Scotland’s Postmodern vision a bold mix of old and new
Diane M Watters, architectural historian at Historic Environment Scotland, on how a playful post-1975 vision shaped our streets.
If you were asked to name your favourite building in Scotland, what would you choose? Would it be a stately castle, a dedicated design museum, or something slightly more functional? Four years ago, a shopping centre in Glasgow was crowned Scotland’s ‘favourite building’.
Princes Square is a popular Postmodern shopping precinct designed by Hugh Martin Partnership in 1986-7, set behind a mid-19th century listed façade. When it won the award, it was only 30 years old. So what is Postmodern Architecture, and why do we find it so interesting?
Postmodernism is not a set style in the same way as Gothic or Classical architecture. In fact, it is characterised by stylistic diversity – a bold mix of old and new.
Postmodern Architecture was part of the wider cultural movement across philosophy, literature and the arts that began in the midto-late 20th century.
It was the beginning of a move away from the rigid, functional architecture of the modern era towards something more image-led and stylistically popular.
Instead of deferring to internationally recognised Modern Movement rules, Postmodernism openly flouted them. Where Modernist architecture embraced minimalism and focused on the function of buildings, Postmodernism was varied, quirky and individualistic.
In Scotland, the economic downturn and crisis of 1979 closed many architectural practices. But by the late 1980s, new pioneering practices were being formed. The architects’ client-base shifted increasingly from public to commercial projects such as shopping, leisure, and culture. Private practice boomed.
In architectural culture and design there was a significant shift from the social welfare collective ethos to that of individualism. In contrast with the regional planning of the post-war era, Scotland’s cities in the 1980s and 90s were now in competition to be cultural and commercial centres.
For example, the now demolished Olympia Pool and Leisure Centre in Dundee was a bulky modernist block at its core, but also an example of a new ‘playful’ design in civic leisure projects.
There were new ambitious public projects, redevelopment of historic centres, and housing refurbishment and regeneration in residential areas.
This period also saw the introduction of the historic building preservation movement, with vocal antimodernist views of 1960s concrete heritage.
Postmodernism revived historical building styles, but no period or style of architecture was now privileged or copied slavishly. Some were favoured, including art deco and classicism.
However a preoccupation with Scotland’s own traditional built forms – the castle – and the works of the ‘great master’ – architect Charles Rennie Mackintosh – had a direct impact on the visual language of architecture in the 1980s and early 1990s.
These home-grown stylistic revivals were part of a broader cultural self-reflection on Scotland’s national identity post-thatcher.
In April 2019, we began a smallscale survey at HES to record and research postmodern places from 1975-1990s. It was our response to a pressing need to tackle a period of increasing interest to historians of architecture, heritage professionals, and, as the 2017 award illustrated, the general public. We are proactively recording surviving buildings that are significant and representative of the post-1975 period.
Contemporary architects have promoted Postmodernism and Neomodernism, and attempted international overviews of its development.
But we’re conscious there has been no targeted study devoted to this movement in Scotland. Given there are extensive political and social histories of Scotland in the 1970s, 80s and 90s, we feel a more detailed study of Scotland’s post1975 building and sites is long overdue.