Scotland's Art Deco buildings are inspiring devoted defenders

One is against a company that wants to turn Edinburgh’s C-listed George Cinema into a residential building. It’s had its proposal rejected by Historic Environment Scotland and Edinburgh Council, on the basis that the George’s interiors preserve “Art Deco/Moderne design ... Its streamlined design included innovations in the use of modern materials and up-to-the-minute continental style”.

The second is – counterintuitively, as you watch your extremities go blue – an Aberdeen outdoor swimming lido. The A-listed Tarlair Pool will reopen this summer with a cafe, but with workshops, pavilion and triple-pools coming after that.

Look at the pictures that accompany these buildings, and – to me at least – it’s obvious why they generate their redoubtable “Friends Of...” protectors.

The George is a stately white edifice, tubular and looming like a backdrop from Fritz Lang’s Metropolis. Stoically, it bears its tacky “BINGO” signage.

The Tarlair Pool, as a design, is an exquisite array of rectangles, triangles and grid windows. Its quiet modernity defies the wild wall of Aberdeen gneiss and moss behind it, and stewards the hopeful recreational waters that spread before it.

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That’s what’s distinctive about Art Deco style – the energy, surplus and optimism it radiates. It’s hard not to connect that to the roaring, crashing and recovering conditions, between the two world wars, in which it first emerged and flourished.

Art, design and architectural history would place Art Deco between two great trends. Before it, Art Nouveau was inspired by natural forms, generating intricate designs, pursuing beauty for its own sake. After Art Deco came Modernism and the International Style, where form mechanistically and rationally followed function, with decoration at a minimum.

As we look at its remnants now, Art Deco benefits from being between these two eras. It embraced the machine age, and indeed harnessed new technologies (like reinforced concrete, elevators and moulding). But it was also bouncing forward from the horrors of the First World War, and retained enough aspiration to literally “decorate” its tubes and blocks with abandon.

Yet Art Deco of the 20s and 30s is unhaunted by the horrors of technology represented by the atomic bomb. It also evades the perversions of grandiosity and ambition represented by Nazism and Stalinism.

So skyscrapers can scrape the sky in New York, and be as vastly ornate as the Chrysler or Empire State buildings, and only evoke affluence and capitalist success – not anything more sinister.

In a similar way, St Andrew’s House on Calton Hill in Edinburgh, built between 1934-39 by Thomas S Tait, can serve as Scotland’s administrative and bureaucratic centre – even though, from our current historical viewpoint, it looks as forbidding as any Soviet-era headquarters (or Orwellian ministry).

So Art Deco attracts us because it is a dream of the future which seems untroubled by doubts about our capacity to steer that future.

You’ll note that the two examples we opened with were leisure and entertainment experiences in Scotland. As the late architectural historian Charles McKean once noted, you rarely find “Art Deco buildings used for housing or factories” (although there are glorious exceptions, like the India tyre factory in Inchinnan, and the Luma Tower lamp factory in Glasgow.)

Art Deco buildings “housed the likes of roadhouses, cinemas, ice rinks, milk bars, dancehalls and caffs”, continued McKean. “The kind of businesses that changed hands, but had to be fashionable. They were buildings designed to draw people in, and get them to open their wallets. They symbolised the start of the consumer age.”

These Art Deco fun palaces had quite an effect on Scotland’s Victorian-defined capitals. “In a city like Glasgow, it was a huge change,” continues McKean. “The Art Deco buildings shook up the architecture of industrial Scotland. Suddenly, you had these sleek buildings, that were shiny, or brilliant white, or with dazzling chrome fascias, appearing in soot-black streets.”

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Certainly, my own reckoning with the power of Art Deco – and the emotional investments involved in preserving it – began when I first started to visit Nardini’s, the ice cream emporium in Largs, in the late-80s and early-90s.

Maybe it was because it was the height of postmodernism, where yuppies would delight in sticking together bits of the “kitschy” past, framing them with air quotes as they did so.

But to walk through the white cubist arch of Nardini’s, and find raffia chairs still hanging together from many repairs, then spooning down a Baba Rum sundae that tasted perennial (or at least from the 30s)...

It was like walking into a live simulation of history. But not just any history. The Art Deco experience provides a happy, even naive futurism, where luxury is accessible and non-problematic, as consumer culture kicks into gear.

Though as Dorothy might have said when gazing on the impeccably Art Deco towers of the city of Oz, we’re not in Kansas anymore. And that’s especially when it comes to questions of luxury and consumerism.

I wouldn’t deny that there’s a kind of willed forgetting, a compensatory nostalgia, involved in the defence of Art Deco buildings. As we barrel along the crumbling edge of our environmental precipice, largely taken there by the post-war consumer boom, our hearts seem to beat fondly for a time when none of the externalities caused by consumerism were remotely obvious.

Art Deco is beautiful and elegant, but it’s heedless of the consequences of the desires it began to stoke up. (So possibly my most fun – because ironic – Art Deco experience is to watch an “issue” movie in the Glasgow Film Theatre, brought to the world as the Cosmo in 1939, and opening a few months before the start of the Second World War.)

Yet at least the legacy of Art Deco is still-standing buildings. And these are edifices that can be re-purposed from their original consumerist functions.

Can Art Deco help to inspire what the environmentalist George Monbiot calls “private sufficiency, public luxury” (as opposed to John Kenneth Galbraith’s “private affluence, public squalor”)?

I note that those seeking to keep Edinburgh’s George Cinema out of the residential property developers’ hands have plans for it as a “community facility”, managed and developed under charity status.

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There’s room within those categories, whereby a different kind of “dream palace” might be imagined. One that isn’t just driven by Americanist film fantasies, never mind the addictive wormholes of gambling.

Why not retain the ambition and optimism of the buildings of Art Deco, but reconnect those spirits to the need to be capable for our new era? Together, we need to plan and envision how we build our resilience and adaptiveness – for the shocks of climate worsening, and technological intensifying.

But in what built places? In what locations, exactly, do we seize and occupy our challenging future, deep in our own communities?

A former church can do it. But a glitzy old cinema, a place for unreasonable confidence and big dreaming, might work just as well.