You
Good afternoon. There is nothing we more fondly cherish than belonging after immortality.
The desire to realise duration, nothing more appugnant or humiliating than decay.
My work, including this great wall, represents imperishable thought.
Sadly, as you can see, the elements, and those who have come after me,
have done their best to obliterate the marks I left on the face of this mighty city.
But the power that the Lord instilled in these structures through my imagination and my hand,
that survives.
Today, I share a little of my story with you, so that you can appreciate perhaps the vision that I followed
in pursuit of perfect truth.
Pieces such as this speak still of the life that I lived and what that life taught me.
Embedded in this structure is the highest power, that of the Almighty.
Of course, the man who commissioned this wall was concerned with far more earthly things.
John Walker, an ambitious coach-provider, had bought the lands lying to the west of here for development.
Please, do take care of what I understand you now call the motor car.
Imagine that these buildings were not here.
Once, there were rolling hills crisscrossed by tumbling streams,
and Walker wanted tears of tenements thrown up to house of families that would surely be flocking in to power Glasgow's expansion.
This was the age of empire, after all, and our city was that empire's puffing, pumping, clanking, grinding engine room.
North Kelvin side was to be promoted as an idyll, a clean, quiet pocket of civility
with an easy reach of the unrelenting grime just across there.
Walker built a bridge here in order to connect his land with the road behind that would be rolling ever westward
in order to provide breathing space for those who could afford to escape the smoke of the city.
Just up there, though, was the city of Glasgow Bank's land. Walker's main rivals in this greedy, boomtown game.
Walker had me build this wall as a barren.
People thinking about living up there would have to pass it in order to reach the amenities of the civilisation below.
And they could hire a cab right here where Walker had an office.
He was an opportunist, a fighter that I gave him his Thorn Quad defences.
But for me, it had to be about more than that.
This wall went up when I was approaching the end of my life.
My lungs were bad from the asthma and bronchitis that had dogged me since childhood.
And I was aware that my time on this earth was running out.
My mind had turned to mortality and I wanted to encapsulate the thinking that I had spent my whole life pursuing.
As you can see, the scaffold here has been erected to allow investigation of my wall.
What is behind it?
A cliff face? Rubble and air? A waterfall?
No. No. Far more than that.
These suggestions of doors and windows are meant to remind you that there are influences that came before.
Hints of other realms. More spiritual dimensions to consider.
Step through these and maybe step into eternity.
My work draws upon the teachings of the ancients, Etruscans, Assyrians, Egyptians, Indians, Greeks.
It was they, above all, who understood aesthetics and carried mental culture to a much higher degree than any other people.
Theirs is a forgotten knowledge.
My interest is in reinterpreting, reinventing, reapplying at never slavishly copying.
I have taken influences from those who came before as a starting point from which to develop my art.
It is my understanding that architectural design consists in moulding and adapting forms and lines into harmonious proportions and combinations by the exercise of the aesthetic faculty.
Forms which do not possess these qualities cannot be regarded as in any wise connected with art, for it is the spirit and not the body that we look to as a means of enlightenment and as a source of enjoyment.
Forgive me.
I come from a long line of believers, ardent followers of a liberal Protestant faith.
One uncle was a covenant, a valiant defender of the faith. Others were ministers and missionaries around the same time as this wall was being built.
My own dear younger brother George followed his hack to Africa, where he turned his architectural skills into building a fine mission hospital.
To my mind, and those of others, our finest work together with survived churches that were built to celebrate worship in Glasgow.
If you survive, most burned down, bombed out, or demolished, but we were true believers and nothing would shake our faith.
That faith was driven by our father, a book who could have accepted promotion in the Balfron mill where he worked, but that would have meant working on the Sabbath and he would not.
Father, passed on when I was seven years of age, the seventeenth of his twenty offspring.
My mother, who taught us all well, brought us youngest here to Glasgow, where Calamity again befell the family.
In the course of two years, and before I had reached my thirteenth birthday, I had lost my sister Jane, no less than three brothers, and then my beloved mother herself.
My brother William, a brilliant scholar, took us all under his wing.
He continued our education, introducing me to the philosophies of the world that would influence my thinking forever.
I did not need to travel to witness for myself the wonders of the world.
No, right here, in Glasgow, I drank from the same deep well of knowledge that had irrigated the mines that built Arraninova, Rome, and Athens.
When I was old enough to work, I joined a lawyer's office. There, I met the architect Robert Foot, who spotted me sketching, realised my potential, and took me on as his apprentice.
It was then my eyes were truly opened to a world of imagery, paintings of scenes from the Old Testament by John Martin and Turner that placed architecture in glorious context, drawings detailing the perfection of the Parthenon, and imaginations of Solomon's temple itself.
Ah, yes. As I explored the craft of the architect, I played with the styles of the greats.
But I wasn't tired of trifling divergence such as arches. To my mind, a bricklayer's contrivance.
To get my stride, I came to realise that only the Ionic Greek style truly captures divine perfection.
My work was never fashionable.
I left the pursuit of the fancy to that metropolitan Mambe-Pambe-Pugin. His Gothic revival monstrosities might have dazzled the masses possessed of more money than since, but to me, they are a mess.
The London Houses of Parliament. An abomination of order.
Do you know, Pugin actually had the nerve to dismiss Greek architecture by saying that they erected their columns like the uprights of Stonehenge?
To my mind, Stonehenge is really more scientifically constructed than York Minster.
I was interested in playing with the might of the horizontal, employing new materials to lend new dimensions, and a rhythmic symmetry that, even if you did not know it, would harmonise your world.
I was always serious about my work, but that did not mean I could not also have fun.
There were signs of playfulness and romance in my work. Just take a look at this viewing point, framing a vista of the beautiful Kelvin River Valley and beyond.
I am very thankful to have known great love in my life, my darling life, Jane, and our twelve beloved children.
But I have also known great sorrow. Five of our babies lost their lives to a terrible epidemic of cholera that swept through the city.
However, I knew that I would meet them again when my time came, and it did, eventually, when I was fifty-seven.
That was just a couple of years after this wall and these fine steps were built, although in those days they were set in fields.
Not a butted by ugly red sandstone as you see today.
So, you see, these ghostly traces, hinting, as they do, at a hidden life for this structure, are no mistake.
My spirit still lingers on this wall.
My legacy to you is carved in every one of these stones, and I am thankful that there are still people with inquiring minds prepared to spend some time contemplating the messiness that they hold.
Good day to you.
Good day to you.
Good day to you.
