City

11th May 2025

ANALOGUES OF McEWAN by Johnny Rodger

The recent opening of the exhibition of drawings 'Tracing Rossi' at the Stallan Brand studio gallery in Glasgow offered an opportunity to examine author Cameron McEwan's in-depth published study of the influential architect Aldo Rossi. Via discussion of a relatively obscure and neglected project by Rossi, the book 'Analogical City' makes weighty claims for architecture as a poetic, political and above all, critical practice. Johnny Rodger reviews.
19th April 2025

STREET CLUTTER by Maria Burke

I am a walker – I love walking. I love the freedom of roaming around, being curious, looking for often-missed details. I walk on mycommute to work; I walk to get my steps in; I walk to take photographs for content for my Twitter and Instagram pages; I walk out of necessity because inner-city parking is too costly and too stressful and public transport is increasingly getting more expensive. I am a proud pedestrian.
4th April 2025

A VISIT TO A MUSEUM WHERE TIME DOES NOT EXIST by Mark Rego

A meditation on time in architecture by philosopher and architect Mark Rego. In this piece Rego examines the apparently paradoxical union in an art museum of a painter who rejected time, and an architect 'whose works are perhaps some of the most embodied in temporality.' Alvaro Siza's Museu de Arte Contemporanea in Chaves, Portugal to house the works of Nadir Afonso.
29th October 2024

NEW ALBUM: reviewed by NORRY WILSON

Since their first gig two years ago, Glasgow band The Tenementals have played solidly round the city and elsewhere to full houses and released several singles. With a line up of eight musicians, and sometimes more, they sing the history of Glasgow into being and conjure up the glories and the disasters, and the pride and the shame of it before the citizens. Norry Wilson of Lost Glasgow will introduce them on stage at the launch of the first album in Oran Mor on Wednesday 27th November. Here he tells us why he is delighted to present them on the occasion of the release of their first major recording. (plus free track!)
14th October 2023

In Praise of Sturdy Buildings:
A Report for Wyndford Residents Union
by
Fraser/Livingstone Architects

In all campaigns and struggles with authorities it is important that the process is documented and made accessible so that lessons can be learned. This is no mere footnote to the struggle of the Wyndford Residents Union to save their homes from the wrecking ball. They commissioned Fraser/Livingstone Architects to produce a Report on the condition of the estate to respond to those reports produced by the authorities. We're delighted to reproduce that Report here with an introduction/preface by Malcolm Fraser.
14th June 2023

MAKING HOME : The Fight to Save the Wyndford (ArchiFringe 23)
Kelly Rappleye

What is going on in Wyndford ? Barnabas Calder (in his book reviewed by Florian Urban in The Drouth August 21) tells us that Architecture, and especially the production of its materials, steel and cement, is the worst of climate change culprits, yet in Glasgow a whole estate is about to be pulled down and rebuilt. We are supposed to be on the brink of some massive changes in our way of living -but not just yet! Kelly Rappleye has organised an event which might enshrine Wyndford not so much as a cause célèbre as a cause désastre.
29th March 2023

A BALCONY IN CHICAGO
by
Murdo Macdonald

Is 'dwelling' always an invasion of some type? In the stoical approach, which is the inescapable ethos of our contemporary of the ecological and the sustainable, it seems so, yes. Here, in appropriately ossianic mode for these end-of-times, a paratactical Murdo Macdonald muses on the hybrid in Chicago.
23rd January 2023

THE GLEAN review by Sara Stevenson

Billed as 'groundbreaking', the Edinburgh City Art Centre exhibition, Glean - curated by Jenny Brownrigg - gathers the work of 14 pioneering early 20th century women photographers and filmmakers. Sara Stevenson reviews it for The Drouth, and considers it an 'impressive achievement'.
13th January 2022

Repointing the Brickwork:
The birth of the Arches PART II
intro by Raymond Burke

Our recent review of the new book on The Arches by Bratchpiece and Innes noted the great achievement of the work in showing how that institution was at the heart of a grassroots creativity in Glasgow. But before the internationally famed club came the prelude -the Theatre company that kept the Arches open and made it all possible. Raymond Burke has set the record right on this, collecting and introducing the story of the Arches Theatre through the words of the actors themselves. We publish in two parts: this is PART 2