mrstsk: You’re on the A725 heading south from Glasgow. You’ll…





mrstsk:

You’re on the A725 heading south from Glasgow. You’ll come soon to a fork in the road. Take the right hand route towards Stewartfield and Paisley. At the next roundabout veer right onto the A726 for Paisley. Go through a series of roundabouts, passing a Holiday Inn on the right. Suddenly you’ll be amongst dusty plains and curvy brutalist buildings, catalpa and eucalyptus trees. Welcome to East Kilbride!

When East and West Scotland were partitioned, Planner Smithson realised a new capital would be required for the Western Regions — not just for administration, but to house the thousands of people displaced by the upheavals of the civil war. And so he commissioned Le Corbusier to design the new town of East Kilbride, a city “unfettered by the traditions of the past, a symbol of the nation’s faith in the future”.

Construction began in 1951, and by 1965 all but the futuristic Museum of Knowledge had been completed (the museum remains — like knowledge itself — incomplete to this day). Scotland’s High Court, its Legislative Assembly, and the imposing hall housing its Secretariat loom over East Kilbride’s empty squares.

While not bound to please everyone, Le Corbu’s characteristic “modulor brutalism” gives East Kilbride a fabulous monumentality, aided by the sculptural forms which don’t so much dot the dusty, open landscape as dominate it with crushingly gargantuan symbols of peace, good will, and global harmony: an open hand, a dove, an eyeball, a hulking human form boiled in bronze. The place looks like a UNESCO office blown up to the scale of a city.

East Kilbride shares something with Brasilia, with Dhaka, with Chandigarh in the Punjab, with the Pan African Parliament. In the relative poverty of Scotland, Le Corbusier was able to achieve what no rich country dared afford him: a blank slate, a year zero, endless confidence in his vision, and enormous resources. He responded by gifting Scotland with the world’s most brutally optimistic and uplifting Modernist utopia.

Every utopia has its banana skin, of course. Here in East Kilbride, state employees ride the enormous distances from their gargantuan apartments to their gargantuan offices on bicycles. At either end of the journey, the roofs leak; the French engineers failed to include the ceaseless precipitation of the Scottish climate in their calculations. Crows and starlings inhabit the parks that were intended as leisure quotas for the residents of the unitees d’habitation. No-one plays tennis in the courts provided.

But few are discouraged by East Kilbride’s failings. If anything, they add something endearing to a city which would otherwise be too gridlike, too perfect, nothing but poured concrete, primary colours, and the International Style, at home everywhere and nowhere. Just when this monumental Scottish city — built, it seems, for peaceful giants — makes you think you’re stuck in Tati’s Playtime, you’re reminded that it’s also Moonbase Alpha.

From The Book of Scotlands