The Gorbals, infamous area of Glasgow once re-known for its violence and deprivation, is being erased and rebuilt for the third time: streets moved and renamed,
pubs eradicated, row after row of new buildings, whole scale "redevelopment", erasing and selecting a saleable version of the past.
Something stirred us when we found out there were plans to remove the old burial ground wall, and replace it with a 2.5m yellow brick wall.
Sited between a public park and a new development, the existing wall was too low to act as a barrier and was to be replaced by a brick wall. We had
paid little attention to it before, but it seemed unnecessary to bulldoze another bit of this place.
In the resulting conversations with developers and architects, they were surprisingly supportive and so it happened: we formed an unlikely alliance
with the development team. We had to fulfil a very limited brief, come up with an effective barrier between new housing and public park.
We turned the brief on its head by changing the notion of a limit that repels to a place that draw people to it, keeping the wall for seating instead
of a barrier. We wanted to subvert the idea of having an impassable limit, of building high fences between public and private, of creating gated
communities.
The "effective barrier" was made by planting native species of trees, shrubs and climbers, held within a trellis made of rebar. It weaves
back and forth along the wall, creating seating areas on each side of the fence, love seats between public and private.
The trellis and the planting are designed for the plants to grow wild within the structure and take it over, perverting the idea of neat limitations
between different design elements, between man-made and nature.
The work was developed in collaboration with Matt Baker
Landscape architect: Loci design
Part of the Gorbals Artworks Programme