TWO of Scotland's leading architects have claimed that Glasgow's riverside is being "raped" by developers and that the city's planning policy is still destroying its built heritage.
Andy Macmillan and Isi Metz-stein, who designed the controversial St Peter's Seminary in Cardross and are credited with influencing modern architecture, claimed that "short-term" policies were driving the city's development.
"Things are done with
out any real continuity," said Professor Macmillan. "There's no value put on what was there before. If you can make more money by using the site, then you say 'let's clear it all away and build houses'."
Targeting the Clydeside redevelopment, he said: "There is a rape of the waterfront going on. Buildings are being thrown up along there because people believe that they can get higher rents from riverside views."
Professor Metzstein said the city's planning policies differed from the 1960s - when large sections of Victorian architecture were demolished - only in terms of the rate at which buildings were being cleared: "You have the same destruction, but very slowly: it's a drip, drip effect."
The architects, both in their late-70s, were speaking at the launch of a retrospective of their work at the Lighthouse, Scotland's Centre for Architecture, Design and the City, in Glasgow.
However, a spokesman for the council defended the city's planning policy: "Glasgow is attracting architects who are universally admired to work on fantastic projects such as the Riverside Museum and the National Arena at the SECC, and the redevelopment of the Clyde has been key to the transformation in the city's economic fortunes.
"Anyone who doubts that Glasgow has been transformed for the better over the past decade and a half, at least in part due to good city planning, should be aware that the city has received many awards and nominations from planning and design organisations for their work over the past few years."
He added that the council had just received an engineering award for the Clyde Arc bridge.
Alan Dunlop, an architect whose award-winning practice GM+AD has been heavily involved in the project denied that there had been any "rape" of the waterfront: "I would agree to a certain extent, in that there are developments which are less desirable, next to Springfield Quay. But I would not like to think that Andy is referring to us.
"Our projects use the highest possible materials to create the best designs we can. We would never be associated with any project that involved 'throwing up' buildings.
"Like any waterfront development, you get good bits and bad bits, but they take years to complete and the Clyde's has been going for a few years."
Mr Dunlop also defended the Glasgow planning department, stating that it had a progressive and positive policy.
The full article contains 468 words and appears in The Scotsman newspaper.
