IT HAD TO BE SECURE BUT NOT TOO SAFE -SO THE PUPILS COULD BE INDEPENDENT

摘要

Are gm+ad's Gordon Murray and Alan Dunlop going soft? These are the guys who have boldly taken hold of Glasgow's metropolitan notions of itself and given them a kicking. They've punctured the remaining order of the city's 200-year-old Blythswood grid by putting a baseball-cap roof on their Bewlays Hotel, which was completed in 2000; and a silvered titanium fist leans threateningly out over the road on their Spectrum office building. With their Radisson Hotel on Argyle Street they cocked a snook at the convention that a Glasgow building should only be four storeys high — 'that's just the maximum height of a Victorian fireman's ladder'jeers Dunlop. And they've laughed off the idea that only 'traditional' materials — 'sandstone, sandstone, and erm, sandstone' they say — can make a Glasgow style. Self-declared Mies Modernists, even their friends (such as writer and Prospect editor Penny Lewis) have described them as 'commercial architects' who are 'aggressive' and 'hard-nosed'.