**Seminar Announcement
2pm -5pm Thursday 29th April 2010, Glasgow Lighthouse, Gallery 2, Level 2, Mitchell Lane G1 3LX
Guest speakers to be announced shortly.
To coincide with the election campaign and closing of the Spaces of Labour exhibition at the Glasgow Lighthouse, we are holding a seminar to discuss the relationship between architecture, design and Scotland's economic future. A panel of five speakers will be asked to give a 15min response to a series of questions concerning the history and future of work spaces, after which the debate will be opened up to the audience
There will be a limited number of places available for this event, to reserve your place please email us.
Current Exhibition
Glasgow Lighthouse, G1 3NUG1 3LX until April 30th 2010
Monday, Wednesday - Saturday 10.30am - 5.30pm, Tuesday 11am - 5pm
Closed Sunday
Guest Book Comments
Charley S “Very clever, very visually stimulating- very great. Especially enjoyed the ‘harbours’- great concept”
S. Emmanuel “Thanks for this exhibition-very inspiring & insightful”
M. Morney “ Harbours & Coal display show epic landscapes- lovely”
R. Laurie “Mindblowing. Very interesting- historically intriguing!”
Louise M “The grey matter study was ingenious- imagine bricks looking like those- buildings would be stunning”
K. Gilchrist “Amazing. This should go around the schools of Scotland and then abroad!”
Mary S “Pure braw… the whole lot of it”
Thank you everyone for your encouraging comments. We will be moving the exhibition to a new venue soon and will keep you updated here.
The Pits
My village was surrounded by walking and cycling paths, which helpfully connected us to nearby villages in straight and level routes. When we were wee we used to go walking and cycling looking for whatever we could get: brambles; raspberries; hazelnuts; peas; tatties; itchy powder (rosehip), pee the beds (dandelions), conkers and tadpoles. Along the route were occasional grey stones etched with details of no importance. There were two great bridges built of brick arches carrying roads above them, it didn’t occur to us the great effort that had been made to by-pass our path. At Guides we had sausage sizzles on a raised brick platform that looked over the path, while overlooking us were black and white metal ladders with protective loops around them. Further along the path were the bings, big black mounds which were high, steep and hard to climb up but always busy with scramble bikes.
Fifteen years later I realised that my rural idyll was manufactured.
Industrial Monuments
This idea for this journey stemmed from a Diploma exploration into the re-invigoration of a small fishing town. I wanted to expand the the geographical, social and historical context in which my earlier designs had been set. This led me to plan a journey along the entire East coast of Scotland, recording as many harbours, piers and jetties as was possible. The following pages include only a selection of the 192 harbours and slips I documented, the rest are viewable on the Spaces of Labour website. What is interesting about visiting such a large number of harbours is the variety. Harbour forms are always different and dependant on the sea and surrounding landscape. They are also related to the fishing history and what they are used for today. The East coast harbours are exciting, unique structures in themselves. Skeletal functional objects that represent man's eternal battle with the sea. The harbours are monumental, historical and marvels of engineering. At their most basic level they can be considered to be landscape architecture merging with the sea.
Re-imagining a Productive Landscape
The project 're-imagining a productive landscape' had its origins in our diploma work where we investigated the history and fate of the textile industry in the Cumbernauld area. This resulted in series of proposals to build a twenty first century textile mill coupled with a research centre for the production of dyes. It was our intention that these buildings would run using alternative energy and would produce commodities made out of materials and resources indigenous to the Scottish landscape. This led us to speculate on how it might be possible to extend such a logic to the whole of the Scottish economy; a highly idealised scenario in which a new manufacturing and energy-producing sector emerges that produces things for domestic and world markets using only Scottish resources. As a pilot exercise we took a strip across Scotland from the Ardnamurchan peninsular to Fife and began to map what natural resources are available and what they could potentially be transformed into, whether it be new foods, construction materials, textiles, or pharmaceuticals. To try and capture the implications of such a plan for the built environment we produced a series of maps showing new networks and infrastructure and four 'what if' imaginary views of a Scottish landscape devoted to the production of energy and the manufacturing of goods.
From the Gallery Wall to the Village Hall
www.timeandtideforseaweed.co.uk
In response to the general decline of industry within Scotland, the premise of the Spaces of Labour unit was to envisage a new productive landscape based on a native resource. I chose seaweed on a hunch that it was an under-used but valuable resource which has the potential to form the basis of a unique architectural project.
Seaweed has a wide variety of uses from fuel production and fertilisers to cosmetics and foodstuffs. There has also been extensive research into new and future uses for seaweed as a source of biofuel, an additive to fatty foods to combat obesity and even as a building material. Scotland hosts around 20% of the total seaweed biomass in Europe, yet only harvests 2% of this share. Around 50% of Scotland’s seaweed stocks can be found in the North West Highlands, so the most obvious location for a new seaweed industry would be within this area.
The Islands that Roofed the World
The Islands That Roof The World is a proposal to re-establish a slate quarrying industry on the west coast of Scotland. The project presents new Scottish slate as a viable material for the construction industry and proposes the slate island of Luing on the West coast of Scotland as the starting point for the establishment of a thriving new industry.
The project developed in two stages, part one presented research into the abandoned Scottish slate industry highlighting a number of factors that would be integral to the successful re-establishment of the industry. This information fed into the production of a brief for a series of developments associated with the establishment of a boat based quarrying strategy. The second part of the project visualises a slate processing plant proposed for the village Cullipool on the island Luing. The proposed quarrying typologies and industrial landscapes are illustrated by means of two animations, Off to Work and Off To School.
Grey Matter
Greymatter- The objective of Grey Matter is to imagine a new manufacturing landscape for Scotland based on the innovative reuse of waste resources.
Paper - Every year approximately 12.5 million tonnes of paper products are consumed within the UK; 64% of which are sourced from overseas (CPI, HMR&C). Out of the 8.7 million tonnes of paper products that were recovered from the waste stream; 4.7 million tonnes will be exported to developing nations for recycling (WRAP).
International export of the UK’s growing waste paper surplus is an inefficient and immoral solution to a domestic matter, with detrimental consequences to the environment. In addition to this, foreign export is reliant upon sustained trade within an increasingly fragile market.
Glasgow's Industrial Ambition
Drawing on research into Glasgow's industrial history, one of my ambitions in this project was to imagine a city of the future that had once again become an industrial powerhouse whilst at the same time self sufficient in terms of energy and food production.
Spaces Of Labour
Spaces of Labour or S.O.L is a project that originated in the post-graduate programme in the Department of Architecture at the University of Strathclyde. Its principal mission is to investigate the architectural, spatial and social organisation of work.
S.O.L is critical of the economic policies of successive governments that saw the remedy to the social and economic devastation caused by de-industrialisation in the expansion of the services sector where employment has often been of an insecure nature in poorly designed and constructed buildings.
S.O.L believes that the long-term future of the Scottish economy is dependent on us expanding and reinvigorating a manufacturing and industrial sector, and that architecture and design has a role to play in this process by illustrating and imagining what new types of productive landscape could conceivably emerge.
S.O.L is speculating on what types of buildings and spaces might be required in the twenty first century that are devoted to innovations in the production of energy, eco-transport systems, green building materials, seaweed, and natural pharmaceuticals.
S.O.L is simultaneously documenting the historical places and building typologies associated with industries that have gone into decline, such as coal, textiles, fishing and slate. It is doing this to ensure that these landscapes are not forgotten, and to speculate on whether it is possible to regenerate them and find new uses for the buildings and infrastructure.
S.O.L is consciously idealistic about the future of Scotland. It maybe true that given the state of the global economy, capital and any new productive industries might continue to migrate to places where labour is cheaper. But this situation can change very quickly.
S.O.L is registered as a worker's co-operative of designers and architects.
Contact Details
If you would like contact us about any of the projects on this site or are interested in collaborating on new work, please get in touch at mail@spacesoflabour.com
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