Last evening, Liam and I went on an official walking tour (with a real guide, instead of just a map), led by architect, Fiona Sinclair. Roughly, Partick is the area running along Dumbarton Road below Hyndland Ave, to the west of Byres Road though we started our tour on Byres Rd.
At one time there was a required one percent for art in new buildings, so we saw two things that show the range of public art.
A neon statue high on top of a commercial and residential building on the busiest corner of Byres Rd and University Ave. The neon was never lit up, but the colors are still there.
A wrought-iron ship sculpture (to celebrate Glasgow's now defunct ship-building economy) on top of a new residential building done by a local housing association to replace a tenement that could not be renovated.
The late 19th century and early 20th century stone masons were artists in their right. Architects would indicate places for sculptures on buildings but often it was the stone masons who decided what to do. Here's an ingenious example of decorating the external drain pipe system outside the Western Infirmary on Church St.
This sculpture on the side of the Anderson College of Medicine incorporates a leaded-glass window and shows how discolored the sandstone can be. Most of the sandstone buildings were cleaned as part of a city-wide improvement in the 1980s, but the cleaning is damaging to the stone so this was probably left alone in order to not ruin the figures.
All along the Kelvin River there used to be flour mills, most have been demolished and now most of the new buildings are student housing along with some older residential buildings. Amid these high-rises and construction sites, one mill remains. Bishops Mill is noted for its distinctive wheat sheaf finials (flour mill remember) and has been converted into flats.
New buildings incorporate old design elements
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| wrought iron fencing turned on its side to keep passersby from coming too close to the building |
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| modern sculpture above a doorway depicting Glasgow (bus, sailing ships) |
The most interesting part of the tour took us up Dowanhill St, which is a residential street that runs roughly parallel to Byres Rd. The bottom four blocks of the street (south of Dowanhill Park) were tenements built for workers and their families due to the street's proximity to the mills and the shipyards on the Clyde River. These tenements would mostly be one or two room units with toilets and washing space in the alleys behind the buildings. Their design though followed the Renaissance love for perspective and order with beautifully proportioned windows and decorative touches. The idea was you could look down a block and the line of the buildings would flow down the street.
On the other side of Dowanhill Park you move from Partick into Dowanhill. Many of the same design elements were used but the buildings held three or four units (a family per floor) and included stained and leaded glass, bay windows and marble entrances. Doctors, lawyers and merchants lived in these buildings as opposed to factory and shipyard workers. Continuing up the hill, the buildings become single unit villas so that one family would have three or four floors to themselves. One street showing the whole early 1900s class structure of the West End!
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| slate roof, leaded glass, bay windows -- three units in this building |
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| stained glass inside the entrance hall |
This part of Dowanhill St is where I've decide I will live next time I move to Glasgow -- why not aim high? Like maybe this single family house?
