Building Design

Jonathan Woolf's temporary information point-cum-lecture hall for Scotland's Six Cities Design Festival pits OSB against granite in central Aberdeen. The area immediately around Aberdeen harbour is hardly the city's most salubrious. Warehouses, surface car parking and a four-lane bypass have all but erased the medieval street pattern. Home to the odd charity shop and with a sepulchral bar on every corner, these streets are bleakly unpopulated even in the middle of the day. It wasn't always so. Writing in the early 18th century, Daniel Defoe described the fabric that stood here as “very handsome and well built, the houses lofty and high; built not so as to be inconvenient, as in Edinburgh; or low, to be contemptible, as in most other places. But the generality of the citizens' houses are built of stone four- storey high, handsome sash windows, and are very well furnished within, the citizens here being as gay and genteel, and perhaps as rich, as in any city in Scotland.”