Vertical Glasgow is a photographic project that looks at the history and the present of Tower blocks within the city.
Tower blocks in Glasgow have played a huge part in the development of the city. In the 50’s and 60’s then was a large population increase and a shortage of housing, this combination led to the development of tower blocks. A cost-effective method for large quantities of housing to be made and easily reproduced.
In this time the city was totally transformed and tower blocks sprung up in neighbourhoods across the city and at one stage had over 230 blocks, making it the tallest city in Europe with more people living above 8 stories than any other in the continent.
At their core tower blocks are a tool for social good, with poorer communities given the opportunity to live in the centre of a city near essential amenities and with the potential of a vibrant community forming around the block. However, through decades of lack of planning and a change in priorities by local governments these blocks are now being demolished and redeveloped. All social housing within the city is owned by private companies where their goals are ultimately to make money as opposed to their primary focus being on the residents and preserving a community.
Following on from the Grenfell disaster, the tower block debate was reopened and forced every tower block within the country to re-evaluate the safety of the blocks and make changes to improve the blocks. Due to this the future of many blocks has been put into question, with owners being faced with extensive repairs and improvements or to demolish and rebuild. But what are the driving factors in making this decision? Is it to preserve or a community? or to maximise profits?
I have spent my life coming back and forth to Glasgow visiting family as my Mum is from paisley, the tower blocks have always been a symbol of Glasgow for me. More people living in a tower block than the people that lived in my dad’s home village. That idea was and still is hard for me to grasp. It has always given me questions about how people are supposed to live and the goals of housing and how these issues can affect the lives of people. I would visit at least once a year as a kid but even to me the changes and the speed that they happened were so obvious. It is this interest and fascination that prompted me to research the tower blocks and create this project.
At the core of the project is a photographic series of images heavily inspired by the works of Andreas Gursky and Bernd and Hila Becher. I wanted a way to capture the block in its entirety with little distortion and bias to any aspect of the image. Creating an image that acts as a portrait of a building, allowing the viewer to focus on the details on every level of the building and allowing you to understand the scale and numbers of people that live within a tower block. Often described as 'villages in the sky', with them allowing hundreds of people to live in the same place, a vertical village.
I developed a system using a drone with a camera to capture large scale flat scans of the building. I would take images intermittently as I flew up the building and then later combined them into a larger image. This creates an image that gives the viewer the same perspective from the bottom and the top. You get to view the building from a perspective that is normally not possible from traditional photography or even in person. It allows the buildings to be preserved and is the most accurate way of viewing even after the buildings have been demolished, creating an archival record of every inch of the building.
As part of the project, I have also produced a series of maps that looks at all of the demolished tower blocks within the city. By using various online sources I've compiled a list of all the buildings and their locations and marked them on a historical map of Glasgow. This allows the viewer to visualise the impact tower blocks once had on the city. The scale and the number of blocks that used to define the Glasgow skyline and played such a key role in the lives of people in the city.