Festival – SpecNews

2016: A year of grand designs

The branding of 2016 as the Year of Innovation, Architecture and Design, follows this 2015’s Year of Food and Drink status, and 2014’s Year of Homecoming.
VisitScotland’s involvement signals the belief that there’s a tourism buck to be made out of selling Scotland’s architecture – both historic and new – as an attraction.
WHEN fire tore through Glasgow School of Art’s Mackintosh building on 23 May, 2014, the shockwaves spread far beyond the confines of the creative community.
Turning the festival – and the entire Year of Innovation, Architecture and Design – into a financial success is the responsibility, ultimately, of the quango.
Contemporary structures add a new layer to our built environment, taking inspiration from and sometimes reacting against past achievements in design.

As Charles Eames used to tell his staff: “Take your pleasure seriously.”
The Eameses playful mischief is still evident in their home studio, the smaller pavilion that stands across a small courtyard from the house.
New employees of the Eames Office would be set the daunting challenge of rearranging the keys to make a new tune.
As the British brutalist architect Peter Smithson, an Eames-admiring contemporary, put it: “They made it respectable to like pretty things”.
A replica features in the exhibition, providing an appropriately anarchic plinkety-plonk soundtrack to the riot of ideas.