French tightrope walker Didler Pasquette recently attempted to walk between 3 of the Red Road Flats (above) – one of Glasgow’s more famous mega housing tower complexes built in the sixties. The event, title Highwire was part of an arts project for the Glasgow International Festival of Contemporary Arts. The set-up was fantastic with huge support guys stretching off the main lines connecting the massive apartment slabs in a spidery embrace. There were metaphors a plenty with the symbolic linking of poorly constructed & maintained and much derided high rise towers that are (for now at least) a strong part of Glasgow’s urban fabric. Visiting the site in person reinforced to me how the greatest problems these towers suffer (apart from poorly perfoming lifts) is the terrible manner in which the hit the ground – so stark and without any landscaping on transition zones, and no amenity to speak of.

The walk turned into a bit of a non-event when Didler (above) made it about a third of the way across the first wire only to decide that it was unsafe to continue due to high winds and therefore backed his way back to safety.

On our way home we crossed through Springburn park and discovered the decrepit Wintergarden (above & below) that is housed within its grounds. While a shame that it hasn’t been restored like its more famous counterpart in the Botanic Gardens near our flat, as a derelict structure it possesses a certain beauty in it’s rib like structure and faded grandeur that fascinated Chhay & I.

This entry was posted on Saturday, August 11th, 2007 at 2:31 am and is filed under architecture, glasgow, scotland, tim. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.