'The Framework of our lives'

An Interview with Roger Emmerson

Today I'm meeting with Roger Emmerson, author of Land of Stone: A Journey through Modern Architecture in Scotland, which was launched on the 7th of December with us here at Luath Press. So, Roger, how was your launch? Did it go all well?

Oh, it was great. It was a sell out. I gather from Clare, at the RIAS bookshop, this was not usual. So that was good. There was actually a waiting list of people. They seemed to sell out most of the books. There were only two left at the end, and Gavin [our director here at Luath Press] is now under some pressure to get some more books into the bookshop.

It was great. The talk went well. I had a lot of very nice words afterwards with people. It was just it was terrific.

 urning the topic of the book. What brought you to write Land of Stone?

I think it was what was missing, I think was what did it?

I wouldn't say I have read everything on the history of Scottish architecture but read a lot over the years. And what I found was missing was ideas or new ideas in it.

There were taxonomies. There were ideas from elsewhere, but the new ideas generated in Scotland were a puzzle simply because Scotland has such a fantastic philosophical tradition all the way through from Duns Scotus in the 13th century, David Hume in The 18th century, Alasdair MacIntyre In the 20th century and many, many others. It's solid.

And I thought, well, why was that not in architecture? Why? Why was it all that we talked about was the aesthetics? What did it look like?

So that was really the start. What was missing? I mean, there were other things missing as well.

The obvious gaps were women, people of colour and the working class…And I do make reference to that in the book. My prime objective was to try and uncover ideas that were relevant to architecture which was generated in Scotland.

How did you begin your research or where did it first emerge?

Oh, conversations in the 1980s, believe it or not, there was a kind of there was a perception at the time that there should be contemporary architecture which is derived from the same sources as Charles Rennie Mackintosh had derived his architecture.

So there was a discussion largely around the significance of Scottish Baronial architecture and what that might do.

I was part of that discussion and both in terms of writing and in fact doing speculative designs as to how that might come about. And one of which is illustrated in the book, I even wrote a preliminary what did you call a ‘Preliminary Notes on a Developing Theory of Scottish Architecture’, which was published in 1986.

But really, the serious work didn't begin till I made two trips one to Finland and one to Czechoslovakia because I wanted to see how their architecture had developed and how they had become modern, in a sense, and why those conditions didn't seem to be or hadn't happened in Scotland.

So really it wasn't until the late nineties that I actually put pen to paper. I have a photograph of my desk in a flat in Forest Hill with papers on it. I didn't have a typewriter or anything then, so I was doing it by hand. So I would say in 1998 I started seriously.

I was teaching at the time, but then I went back to full-time architectural work and really for the next six years it was a struggle to do any writing.

I used my retirement after 2016 to develop what I was doing. In particular, I used the pandemic because we weren't doing anything else to try and sit down and consolidate it.

So that that's, again, history of it.

When it comes to architecture itself, has it always been your calling?

No, I never had any doubts about it. Although I didn't know anything about it, I knew from the age of 12. That's what I wanted to do. There wasn't anything else.

 What makes it so important about Scottish architecture to you or what does it mean to you?

Well, it states it's a framework of our lives. Whether we like or dislike it, whether it's beneficial to us or not beneficial to us.

It's what we're all involved in every day of our lives. It's the public art. And that is not an art, if you like. People ignore most of it, but it surrounds them constantly.

Therefore, it requires attention. And that was why I was concerned to find out what the ideas embedded in it were, other than just ideas of doing good work, doing it well, or providing housing or providing hospitals. See, I mean, these are technical issues, it's what you expect of a modern society.

So I was it was the ideas behind it then that drove that.

But yes, I mean, it's what's around us. We have to understand it.

When comes to your writing, what speaks to it? What inspired you as you began to write this book or what did you want from it?

I actually had a notion, which was and it's a political notion. I think reading the book, it's no secret that I have leanings towards independence and nationalism. There's no secret about that, although don't push it during the extent in the book. But you know, reading between the lines, it must be obvious.

What I was very keen to discover was, was that in the architecture that surrounded us, was there anything consciously political? Because the certainly was in a brief period in the architecture in Finland, Czechoslovakia, Sweden, Denmark, Russia, 1930s, Israel 1920s, thirties, Portugal, all somewhat coloured by the fascist regime there. But around the world I could see there were architectures which had political content. Sometimes very of that political content. But I don't mean totalitarian architecture. That's something else totally different.

There's all often confused. So my objective was, was there something political in Scottish architecture? I kind of imagined it might be, but actually, when it came to the bit, there isn't really. You can infer it, but architects in Scotland are very circumspect and they're very cautious about declaring any political allegiance or anything of that sort. Very, very cautious.

I am not cautious. I've never been secretive about what my views were. But I couldn’t, in all honesty, say that that was what was in Scottish architecture. It's not. There might be a tendency, but there's no overt political message in Scottish architecture, none whatsoever. One might go even further and see that a lot of Scottish architecture, there's no message at all any sort.

It's just what it is. The better architecture has got something to say. That's what I found. That's what I was encouraged by, that it was in the better architecture. You can say something about it. There is something within it that communicates ideas and ideas about Scotland.

Was there any hurdles you came when working? Came across. Sorry. When working on Land of Stone?

Yeah. My total incompetence for the computer, which is well known to the Luath team.

I was never taught any aspect of computers. So I'm entirely self-taught. I've never been taught typing and it may shock me to know that the entire thing was done with one finger.

What was interesting to me was that over the years I've acquired a fairly substantial architectural library and consciously or unconsciously, the books that were in it with the books that I needed to reference. I filled the gaps by using the university library.

Therre were no real hurdles bar the fact that I had to go going back to full-time employment as an architect, which left no space, but that was a blessing in disguise because it allowed me to stand back from what really was a pretty naive idea and reflect more maturely on it and see more widely what might be the case.

So yeah, it's a long time coming, but probably the better for that really.

What would you personally say was your favourite part in either writing the book or of the book reflecting on it now? Or what came most natural to you?

A couple of things, really. The principal thing was that I'm no philosopher. I read philosophy entirely. I’m someone who has an interest in general, but I've never been taught it. What I found interesting was there was a philosophical core in Scottish thinking. We tend always to assume that science, the philosophy of David Hume's courage, common sense, and empiricism.

But in fact, what is also relevant is the philosophy deriving from Immanuel Kant. And there is a lot of that. And what I also found was architects expressing themselves used the kind of Kantian antinomies, that is the two poles of an argument, the thesis and the antithesis romanticism, the rationalism. They were conjoined. People talk to me about an architecture of melancholy, which is a kind of pleasure and pain and nostalgia for loss.

I mean, the two ideas contained in that, and the more I read, the more I find that people writing about art and architecture and Scotland, these are the areas we're talking about. They're talking about these kinds of dual ideas. That was so important because it should give me a framework that I didn't have before.

There was a basis for writing about things I could now look at what people had said and discover in it, the fact that they were holding two ideas consistently and working through the two ideas which on the face of it were opposites.

The other one was that I did a sort of very simplistic questionnaire which I sent out to a whole group of architects known to me. And it was very simplistic, but people kept coming back saying, This is the hardest question you ever had to fill. I think it was because it was simple.

Some of the questions even looked daft, but I think that made them reflect and I got such an incredible response. It was just staggering. It was gold dust what was in it because I think many of the architects who I queried in the questionnaire had never actually sat down and examined in that sort of light what it was that they were doing.

Technically, they would have examined their work with respect to what they've been taught about the modern movement at the School of Architecture. They would examine its legal status. But in terms of what was driving them, what was making them do it, how they responded to things, no, I don't think they'd ever done that before.

I also had a couple of 1 to 1 interviews with architects, which were also extremely useful. And I had a particularly interesting discussion with Richard Murphy, who I know slightly but not well at his astonishing house. And it was incredible to discover how much we shared in terms of interests and architects we admired and topics that we covered.

Now, I wouldn't say that Richard and I agreed on everything, but it was intriguing to find out there was some commonality there. So that all of that to me was it was encouraging that there were things emerging that had really never been placed in that fashion before or recorded in that way before.

It made me think that actually there was probably a larger book lying around somewhere to be done by interviewing architects and really put in putting them on notice, really saying, look, you have to think about what you're doing, or you have to vocalize what it is you're doing because every other architecture or culture in the world, that's what people do.

Something that caught my attention was your discussions online on LinkedIn. And you mentioned copyright issues in some of the images and how you turned to just hand-drawing them yourself. Did that allow you to connect more or would you say it was more of a hindrance if you will?

No, I think it's interesting you've picked that up because over the course of my career, I suspect I must have worked half the time on existing buildings, either restoring them, converting them or doing something to them. It wasn't all new buildings. And one of the things you do, to begin with, you survey the building and in the old days it was all done by hand, and you drew it up by hand.

And what I found quite astonishing was the act of drawing someone else's building. It must be like a piano player learning a piece of music. You get into the rhythm of what the person's doing, the shapes of forms, the proportions. You're not necessarily measuring them out other than the window's dimensions. They are that wide by that tall, but you begin to understand something inherently about the building and about the particular architect's way of thinking about it.

So yes, using that then in terms of getting around the copyright issue, redrawing the original buildings, we can that's an access that opens up those buildings very definitely one of them, one building in particular, which I only had a sort of very grainy photograph taken at an angle. And I wanted to show it orthogonally, you know, this straight on, because there were issues about the shapes and proportions in it that I wanted to discuss.

I had to kind of redraw that. So the building is long gone. And so I had to go through the site and George Street pace out in the ground where the building was to find out how wide it was. And from that, I could do a calculation to find out how tall it was as an estimate.

But that whole process was as if I was, in a sense, redesigning that building and producing a conventional architectural elevation that the original architect might have produced.

There is a very definite connection between the act of drawing something that exists already and feeling your way into it. Yeah, no question.

 If you were to sell this book to somebody, what would you see is at the core of it?

Identity.

You know, it's just it's about what it is to be Scottish, part of what it is to be Scottish. And it's using in a way, architecture as a vehicle in order to discuss identity.

As we begin to wrap up this interview, is there anything you wish a possible audience to know about Land of Stone that I may have missed or they may have missed from knowing about the book?

Well, it's not as serious as perhaps the preceding answers have been. I mean, there are, I think, fairly humorous bits in it. There's even a joke in part of it, which is told to me by a Swedish architect. It's a rather good joke.

A DFDS cruise ship sinks in a terrible tropical storm in the Indian Ocean. The search party is sent out, but there are no survivors. There's no wreckage. Five years later, another DFDS cruise ship is in the same location in the Indian Ocean, roughly. That's where the ship went down. They come across an island, they send a party ashore, where they find it. There are six survivors from the sunken ship.

There are two Danes. There are two Norwegians and two Swedes.

The Danes from a cooperative Norwegians are fighting each other and the Swedes are standing by, awkwardly waiting to be introduced.

That’s the joke. I liked it because it was a kind of shorthand for the sort of national characteristics. It and the fact that it was told to me by a Swede was even better.