Flush with success
A company of award-winning architects is on a mission to use Glasgow’s loos, says Sam Eichblatt
The architects at NORD, Alan Pert and Robin Lee, once created an installation using shopping mall lights, hate patio heaters and have a fondness for Victorian loos. The company’s style has been described as “masculine” and “aggressive” – but their current projects are all about creating happier public spaces for their hometown, Glasgow.
For last year’s Architecture Scotland exhibition, NORD placed giant shopping mall ceiling lights as a floor installation as part of a sub-theme, Non-Place, which celebrated generic, transient everyday places such as airports and waiting rooms, one of Pert’s favoured subjects.
“There’s something about things from everyday life, from schools and waiting rooms,” he says. “They’re an institution as a designed object and still fundamental to everyday experience.”
Conventionally, architecture is politely cordoned off from the more experimental arts. But NORD, now five years old, turns its hand to product, furniture and exhibition design, popping up at the Milan Furniture Fair (in the Designers Block show) and in The Observer’s 2007 Hot List. It also recently won Architect of the Year at the Scottish Design Awards.
Pert, Lee, and a team of environmental engineers and designers, are now planning to reopen six of Glasgow’s 33 disused Victorian public toilets.
“These places were part of the original Victorian city,” says Pert. “They’re well-made, subterranean and have power and water connected. We’re looking at the way people use a city today and thinking, ‘why can’t it be carefully considered, in the same way the Victorian city was crafted?’”
NORD’s plans include turning the centrally located toilets into public showers for commuters who cycle, and attaching a caf
