It’s a scribble in the sky – a confident one. It challenges and reflects the world around it. It curves, swoops, embraces, thrusts. Nothing about this building is straightforward – convex becomes concave; what looks straight, bends; rakes switch to overhangs. Who knows how on earth they built it. It’s playful. It’s mischievous. It’s imperious. It’s a showboat.
It is, of course, the Riverside Transport Museum for Glasgow by one of the most exciting architect’s in the world, Zaha Hadid.
She first commanded public attention in her competition design for the Cardiff Opera House , carrying the sense of breaking waves and harbours. If she had done the Scottish parliament it might have been a piece of architecture.
The banks of the Clyde are punctuated by the gigantic once-upon-a-time ship building sheds, often clothed in corrugated metal. Hadid has taken concept, functionality and material and turned every one of them on its head.
The great rectangular block of the traditional shed is here a contemporary ziggurat in its facade, almost cathedral-like – and from above, its roofs (try Google Earth) are a wide combed ‘Z’, sweeping to the riverbank.
Where the sheds resist the light, the Riverside lets it in and adds teasing glimpses of Clydeside in unexpected, often curved, windows.
The metal exterior skin is here too – but in smooth titanium panels that gleam silk in the sun, darken with the storm sky and replace angles with curves – but creating sturdy sinuous forms.
This is a building you can only know if you pay it the respect of real attention – and when you do it’s an eye-opener.
We suggest approaching it by water – go to Water Row in Govan by subway or drive and park on the unmetalled car park opposite the Govan Cross shopping centre – aim for the far end by the river, which is just beside the Clyde Clipper Govan ferry pontoons.
Crossing the river takes a couple of minutes but this way you see how it is glimpsed from the Govan side (top and above) – a carnivalesque surprise, promising more.
You also get a swathe of changing perspectives on the Riverside and the tall ship, Glenlee, moored outside it, as Fencer glides across its facade and down its east side to the museum pontoons.
As a bonus, you may also see the Loch Lomond seaplane (above) taxi up or down river. It operates a service to Oban in Argyll from the pontoons at the south side of the glass crescent of the Science Museum, with its magical unstayed tower that turns in the wind.
From the landing stage and the paved areas outside the building, looking upriver you see two more iconic Clydeside structures. The ‘Armadillo’ (SECC), seems to lurk, squat to the ground, sizing up the opposition. To the right of it, the slender crescent superstructure of the ‘squinty bridge’ – the Clyde Arc – reaches between Finnieston on the north side and the culture and media business cluster at Pacific Quay, beside the Science Centre.
Inside, Hadid’s Riverside remains playful, with an unsigned, almost hidden, curving stair, lit above the painted-out handrail, inviting exploration and keeping its secrets all the way to the top.
Outside, the museum offers immediate evidence on the need for better thought to be given to the marriage of buildings, their relationship to their immediate exterior and to usability issues. There is a specific incoherence at the Riverside which comes both from the architect and from, presumably, its management. We had initially blamed bureaucrats for the aspect of this which now appears to have come from the architect, saying – demonstrably rightly, in general – that the bureaucratic mindset and design do not mix.
This is not peculiar to Scotland. Manchester has a magnificent little white suspension footbridge, Santiago Calatrava’s Trinity Bridge over the River Irwell – and Manchester City Council carefully provided railed areas with seating at either end – painting rails and benches all white and absorbing the slender and elegant bridge into an indiscriminate wedding cake.
At the Riverside, the architect’s clean sweeping lines and mysteries are universally cluttered withwhgat turns out to have been innumerable and undistinguished square bollard things designed by the architect, tossed around in random and unformed groups and close to the building. They have a certain functionality in that you can sit on them for brief unsupported periods – but dumping them beside the building?
Then, tucked into the curve beside the front entrance (above), is a mess of a skimped mini-rail-train play area for small children and its white box office. Why?
This utterly ruins the planned sweep of the building at its landside entrance. It’s also an insult to the notion of a transport museum. This is a cheap sideshow to placate parents of young children. There should be a magnificent mini tram circuit (one in the eye for Edinburgh) sweeping children around much of the complex. That’s transport.
There’s plenty of room. There’s no need whatsoever to stick all of these excrescenses beside the building. Move them out and away from it.
All of this unthought junk makes the outside of the building an incoherent mess at the moment – and the junk is hopelessly out of scale. The overall effect is as if the building has come ready-made in a box protected by cubes of polystyrene which, somehow, have not yet been taken away.
Where is the logic in commissioning – and creating – a genuinely exciting building and then hurling a heap of expedient corporate tat at its feet?
And the car park is wholly inadequate. Buy and use the area immediately west, on the far side of the River Kelvin. It will be needed for the next transport museum anyway, because this one’s already full.
Below the museum, on the Kelvin, just inside its junction with the Clyde, are more pontoons with a couple of lovely classic boats – one a double ended sailboat and one a long straight-stemmed, motor boat. Behind them on the far side of the Clyde, is Govan Old Church, flagging up another part of a day’s hugely worthwhile exploration. Fencer and her friendly and capable crew will carry you in either direction every twenty minutes.
Photographs: For Argyll
NOTE 1: Entrance to the Riverside Transport Museum is free but there is a fee for entrance to the separately owned tall ship, Glenlee. The cost of the Clyde Clipper Govan ferry is very modest.
NOTE 2: Other articles in our Riverside Transport Museum series are:
Still to come is an article on visiting the Riverside from the other end of the age scale – two young children who are shortly to visit to report for us; and an article on Govan – ripe for exploration, minutes away by the Clyde Clipper Govan ferry, straight from the museum’s pontoon.
Thanks for this piece. Look forward to visiting the place. Wonder if they’ve managed to retain ‘the scent’ which pervaded the original museum.
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I visited this last month after watching its creation with anticipation and excitment, and left with a strong feeling of style over funtion. Oh yes it does look impressive on the banks of the clyde but once inside its flaws are glaringly obvious. There is no order to the exhibits, they look as though they have just been placed randomly, the space between exhibits is woefully inadequate in that if one person was looking at one of them no one else could walk past (most evident in the new modern streets)let alone anyone with a buggy or wheelchair. there is such a waste in vertical space being open to the cealing so you can gaze in awe at the very clever roof, rather than putting in a second floor and spreading the exhibits out. yes they put the cars and model boats up the wall which again is visualy impressive though now means you cant see them directly and have to look at a computer screen (if i want to view exhibits on a computer i can do it from home). This is suposidly a building created specificaly for these exhibits and yet it lacks the space for the exhibits that Kelvinhall had. It is a triumph of the Archetects ego over the collections requirments and it does not encourage the repeat visits from locals with have always made up the majority of visitors to glasow museums. Very Disapointed
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For disapointed: Our next article – due soon – will be on the museum itself.
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Just for information. The landscape and the square blocks otherwise known as seats and tables were designed by Zaha Hadid in conjunction with Gross Max landscape architects. The miniature railway for under 5s is not a permanent feature, but was v popular with an important range of visitors to the museum.
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For Laurence: OMG. They’re still dreadful. But apologies to bureaucrats everywhere.
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From Stephen Fry’s obituary for Steve Jobs: Or the giveaway blunder “triumph of style over substance”. The use of that last phrase, “style over substance” has always been, as Oscar Wilde observed, a marvellous and instant indicator of a fool. For those who perceive a separation between the two have either not lived, thought, read or experienced the world with any degree of insight, imagination or connective intelligence. It may have been Leclerc Buffon who first said “le style c’est l’homme – the style is the man” but it is an observation that anyone with sense had understood centuries before, Only dullards crippled into cretinism by a fear of being thought pretentious could be so dumb as to believe that there is a distinction between design and use, between form and function, between style and substance.
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Fry’s immensely long winded critique of Mr Jobs is worth reading, but are you sure that he’s right in putting ‘style & substance’ in the same bracket as ‘design & use’ and ‘form & function’?
Surely – while the latter two pairs are both inseparable – ‘style & substance’ can all too often be related to ‘fur coat & knickers’, or, to put it another way, flash junk.
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I’ll start this article by stating, I have as yet not visited the new “Transport” museum, but I have seen a lot of the interior on television and the internet. In all honesty, I don’t really rate it now in places I want to go or places I want to take my kids.
Having visited the old Transport Museum a number of times, one of the best things was that you could get so near to some of the exhibits and actually experience things like the trains etc. Thats what made it interesting and the kids really respond to something that is so hands-on.
What annoys me about this building, although it may look fantastic, is that it was custom designed and built to be the new Transport Museum. Did the architects and Glasgow City Council Officials actually ask curators or visitors to the old museum for their ideas or opinions as to what made it a success? I don’t know, but it would appear not or if they did, they certainly didn’t take it on board. Obviously there was no joined up thinking when they came up with the idea of putting the cars on the walls. Tell me, when kids come to the museum how are they going to get a concept of size when the objects are several feet above them on a flippin wall?
I’ve visited museums all over the world and all different kinds. The ones that are successful with children are the ones that are hands-on. Where they can experience what they see. I’m afraid the new Transport Museum has fallen down quite a bit on my list of things to go to now.
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Rest assured, you can still ‘get near to some of the exhibits’ (described by one critic as having been ‘crammed in’ to the building), and I don’t think kids would be disappointed overall, but I look forward to newsroom’s promised review of the museum itself; the ‘wall of cars’ (sponsored by Arnold Clark) does indeed seem very strange, with many of the cars a hell of a lot more than ‘several feet’ out of reach – and utterly incapable of close inspection.
Unfortunately, the ‘wall of cars’ is not the only odd display method. The truly wonderful collection of ship models has been subjected to diplay in glass cases, at ground floor level, that have a frustratingly user-unfriendly touch-screen identification system over to one side and no match for ‘old fashioned’ labelling. In the upper floor gallery many more ship models ar hung from a continuos conveyor such that the line nearest to close inspection is travelling backwards – and opens the display designers (not Zaha Hadid) to ridicule. If you visit the museum in anything other than calm, dry weather be prepared for the walk across the wide open spaces that surround the building – but at least you don’t have to drive there as there’s a direct bus link from George Square.
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Crazy-she-bat suggests a lack of consultation. So right – we live in an age of hedonistic local authorities convinced they know better – from the Edinburgh Trams to our own CHORD fiasco. The problem is compounded by these people never conceiving the possibility of being wrong.
The Riverside building is indeed an architctural icon but a rotten Transport Museum. The exhibits were far better where they were – put then back and convert the new building into an opera house or something more appropriate (but not yet more Council Offices please).
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‘Hedonistic local authorities convinced they know better’ – The CHORD project does seem to have been very badly handled, as has the Edinburgh tram saga, but both started with good intentions, and whereas CHORD might end up in tears, the Edinburgh trams will eventually prove to be a valuable asset (and be extended)in the same way that comparable projects all over Europe have proved their worth. It’s just that in Edinburgh the project management has been an utter disaster.
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Well I for one quite liked it as did my weans (though they preferred The People’s Palace). I think they liked the attempt to put many of the items in a social and historical context. It’s not perfect (few things are) but I think it is a good addition to Glasgow’s Museums.
L.Croft’s post made me smile!
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Park at Helensburgh Long Stay and get the train in. Or if you don’t fancy Helensburgh, there’s now a decent sized park and ride at Dalreoch. Or of course you could get the bus.
I haven’t been to the Museum yet either, but these articles have piqued my interest.
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