Grey Gardens

Dundee Contemporary Arts, February 27-May 1

Wood, stone and slate are all widely respected in architecture. Concrete, however, always seems to be the poorer cousin of these more natural building materials.

A new exhibition at Dundee Contemporary Arts (DCA) aims to rehabilitate the reputation of the composite construction ingredient.

Grey Gardens explores the use of concrete forms in art and architecture from the 50s to the present day.

Part of the Scotland-wide Festival of Architecture during the Year of Architecture, Innovation and Design, the exhibition combines contemporary and archive photography, scale models and sculptures.

It features some of Scotland’s most renowned modernist houses and projects as far afield as Italy and Mexico.

Among the exhibition’s centrepieces are works by Morris and Steedman, one of the most influential Scottish architects’ practices of the past 50 years.

The Edinburgh-based practice was founded in 1956 by Robert Steedman and James Morris.

Strathkinnes-born James died in 2006, whereas Robert Steedman, 87, still lives in the Fife hamlet of Blebo Craigs and was involved in providing content for Grey Gardens.

Ideal Home in 1963 described Morris and Steedman as “specialists in ‘super’ houses”. The title belies the richness and diversity of their practice but it was the quality and inventiveness of their one-off houses that set them apart from other Scottish architects.

Mr Steedman says not everyone at the time agreed. “We built out first house in 1955,” he recalls.

“It would have been one of the most modernist buildings in the country at the time and the client hadn’t been able to get permission, so he turned to us.

“Planning told us we could build the house but only on the condition that it couldn’t be seen from the road, so passers-by wouldn’t have to look at it.

“Now, 60 years on, it’s a listed building.”

Town art is also featured in the exhibition, from Brian Miller’s work in Cumbernauld to works for Glenrothes by David Harding, who went on to establish and run the influential Environmental Art course at Glasgow School of Art. Artist and fabricator Neville Rae, an alumnus of that course, reinterprets and catalogues Miller’s work.

Martin Boyce, the Turner Prize-winning artist (and another former pupil of Harding’s), whose work DCA curated for the Venice Biennale in 2009, makes a welcome return with a new concrete work and a series of photographs.

Edward James and Plutarco Gastelum’s concrete garden Las Pozas, located in a Mexican rainforest, provides a surreal counterpoint.

One of Morris and Steedman’s modernist homes.