Neville Rae: A Town For Tomorrow

In the basement of Inverleith House Neville Rae has created a shrine-like tribute to the vision of Brian Millar, Cumbernauld's first and only town artist. Original maquettes are arranged across pristine, bespoke table tops in the centre of a low-lit room. On the walls hang collages, black and white photographs interrupted by brightly coloured forms, vibrant futuristic assemblages enlivening the otherwise drab landscapes of the post-war new town. These are the frustrated dreams of the artist-cum-town-planner.

Rae has chosen to display these remnants of a forgotten era as a means of exploring his fundamental interest in the history and theory of the architecture of the Scottish new towns. A Cumbernauld native, the bright, fantastical sculptures and joyous underpass murals which Miller proposed to lend colour to the commuter town must hold a peculiar poignancy. They remained unrealised, and so Cumbernauld remained an uninterrupted concrete jungle; the hopes and dreams of the town of tomorrow remained to a certain extent unfulfilled.

Rae's method of working is intriguing; his display of the archive of another artist leaving him vulnerable to accusations of appropriation. His role is in fact much more complicated than that, being part curator, part archivist, part restorer, as he interacts with and indeed protects the forgotten dreams of the brave new towns as envisioned by Scotland's post-war architects and designers. His year-long collaboration with Miller has already led to the creation of an underpass mural, and the plan is to continue a programme of reinstatement, realising the archive of forgotten artistic plans and lending colour to the melancholy concrete of Cumbernauld.

This show gives us a glimpse of these plans, and provides a counterpoint to the standard 'What were they thinking?' attitude to post-war architecture. Rae's methodology reveals that visionaries existed, and that these dreich environs were not the whole intention.