Wow! eBook
Look Up Glasgow
Author(s): Adrian Searle (Author), David Barbour (Illustrator)
- Publisher: Freight Books
- Publication Date: June 1, 2014
- Language: English
- Print length: 224 pages
- ISBN-10: 1908754214
- ISBN-13: 9781908754219
Book Description
A stunning coffee table book of Glasgow’s world-class architectural detail, hidden in plain sight at the tops of the city’s iconic buildings
Glasgow is Scotland’s largest city, its streets a constant frenetic bustle of activity, but rarely do its residents take the time to stop and look up at the extraordinary architectural heritage all around. Glasgow’s image belies this world-class architectural detail, comprising of stunning sculpture, ornament, friezes, gables, and decoration, the vast majority of which are hidden in plain sight above eye level. Writer Adrian Searle and specialist architectural photographer David Barbour have scoured the city, bringing together in one volume a fabulous record of the hidden jewels of “the second city of the Empire,” created in a time of great wealth and virtuoso craftsmanship now long gone. The book also includes poetry from six of Scotland’s leading poets, responding in very individual ways to Glasgow’s extraordinary urban environment. This collection will be a beautiful surprise to residents, visitors, and non-residents alike, demonstrating that it is much more than just another post-industrial British city. It will be a book that those passionate about the city and about architecture will treasure.
Editorial Reviews
About the Author
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
Look Up Glasgow
World Class Architectural Heritage that’s Hidden in Plain Sight
By Adrian Searle, David Barbour
Freight Books
Copyright © 2013 Adrian Searle and David Barbour
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-908754-21-9
Contents
FOREWORD,
CITY CENTRE,
MERCHANT CITY,
CHARING CROSS,
WEST END,
EAST END,
GOVAN,
SOUTH SIDE,
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS,
CHAPTER 1
CITY CENTRE
The Derelicts
Kona Macphee
They beg along the inner city miles,
these empire’s orphans, each a hefty waif
of blurring stonework, downward-slipping tiles:
not yet unlovely, ever more unsafe.
Façades and gutters foster tufted plumes
— funereal wild ironies of green —
while rain and roots slip in to higher rooms
and do their wreckers’ work unpaid, unseen.
Passing, we buzz with possibility
(Academy of Joy? Some arty den?
A Makers’ Market? Haven of tranquility?),
our whimsies ghosting shells with life again:
and yet we never give these failing graces
more than the unlived lives behind our faces.
Glasgow album
Kona Macphee
O photographer!
Why this beryl litany,
these cobalt encores?
Blue is for tourists;
a native heart knows snapshots
grey-scaled, street-wise, smirred:
the city, wet-sheened,
resting in its hill-rimmed dish
like a vast glazed tart
a wet mist rolling:
camouflage for the ghost-ships
still haunting old men
summertime downpours:
the river’s bygone highway,
the road a river
nightlife parallels:
rain tracks and spaghetti straps;
shopfronts as mirrors
women on a train:
fifties-raucous, trinketed;
splashy umbrellas
a seedling hard-man:
skinny, chippy, jitter-eyed;
sleet-melt on tattoos
a doorway’s shelter;
banter with passing soakers:
glasgow smiles better
The Postman
Graham Fulton
as I stare up at the face
of a mythical man in pain
staring straight down from a wall
a postma1n in red coming out of a café
tells me if
I walk down the hill and turn right
into Waterloo Street
there’s the most beautiful building
in G
