(RIBA article, November 2010)
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| The six shortlisted entries for the V&A Dundee. |
It’s a hard lot, to be a small city in a far corner of the country. It enforces an inferiority complex through constant comparison to larger, wealthier, better connected counterparts. Opportunities seem to flow to capitals and conurbations. Success breeds success, but the feeling of inertia can be equally self-perpetuating. Before long, an aura of negative connotation builds up in the public imagination. Offhand jokes and derision sting doubly because they seem to confirm a truth already known that the city’s best days are behind it and that it has lost its spirit and its ambition.
This is the situation in which Dundee finds itself. Fifty miles north of Edinburgh, three hundred and fifty from London, it is a former industrial centre now trying to reinvent itself as a university town and research hub. Key to this new vision and to overcoming years of negative perception is a major redevelopment of the city’s disjointed and dispiriting waterfront. Grim council offices are to be removed, the baffling tangle of roundabouts and roads is to be reduced and a new grid plan of streets aims to reconnect the city centre with the long neglected River Tay.
The prestigious centrepiece of all this is a branch of London’s Victoria & Albert museum which will sit in the river itself, projecting a new persona to visitors arriving from the South. The six shortlisted designs are currently on display in Dundee and have provoked much debate over how to represent a city that is trying hard to distance itself from its industrial past.
The approaches from the six architects are varied. From Snøhetta’s modest barge which rises and falls with the rhythm of the tide, to Delugan Meissi’s Star Trek flavoured pebble, balancing on the shore and Sutherland Hussey’s fantastically unpopular neo-industrial effort which prompted the pick of the online comments, “When is a power plant not a power plant? When it’s the V&A.”
Perhaps the most interesting attempt to negotiate a détente between the city’s aspirations and its heritage comes from Steven Holl. The American has proposed an enigmatic and ethereal prism which rises high in contrast to the wide expanse of the estuary. The architect has pointed to several sources of inspiration for the design. The plan supposedly implies the form of a ship making its way to port and the large central opening references a long demolished arch which once stood by the docks. However, surely the most powerful and telling comparison is with that most reviled monument to past mistakes, the tower block.
Holl’s V&A treads a fine line. By conjuring the loaded imagery of the sixtes and seventies he risks condemning the city to be forever tied to that era. However he also provides the opportunity for the city to come to terms with its own image. The connotations of the tower block are subtly shifted. It becomes, once again, a symbol of future potential. If that association were to rub off on the rest of the skyline then the V&A will have succeeded in its aim of transforming the image of Dundee.
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| Steven Holl's proposal set against the Dundee skyline. |
