1-75 Gilcomstoun Land

Eleven-storey modern Brutalist multi-storey slab block of flats designed by the Aberdeen City Architects Department under the supervision of Chief Architect George McIntosh Keith, with project architect John Pressley, built 1959–1963 for the Aberdeen Housing Committee. The building contractor was the Aberdeen firm W J Anderson.

The block is oriented on a north-south axis and sits in a densely built inner urban area surrounded by two-storey low-rise modern buildings. It contains 75 maisonette flats arranged in a crossover section, where flats are entered at ground floor at either the bedroom or living area, then cross up and over to the bedroom or living area, providing dual aspect across two levels. A contemporary painted timber sign reading 'Gilcomstoun Land' is mounted above the entrance.

The building has a reinforced concrete frame with smooth-finished precast concrete cladding panels and poured concrete tapered columns. The long slab elevations feature shallow continuous fire-escape balconies. The end elevations have large aggregate granite-faced finish panels, which have been painted over in light grey. A partially open undercroft at ground floor contains building facilities including a laundry room, community room and substations, set back from the building line.

The common areas largely retain their 1960s layout with some original finishes, fixtures, fittings and signage, notably teak boarded ceilings to the entrance lobby. Most windows, doors and fixtures and fittings to the exterior and interior have been replaced.

Gilcomstoun Land was designed and built in a selected redevelopment area as part of a comprehensive building programme initiated by the Aberdeen Housing Committee to rehouse residents into modern, healthy homes throughout the city centre. The Chapel Street/Skene Street development at Gilcomstoun was the first of five inner city housing developments built between 1959 and 1978.

Post-war improvement of Aberdeen city centre was inspired by 'Granite City: A Plan for Aberdeen' (1952) by W Dobson Chapman and Charles F Riley, two of the UK's most highly regarded architects and town planners. Their recommendations, following prevalent 1950s planning thinking, called for selective redevelopment and slum-clearance to provide public health, amenity and convenience. In building terms, they recommended high-density multi-storey blocks in the immediate periphery of the city centre and neighbourhood units in outlying suburban areas such as Kincorth and Kaimhill, with a mix of low- and high-rise housing and small-scale commercial and public amenities including shops and schools. Following contemporary comprehensive redevelopment theory, their preference was for flats as the most appropriate housing type, in contrast to what they saw as monotonous inadvertent urban sprawl.

Town planning was a relatively new discipline and, after the upheaval of the Second World War, was of primary importance in driving housing and health reform forward. After the establishment of the Town and Country Planning Act of 1947, large cities and county councils across the UK embarked on major reorganisation of their urban areas, committed to improving infrastructure and providing housing integrated with well-planned commercial and industrial activity.

Comprehensive housing reform was first introduced after the First World War with the Housing and Town Planning (Addison) Act 1919, designed to provide decent housing for the working class and address inner city slums. This act marked a turn towards state-sponsored housing characterised by planned council schemes, which would dominate housing supply in Scotland and the rest of the UK until the late 1970s. By the end of the Second World War, Scotland and other UK cities were embarking on unprecedented restructuring. In Scotland, debate centred on Glasgow's overcrowding and sub-standard housing, with discussion focused on whether to build within the city boundary or decant the population to new settlements outside the city into new towns. The type of housing to build—cottages, four-in-a-block flats, tenements or high-rises—was also intensely debated.

While national housing policies and funding strategies were drawn up by central government, local authorities decided on the direction they would take to improve their housing stock. An important factor was the availability of land and how this affected housing density. With rising costs of land and building materials, building high-rises became an attractive alternative to low-density housing schemes planned along earlier garden-city principles.

The establishment of new high-rise developments was largely aimed at rehousing people who had previously lived in sub-standard accommodation into modern healthy homes. Aberdeen's main housing problem after 1945, however, was not primarily slums or shortage of land, but rather a long waiting list for houses. Its ambitious reconstruction plans were also not principally related to war damage. Rather than an extensive slum-clearance programme, Aberdeen—identified by government officials as an area of potential economic growth—embarked on a highly ambitious plan of civic enhancement and regeneration. In this context, the inner-city multi-storey slab blocks planned from the late 1950s to the late 1970s were unusual for their high-quality individual design by the city's own architects' department. They were exceptional for the period because they were not like the increasingly ubiquitous factory-made system-built schemes erected in all of Scotland's major urban centres, including Aberdeen.