Exhibition: Building Scotland 1945-1985

A photographic exhibition exploring Scotland's recent past through its twentieth century architecture is free to view throughout August at Glasgow City Heritage Trust. There are some unlikely additions to the roster which have been selected for the important points they make about Scotland's history between 1945 and 1985. Typographical House, Glasgow's derelict 1950s office-block at Clyde Street is one of the more surprising entries which is highlighted for its rarity as a small-scale office building, and its social history links, once serving as home to the Graphical, Paper and Media Union. Other structures such as Sillitto House in Edinburgh and the M8 Bailleston Interchange pull off the same feat; the commonplace propelling us to renewed appreciation of the local built environment and to reflect on what the architecture says about the people who inhabit it.

Docomomo Scotland, active campaigners for the conservation of Scotland's twentieth century architecture produced the exhibition for Glasgow City Heritage Trust. Docomomo Scotland is the local branch of Docomomo International, the committee for the documentation and conservation of buildings designed in the Modern Movement. Their organisation's website is well worth a gander for links to news items about the event and to related websites including this self-made Google map of 60 key Scottish monuments. From the website, you can also access this year's annual edition of MoMo World Scotland, an excellent, newsy introduction to modernist architecture in Scotland.

Building Scotland: 1945-1985 runs until September 2nd at the Heritage Trust's offices in Bell Street - directions here. Some of the examples of the structures on display can be browsed via the BBC's news website here.

Frances McCourt: Carbeth Re-exhibited

Carbeth, the small township of huts is recapturing the public imagination after 90 years of sustainable living in the woods north of Milngavie. This is amply demonstrated by this week's BBC News story and the revival of Frances McCourt's exhibition of photographs, inspired by the character of the place.

Ayrshire-born McCourt first exhibited photographs of the huts at Street Level Photoworks in Autumn 2010. This time round, her work goes on show at the Lillie Art Gallery, near Milngavie railway station. See directions here. As well as serving as a beautifully serene collection, works like the examples pictured here should interest anyone following the 'Thousand Huts' campaign: a move to up the ante on sustainable rural development in Scotland. Since the Carbeth hutters' success in raising the funds to buy the land, 'hutting' appears to be gathering momentum with much to be said for the power of community to bring about green initiatives.

Frances McCourt's photograph series can be seen until 16 August at the Lillie Art Gallery. For more detail on the history of Carbeth and for links to the community's groups, read our previous blog post.

Plans to Demolish B-Listed Building For Commonwealth Development Plans

A 1907 board school designed by architects Thomson & Turnbull is under threat of demolition following plans submitted by Glasgow's Celtic Football Club to replace it with an expanded superstore. The club want to knock down the disused London Road Primary School as part of their plan to regenerate the area around the ground in time for the 2014 Commonwealth Games. Included in the plans is the formation of a landscaped avenue paved with inscribed stones which would run from Dalmarnock Station past several key venues towards the football stadium. Due to financial budgets and time constraints, it seems unlikely the club's full plans could be realised before the start of the games, however the avenue is being heralded as a necessary development to make the area more attractive to the influx of visitors expected next year.

London Road Primary is understood to be Glasgow's sole remaining B-listed school and is a fine example of English Baroque with carved ornamental features and Venetian and circular windows in the pedimented end bays. Historic Scotland are bound to object to the proposed plans, however as the school has been unoccupied for several years, the case could well proceed on the basis of the building being structurally unsound. Councillors are in support of the club's plans, perceiving the school as an unnecessary eyesore making it even likelier that the building will eventually be razed. Indeed, it seems that the financial advantages to be gained from redevelopment in the East End will inevitably outweigh the costs of conserving some of its architecture.

Department of Architecture Celebration Event at Strathclyde University

The University of Strathclyde Architecture Department are hosting a joint event with the new Glasgow Society, to celebrate its purpose-built building at 131 Rottenrow and to showcase the works of GSA graduate and sculptor, Charles Anderson. The evening event on 26th March will be split into two parts; the first focused on Charles Anderson's successful career as a professional mural painter and sculptor, and the second on the construction of the architecture school by Fielden and Associates in 1965-66.

Charles Anderson studied Drawing & Painting at the School of Art under Donald Donaldson and Mary Armour, graduating with the Diploma in 1959. The many examples of his sculptural works to be found in Scotland include the Glasgow Charing Cross wall mural and concrete wall sculpture at the entrance to the Strathclyde Architecture School Building the event is being held. The second half of the evening will be led by Professor Frank A. Walker, an academic in the Strathclyde department and John C. Cunningham, another successful GSA graduate who was chief-architect on the Architecture Department project.

The event is bound to be of interest for all who have an interest in 1960's Scottish art and architecture, not least given its apt location in the iconic Strathclyde Architecture School Building.

Anyone interested in attending would be wise to book a place in advance at this link:
https://www.eventbrite.com/event/5787048217?ref=emobiem

SOA and EDA - One and the Same

Event-Driven Architecture (EDA) has received a lot of coverage lately. Gartner’s analysts spent a lot of time last year talking about it and promoting their ideas on how it relates to the Enterprise Architecture. A lot of companies, lead primarily by the financial institutions, have taken the plunge into the EDA. Alerts offered by virtually every bank are a good example of this. However, I do not feel that the relationship between EDA and SOA has been fully explored yet.

EDA is based on the concepts of events, publishers, and subscribers. At the most basic level, the idea behind EDA is that publishers publish events and subscribers consume them. Of course, some logic and rules must be applied to properly route the events. Through this mechanism, systems become connected in a loosely coupled fashion. This makes the integrations a lot easier and eliminates the need for each publisher and subscriber to know the details of how to communicate with each other.

Sounds familiar? Absolutely! Change the terms events, publishers, and subscribers to services, providers, and consumers respectively and the paragraph above reads like an explanation of SOA. Why is this, you would ask? Because EDA is nothing more than an asynchronous version of SOA. The major difference between the two is that services are typically implemented as real time calls while events are published and consumed asynchronously. All the other concepts are virtually the same.

While the architectural approaches and design patterns for EDA are slightly different from SOA, the fundamental concepts are still the same. A central event handling infrastructure that knows how to receive, route, and transform the messages is required. It should be viewed as practically the same thing as the Enterprise Service Bus (ESB). In fact, generically, I would call it the Enterprise Eventing Bus (EEB). As events are published, they need to be translated into a common representation, so that a consistent set of rules and operations can be applied to them. A canonical model is the best solution to achieve this goal. Additionally, the same façade pattern should be used as described in the SOA Façade Pattern post to abstract the publishers from knowing and being tied directly to the Enterprise Canonical Model. Note that the logical EDA architecture presented below is very similar to the one introduced in the SOA Façade Pattern.

Events, just like services, should be registered and be discoverable via a central Registry mechanism. Subscribers looking to consume specific events should be able to discover them at design time and receive them from EEB at the run-time. Design of the events, their publication and consumption should also follow the same standards and patterns as service design. All of the related documentation should be stored in the same centralized repository. Governance mechanisms applied to events should also be very similar to those applied to services. EDA does not require establishing a completely new governance model but can effectively leverage existing SOA governance practices.

The bottom line is that EDA and SOA are virtually the same architectural approaches. If you think about EDA as an asynchronous version of SOA, everything else will fall in place.