Power in the landscape: Regenerating the Scottish Highlands after the Second World War
- Submitting institution
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Glasgow School of Art
- Unit of assessment
- 32 - Art and Design: History, Practice and Theory
- Output identifier
- 5886
- Type
- C - Chapter in book
- DOI
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- Book title
- The Culture of Nature in the History of Design
- Publisher
- Routledge
- ISBN
- 9781138601918
- Open access status
- Out of scope for open access requirements
- Month of publication
- -
- Year of publication
- 2019
- URL
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- Supplementary information
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- Request cross-referral to
- -
- Output has been delayed by COVID-19
- No
- COVID-19 affected output statement
- -
- Forensic science
- No
- Criminology
- No
- Interdisciplinary
- No
- Number of additional authors
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0
- Research group(s)
-
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- Proposed double-weighted
- No
- Reserve for an output with double weighting
- No
- Additional information
- This chapter from The Culture of Nature in the History of Design (Fallan ed., 2019), derives from material presented at the 2017 Design History Society Conference on the Anthropocene: ‘Making and Unmaking the Environment.’ As Fallan puts it: ‘design has a pertinent yet precarious position in environmental discourse’ but the interconnections between design history and environmental history are underexamined. This chapter develops those interconnections through a re-examination of the design decisions in the development of massive hydro-electric power schemes in the Scottish Highlands after 1945; a region that was newly designated as a national amenity of outstanding natural beauty, having already been maintained for at least a century as an ‘artificial wilderness’ due to existing interests of large estates. The immediate impetus for the schemes was post-war reconstruction of a depopulated area in tension with conservation arguments. This chapter asks how established accounts of the landscape and built heritage of this region - including the hydro-electric schemes - are challenged and modified by recent debates and approaches derived from environmental history and activism. Archival research including architects’ personal records, local newspaper reports, planning records, Nature Conservancy reports, craft councils and political party leaflets provided testimony of the conflicting voices seeking to control these significant engineering interventions into natural, human and geomorphological landscapes, and somehow, to also preserve or enhance a timeless natural landscape as a ‘cultural museum.’ The overall argument was that the design solution arrived at for these schemes - favouring scenic beauty and the appearance of tradition - functioned as a covert recognition and reinforcement of unequal power structures in the land. The research drew together design and landscape history, theories of national identity in relation to landscape representation, the social and political history of Scotland, recent environmental history and science and technology studies.
- Author contribution statement
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- Non-English
- No
- English abstract
- -
