Re-imagining Cumbernauld
DESIGN COMPETITION

An ideas competition to reimagine the town centre

The megastructure of Cumbernauld Town Centre is one of Scotland’s most infamous pieces of architecture. Revered and reviled in equal measure, it represents a period of optimism in the future as part of Post-War New Town planning. The ambitious design commissioned by the Cumbernauld New Town Development Corporation and led by Leslie Hugh Wilson and Geoffrey Copcutt was never fully completed but the built phases included the core civic facilities for the community in a car free, internal world protected from the weather. Copcutt, a former winner of the GIA’s Alexander Thomson Travelling Scholarship, was hailed as ‘Grandiose Magnifico’ by Luigi Nervi on completion of Phase 1, while the Town Centre itself received the Reynolds Memorial Award for community architecture, highlighting its international significance. At the 1964 RIBA Conference in Glasgow the Town Centre was described as the finest example of new townscape and architecture for the community in Britain.

Inspired by Italian hilltop towns, Cumbernauld Town Centre was to be the focus of the new community, occupying its most central, hilltop location, surrounded by the town’s residential neighbourhoods. Within each neighbourhood, amenities were kept to a minimum with provision only for corner shops and meeting rooms to ensure residents depended on the Town Centre for all of their needs.

The key for ensuring this reliance was both compactness of the overall town plan (ensuring no resident had to walk for more than 3/4 hour from their dwellings) but also provision of all of the amenities which their neighbourhood lacked. Contained within the Town Centre were three tiers of underground parking, a supermarket, marketplace, shops, nursery, church, hotel, cinema, nightclub, library and restaurant (to name but a few), as well as town centre housing including rows of penthouses as the crowning structure.

Almost 60 years after attracting international attention when published in a seminal issue of Architectural Design, and despite its DOCOMOMO status, the megastructure now faces demolition.

We can debate the value of the architectural vision but the embodied carbon in the reinforced concrete of its structure is undeniable. We can’t continue to rub out failing structures without a care for the environmental impact. How, then, can we repair, adapt and re-imagine this megastructure to write a new chapter in its development? Can we find a way to fully realise the vision of an innovative civic realm for Cumbernauld that meets the needs of the community, preserves its visionary optimism and provides a new model for dealing with our modernist legacy in a sustainable manner?