Publication Account

Date 1997

Event ID 1019436

Category Descriptive Accounts

Type Publication Account

Permalink http://canmore.org.uk/event/1019436

A massive multi-level, multi-function town-centre building set on an elevated ridge, straddling a dual-carriageway through road. One of the key monuments of postwar European architecture, and the most important postwar work in this country. Significant chiefly as the international exemplar of 'megastructural' planning - the conception, central to avant-garde 1950s/60s architecture, of single, agglomerative buildings containing multiple functions juxtaposed in a visually exciting manner with traffic routes. In a postwar context, the Centre is almost completely original as a conception - although possibly influenced, further back, by the multi-level imagery of Italian Futurism, or by Schindler's Lovell Beach House - and it was hailed by International Modern Movement historian Reyner Banham as 'the canonical megastructure'. More prosaically: it ws the world's first multi-level covered-in town centre. (Figs. 4.45, 4.46).

Information from 'Rebuilding Scotland: The Postwar Vision, 1945-75', (1997).