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Cumbernauld, Cumbernauld Town Centre, General

Bus Station (Modern), Flat(S) (19th Century) - (20th Century), Municipal Building (19th Century) - (20th Century), Shopping Centre (20th Century)

Site Name Cumbernauld, Cumbernauld Town Centre, General

Classification Bus Station (Modern), Flat(S) (19th Century) - (20th Century), Municipal Building (19th Century) - (20th Century), Shopping Centre (20th Century)

Alternative Name(s) Town Centre

Canmore ID 70557

Site Number NS77SE 47

NGR NS 75805 74489

NGR Description Centred on NS 75805 74489

Datum OSGB36 - NGR

Permalink http://canmore.org.uk/site/70557

Ordnance Survey licence number AC0000807262. All rights reserved.
Canmore Disclaimer. © Copyright and database right 2024.

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Administrative Areas

  • Council North Lanarkshire
  • Parish Cumbernauld
  • Former Region Strathclyde
  • Former District Cumbernauld And Kilsyth
  • Former County Dunbartonshire

Treasured Places (17 August 2007)

Built from the 1960s, Cumbernauld New Town accommodated 70,000 residents in dense low-rise housing and tower blocks. The Town Centre, a huge concrete 'megastructure', was designed to hold Cumbernauld's retail, administrative, cultural and recreational facilities on nine levels, accessed via an on-site bus station and a motorway running underneath. The bold architecture of the Town Centre received international acclaim.

Information from RCAHMS (SC) 17 August 2007

Glendinning, M, MacInnes, R and MacKechnie, A, 1996

Architecture Notes

NS77SE 47 centred on NS 75805 74489

Activities

Construction (1960)

Aerial Photography (1989)

Photographic Survey (1990)

Aerial Photography (1990)

Aerial Photography (1991)

Publication Account (1997)

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).

Aerial Photography (27 August 1998)

Photographic Survey (2 November 2000)

References

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