Corner View - Typical Architecture from your area

This week's Corner View is all about the typical architecture of your area........

I would be the first to admit that the place where I live is not the prettiest. Yes it has an amazing location at the mouth of a large river, with the mountains and the beach close by, but the city itself is a post-industrial city with all that this brings.....old factories no longer in use, low cost housing etc. However, that past has also left it with some huge mansion houses (there used to be more millionaires per head of population than anywhere else in the UK, courtesy of our jute industry), beautiful libraries funded by the philanthropist Andrew Carnegie and some large scale civic architecture.

In fact, the building voted the city's favourite has just reopened following a 4 year programme of refurbishment and modernisation. I walk past it each morning on my way to work. The McManus, is the city's gallery and museum housed in a "splendid gothic revival style building."

In many Scottish towns and cities Victorian tenement buildings are commonplace.....stone, purpose built flats, typically 6 or 8 to a block, with an indoor stairwell known as a close. Indeed, a tenement flat in Glasgow is owned by the National Trust and preserved by it's previous owner, Miss Toward who lived there with her mother from 1911 for over 50 years, keeping much of the Victorian furniture that belonged to her grandparents and not changing much in the flat that whole period. It is an amazing piece of social history.

We also have our fair share of 1960s architecture (and plans to demolish quite a lot of it too!)

We also have the first UK building designed by Frank Gehry, famous for the Guggenheim in Bilbao or the Disney Concert Hall in Los Angeles. Our's is small in comparison, but pretty perfect. It is part of a chain of Maggies Centres which provide support to cancer sufferers. "Maggie" was Maggie Keswick Jencks, the wife of landscape architect Charles Jencks, mother and landscape designer, who died of cancer, but before she died, she set up her charity to provide support for the many non-medical issues cancer brings. Maggies Centres exist in 6 UK locations, Dundee was the third and all are designed by world class architects including Frank Gehry, Zaha Hadid. There are 4 interim centres operating with plans for another 4. The interim centres are currently fundraising to build their permanent structures - designed (for free) by architects such as Kisho Kurokawa, Wilkinson Eyre, whilst Frank Gehry is designing the centre for Hong Kong.

Photo by Miomar at Flickr

We are also in the midst of an international architecture competition to design the proposed new V&A Museum for the city. So whilst we have to contend with an industrial past, we are moving forwards!

Go check out the other Corner View's to see some more typical and atypical architecture from around the world!