Glasgow's Royal Concert Hall and the invention of the post-modern city

Abstract

The Royal Concert Hall, designed by Leslie Martin, occupies a pivotal space in central Glasgow. Its opening in 1990 concluded a thirty-year war over modern and post-modern urban form. At the time, Glasgow's city centre looked very different than three decades earlier, and the changes from a modern to a ‘post-modern’ environment were paradigmatic for the shifts in many de-industrialising cities in Europe and North America. In this context the Royal Concert Hall is an example of how a single building catalysed a wide-ranging paradigm change. This article retraces the design debates on the basis of newspaper articles, interviews and documents, in particular from the City Council and other public agencies. It will show that the struggle that eventually defined the shape and use of Glasgow's largest music venue as well as those of the entire city centre related to Glasgow's post-modern ‘reinvention’. At the same time it shows that the new urban form was not a mandatory consequence of the economic shift but conditioned by several social and cultural specificities.