Gery O'Brien

From Paisley’s brief blast of civic brutalism, to structural pyrotechnics in the north sea and structural poetry from an Italian master.

I grew up in Paisley at a time when the baby-boomer generation was spilling out of Glasgow into the new towns. There were a lot of interesting architectural typologies emerging, many of them brutalist. Basil Spence’s Glasgow Airport, which opened in 1966 just north of Paisley, was a proper day out for us. The White Cart Viaduct was this incredible flyover more than 20m above the River Cart – at the time, any boat in the world could pass beneath it.

Paisley Civic Centre, designed by Hutchison, Locke and Monk (later HLM Architects) was another building I used to run around as a kid. When the complex opened in 1969, it felt like a symbol of hope. Brutalist buildings can do that. It’s to do with the strength with which they sit in the landscape – you just cannot miss their stature and civic presence.

Those buildings were really aspirational for me, but it was a brief moment in time. The industries that gave places like Paisley their identity were already vanishing. The docks closed months after the White Cart Viaduct opened. New civic buildings and housing can’t do much on their own. Poor Paisley is very down at heel these days, but it still has some amazing architecture.

I keep hoping that one day it gets reinvented as an undiscovered suburb of Glasgow. As a structural engineer, I have to pick a building by Pier Luigi Nervi, because he is still so relevant. He was always trying to make buildings affordable and deliverable, but without sacrificing design quality, and that’s pretty much what I think engineering should be all about.

The beautiful dome of the Palazzetto dello Sport in Rome is just structural form and the minimum amount of material. The shell and ribs were made with ferrocement which, combined with the curving geometry, generated the required stiffness for very little weight. And it was almost entirely precast concrete, which meant they didn’t have to put up any timber formwork, an enormous cost saving at that time.

There was similar ingenuity at play for my final choice – but it comes with a caveat. The Troll A gas platform is 472m high – basically two Heron Towers – and is still the tallest object ever to have been moved across the face of the earth. I remember watching on the news back in 1995 and just being absolutely stunned: this 666,000-tonne structure being towed into place like a boat before being essentially sucked into the seabed on immense vacuum piles.

Of course, 30 years on, such monuments of fossil-fuel extraction are seen more as cautionary tales than structural wonders. But the example of Troll A offers hope too, that human ingenuity can do extraordinary things. Now we’ve got to get on and do them. 

Gerry O’Brien is co-founder of structural engineer Agentia

Photos Architectural Press Archive / RIBA Collections, Le Nouveau Programme; RIBA Collections