Cumbernauld Revisited

An experiment in growing your own town

Cumbernauld New Town in the outskirts of Glasgow was a heroic post war attempt to create a Faustian hybrid of an Italian Hill Top Village and a Futuristic New Town in Scotland. Whilst also voted ‘Scotland’s Ugliest Town’ and under repeated treat of demolishment we believed Cumbernauld in its layered compactness, has potentially for a new radical overhaul. We wrote a manifesto: “Grow Your Own Town”:

New Town: Cumbernauld New Town Mark II will one day be rediscovered as an ancient 20th century temple dedicated to the worship of the Motorcar…Archaeologist of the future will be puzzled by its remains, one of the largest concrete structures in Western Europe; a kind of drive-in Stonehenge…. A town devoted to  the worship of mobility based on a strict fundamentalist segregation of man and motor…A compact city with mega-structure multi-level single-envelop town centre …A rare cross-breed of Italian  Hill Top Village and American Shopping Mall….According to early documentation: “the town centre rears up on legs like a huge vertebrate monster on the ridge of the hill….” The 1960’s judgement of Cumbernauld was short and sweet: poplar amongst architects… More recently, Cumbernauld was voted Scotland’s ugliest town: a concrete slab in the face of modernity…Today part of the megastructure town centre is demolished while the other half has become an UNESCO.  Listed monument….Like a schizophrenic operation on Siamese Twins by Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde….But what about Cumbernauld’s original concept of endless flexibility & adaptability, in which citizen no longer a wall flower is encouraged to participate in a temple of mass culture….Imagine a kaleidoscopic sequence of environments, each space an everchanging changing-room….and pleasure no longer a separate commodity but a characteristic of the whole mode…Alas, visionary architecture, now no longer in fashion, has become obsolete and replaced with architecture without vision…Curiosity kills the architect……

New Nature: Hugh Wilson, the main designer of Cumbernauld, stated that New Towns  were only justifiable if they were considered as laboratories in which ideas for the restructuring of existing cities were explored….Cumbernauld New Town could once again become a centre of experimentation….An experiment in growing your own town, town planning based on the principle of ecological succession from pioneer colonisation to climax urbanisation…. A town of growing complexity, multi-layered and open-minded…. A renewed New Town, based on double exposure of both bio- and cultural diversity…. Plug-in nature will recolonise the urban void---organic town planning without additives, preservatives and growth hormones…. A reversed city of Nature Estates and Housing Reserves…. Bio-mass housing, re-cycle lanes and oxygen bars frequented by free radicals…. Fast track jogging tracks and slow-motion nature trails…. Motorways for born to be wild joyriding …. Cumbernauld town centre becomes world’s longest landscraper…,.landscape into building / building into landscape……new town turned inside out/ new nature turned outside / in …. rooftop sheep farming, drive-in gardening---ecology as software downloaded on the urban hardware…. A delirious experiment of sustainable optimism.

The manifesto was part of an exhibition Re-Motion: New Movements in Scottish Architecture organised by The Lighthouse Glasgow. The exhibition explored the meaning of sustainability and its relevance to Scotland, with special reference to future transport policy. For the exhibition we collaborated with artist Gair Dunlop and Dan Norton. The award-winning exhibition opened at the Rotterdam Architectural Biennale in 2003.