Glasgow – City of Design and Industry
This week Amanda and Adrian took the opportunity to take a few days off and explore the fabulous city of Glasgow.
Once renowned for it’s heavy industries, Glasgow has seen a big shift away from shipbuilding and is now more focused on digital technology, finance, service industry and of course tourism.
If you do get to visit the city and love design we can thoroughly recommend Charles Rennie Mackintosh school of art , the Willow Tea Rooms and Kelvingrove Art Gallery.
Of course – when we visit somewhere, anywhere, we’re focusing on cast iron , ventilation and lovely air bricks . Its really interesting in these COVID times how there has been a shift towards ventilation. A few years ago, sealing buildings up was the future – maintaining a draught free environment was crucial to improve energy efficiency. It is indeed sad that we’ve all been forced to rethink our views on “fresh air” but opening windows, allowing air in and recirculating the air in our public indoor spaces has never been so crucial.
Oddly enough we have turned full circle. The Victorians and Edwardian’s where firm fresh air fans, opening windows to let the goodness in and the fresh air into our hospitals and wards to prevent disease and virus building up. Here we are now in 2021 and the government actually runs a campaign on TV getting us to do just that !
Looking round Kelvingrove Art Gallery you cannot help but notice the ventilation, fabulous cast iron grilles quite similar to our own Heritage vents. We are going to have to look at how these spaces are vented in the future and balance the need for our works of art to be stored with the correct humidity and our own “fresh air” we breath whilst visiting museums and galleries.