Johnny Rodger

The Revolution will be Painted: A Study of the Struggle to Build New Architecture in Late Victorian and Edwardian Glasgow

Francis Newbery, Director of the Glasgow School of Art between 1885 and1918, produced a painting that depicted the deliberations of the School’s governors as they commissioned the building of new school premises designed by Charles Rennie Mackintosh. The painting was acquired by the School in 1914 and hung in the Board Room. A mixture of deliberate technique and fortuitous circumstance in the creation of this work seems to have made for a canvas saturated with meaning in the evidently discordant complexity of its representations of time and space. An examination of the painting is used critically to engage with the story of the creation of Mackintosh’s masterwork, and to contextualize the process in which the latter was produced as a significant work of art.

St Peter's Seminary, Cardross

Completed in 1966, St Peters Seminary at Cardross, Dunbartonshire, has been described as the ‘greatest modernist building in Scotland’. Designed as a space for the collective training of Roman Catholic priests, the building was effectively renderered obsolete before it was even completed when Vatican II (1962) championed community-based training programmes for priests. Eventually abandoned in 1980, the building has fallen into dilapidation and ruin, although the performance company NVA are planning an experimental restoration of at least certain bare elements of the building complex. This article explores the extent to which the initial structure and the ruin of Cardross can be viewed through the lens of Negris definition of the transition to postmodernity as a 1960s crisis of modernist regimes of measure and the functional logic of the factory system. That system provided the organisational basis of post-war society in imposing a series of spatial and temporal divisions in everyday social life in order to organise production. The organising principle of a Seminary like St Peters Cardross can be conceived of as imposing a similar, indeed an even more comprehensive control over the entire spatio-temporal existence of the young priests within its walls. To a certain extent this rigid division can be seen in the concrete form of the building. The Seminary was designed such that the modulor dimension of one student priests dorm is presented as an arch on the façade, and the series of these arches making up the length of the building is thus an expression of the individuals fully incorporated existence within the institution. To what extent, then, can the abandonment and gradual ruination of the strict spatially segregated and segmented complex of St Peters Cardross be read as an extreme paradigm for the dismantling of the regime based on measures that came along with the western crisis in capital and collapse of industrial production from the 1960s on? This question is examined through an analysis of the cinematic representation of St Peters in two experimental films, Space and Light (1972, Murray Grigor), produced when it was a working seminary, and Space and Light Revisited (2009, Murray Grigor), an attempted shot-for-shot remake of the original filmed when it was in a state of decay. Both films have been screened simultaneously and side-by-side (at the films 2009 Glasgow premiere and at the 2010 Berlinale) and the article explores the specific experiences of this viewing experience. Cinema regularly deploys ruins as the locus for melodramatic action, operating as a visual parallel of the onscreen action; however, in these films St Peters is the central object of attention, and a celebration of, and lament for, the original is offered up. While early experimental filmmakers experimented with temporality by rewinding film to reconstruct demolished walls or buildings, in this setting, the indexical qualities of the cinematic apparatus are deployed to juxtapose past and present. In doing so, they highlight the referential nature of both the cinema and the ruin as this high point of Scottish architectural modernism, commissioned by the church, lies in a state of ruination.

‘To Infinity and Beyond…’: The American Vernacular and Democratic Space

Abstract The spatial strategies adopted by the founding fathers of the American Republic are examined and their political roots and consequences explored. In particular the reasons for the neo-classical style becoming prominent are questioned, and whether that style was an appropriate spatial strategy for democratization. An analysis is presented of how American writing and literature was a forum for the working out of the questions of expansion into, and settlement in, new space.