives and takes to a non-agenda led conversation around particular localities.
Identity is never one thing or a fixed idea. Therefore, we view the notion of identity more as an on-going conversation that we end up feeding into once we’re involved in a project. It’s about everyone working something out together and in doing so we hope to reveal the complexity of the context and identity of a place rather than distilling it into something for the purposes of the architectural proposal.