opment Department, as it continued to be until last year. I fear that the peace is an uneasy one: pockets of resistance are evident enough; in some places gunlaw still prevails. Do we really want total victory? Are the ideas of the Prince of Wales embodied in the IHBC? Is a High Street dominated by Past Times, Crabtree & Evelyn, Farrow & Ball Paint shops and Laura Ashley our ideal world? Conservation ideas usually piggy-back on other movements - the push for housing in the post-war period which lasted until the 1970s and the promise of economic regeneration through tourism which dominated the 1980s and 1990s are familiar examples, while the new bandwagons of social inclusion or social justice, and sustainability are rumbling past with conservation officers sitting on the roof like passengers on an Indian train. But there was a moment when we appeared to win. Architecture was a shameful profession - towerblock denial was rife, books on Le Corbusier were available only under the counter. Carbuncles were out - well-loved friends were in. Architecture in Britain was nearly dead, for it is the inevitability of destruction that gives urgency and purpose to both procreation and creation. If we succeed in halting destruction, why create, ifwe can banish death, why procreate? A new challenge, or wind if you like, is ruffling the waters and coming from a different direction. It is coming in the form of a sophisticated, intellectually inspired backlash. As bands and younger architects alike turn back to the 1960s for inspiration, buildings are becoming more assertively modern, less deferential to their neighbours. The urban-design, rather than conservation, principles of context are under attack. Pastiche is probably dead, or at least dormant for the time being. Would the Art Lover's House be built now, or is the Lighthouse, Scotland's architecture centre by Page and Park, a better pointer to the future? Large-scale demolition of listed buildings is not unthinkable to these young turks, and no major listed building is immune to the suggestion that it could be improved by a whimsical or witty intervention. At the former Highland Tolbooth Church, designed by Gillespie Graham with Pugin, as a hall for the General Assembly of the Church of Scotland and acquired by the Edinburgh Festival Society, Ben Tindall has dramatically signalled the change of use from church to Festival offices and performance space renamed The Hub - Pugin on acid as it has been termed. Outside, to underline the point, Ben wished to have angels springing out of the lucarnes of the Tower, on the hour or half hour, like a cuckoo clock, which would trumpet clouds of dry ice into the sky. By comparison the Nikki de St Phalle mosaic on the Gallery of Modern Art here in Glasgow is a triumphantly understated response to the building's architecture. The Hub is, of course, a lottery project. The lottery has been good for modern architecture: the Museum of Scotland by Benson & Forsyth, the LightCONTEXT 67 SEPTEMBER 2000 house, the conversion of the A-listed Dean Orphanage by Terry Farrell to house the National Galleries of Scotland's surrealist and Paolozzi collection, Dundee Arts Centre by Richard Murphy are all spectacular successes. But there have been less happy ideas; for instance Richard Murphy's scheme to float a glass terrace like a ring of Saturn around the dome of the Usher Hall in Edinburgh. And the idea is spreading to more avidly commercial practices; for instance, the Holmes Partnership's scheme for the A-listed 110 St Vincent Street, by James Miller, in homage to Jean Nouvel's Lyon Opera House, which neatly bypasses the stage where the building is devastated by fire. The right course in not always clear-cut. How many of us are happy with the Herodic role of strangling all babies at birth? Isn't it better to strive for a future where we engage in a dialogue between the past and the future in seeking a new architecture for a new Scotland, as David Page has termed it, or get down and mud-wrestle as Richard Murphy has described the same process? Lottery schemes can be big wins and their potential, so far as listed buildings are concerned, is for good and ill. Kelvingrove Art Gallery, Glasgow, largely unaltered since it was built, is of course a recent winner. Here groovy things will be done with the basement, an enormous and under-used space, but the inevitable desire for restaurant space will push out conservatories onto the front facing the park. And the days of huge grants for such projects are clearly numbered. The lottery is also a major source of funding for conventional conservation work and it has made a considerable contribution to the repair of those churches prepared to accept its money - but again the signals are that money is tight and future grants to churches will be smaller and fewer. The ruinous 19th-century churches in our city centres seem likely to remain as much a feature of the townscape as the ruined churches of the reformation. And what is to be done with the hospitals? The cost to the NHS of listing hospital buildings seems likely to become a political hot potato, centred on the 25 acres of soon-to-be-redundant listed buildings at the Edinburgh Royal Infirmary. Is there more likely to be a consensus on the people-based issue - the health service - or on the heritage issue? Will our ability to enact our own legislation covering the heritage allow us to move ahead of or even keep up with our southern neighbours? We were after all the first to set up a Royal Commission on Ancient and Historic Monuments, the first to introduce listing of historic buildings. Our thirty year rule allowing the automatic continuous addition of modern buildings to the list is a pragmatic solution to a difficult issue. Our Inventory of Designed Landscapes and Parks and Gardens includes archaeological, scenic and nature conservation values, not included in the English register. Or are we to slip behind, unable to enthuse Ministers or MSPs pressured by their constituents to resist continuing let alone increased legislative burdens? Townhead Blockairn Church in Glasgow, largely demolished as unsafe in 1999. We have ruinous churches in our city centres which seem likely to remain as much a feature of the townscape as the ruined churches of the Reformation. Photograph by Ranald Macinnes. This is an edited version of Richard Emerson 's talk at the !HBC Annual Scool in Glasgow. 17
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