Anderston Centre (Glasgow)

 office building, strip mall, apartment building, parking

Residential and commercial complex designed by the Richard Seifert Company and Partnership. This vast megastructure was the flagship development of the new Anderston - the old having been largely wiped out by slum clearances and the construction of the M8. Today, the complex is a sad shadow of its former self, with only the underground car park, the three council tower blocks and some of the office space remaining in use. The rest has lain derelict, decaying and unloved for decades, and has a creepy, post-apocalyptic feel about it. Despite its monumental failure as a working building, the Anderston Centre still has its admirers who feel it should be held up as a great piece of Brutalist architecture from the late 1960s.....

It all began much more optimistically - built between 1967 and 1973, the intention was that the commercial activity of the re-developed Anderston would be replaced by one huge building - it encompassed offices, high-rise housing, shops, car parking and a bus station. The original Radio Clyde studios were within the complex as well until 1983, and it even had its own dedicated fire station in the early days!

However, Glasgow Corporation were unable to attract the required private investment needed to realise Seifert's scheme its entirety - so what was built was a very watered down version of it, and this was what fatally undermined the complex from day one.

The complex was to be the anchor of a regenerated Anderston, the problem was that much of the replacement housing developments it was supposed to serve remained on the drawing board, and it was too far west to attract footfall from the city centre. One by one, the shops closed and then the bus station became increasingly redundant and eventually closed (along with the rest of the shops) in 1993, leaving the deserted concrete shell a haven for vandals and prostitutes, earning the complex a even more dire reputation from which it never recovered.

Since the 1990s, the megastructure has undergone near continuous redevelopment (including a rename to "Cadogan Square") to bring it back into respectability - the bus station, the leisure complex and most of the shopping precinct has long since been demolished to make way for new office blocks. The three tower blocks were originally condemned in 2002, but were later saved in favour of refurbishment. More ambitious plans exist to raze the remains of the shopping precinct and replace it with an open space between the three towers, but these have yet to come to fruition.

There is a great Flickr page which captures the atmosphere of the place perfectly here:
www.flickr.com/photos/wsmbm/sets/72157625961570597/with...