Architect, John McAslan CBE: A SCCI Cinéphile Hub 2020 Episode

Yeah, thank you very much. I was brought up in Dunoon, born in Glasgow, brought up in Dunoon. Then I was sent away to boarding school when I was 15, which was a bit of a blessing because without that, God knows what would have happened. Then Edinburgh University, so my formative years were in Dunoon and I still retain an affection for the place. It's a curious town, a famous Victorian seaside resort that lost its charm to cheap package holidays. It's wet and windy, terrible restaurants, terrible hotels. So people went overseas until the Americans came in 1963, the Kennedy effect, setting up a Polaris base in the Holy Loch. Dunoon went from being a sleepy downhill town to the center of the CND movement, with Billy Connolly, the Humblebums, Paul Newman. Suddenly Dunoon became the center of an American community of about 5,000 servicemen and their families. Everyone grumbled about the Americans but when they left, it was like another depression. I absolutely loved Dunoon. I'm still very much a West Scotland boy. I love the wild, windswept, unpopulated beauty of the West Coast. It's also quite tough; the people are robust. Glasgow is known for its 19th-century architecture and the early 20th-century Glasgow Style, by Charles Rennie Mackintosh.

Yeah, my father, Alexander, did it very badly. He was a doctor but thought he was a monkey architect. He designed it very badly oriented, everything leaked. But he had a sense of the aesthetic. I was also aware of art because my closest friend, Crawford, said that Van Gogh used to live in our house. It turned out that Van Gogh's patron, Alexander Reid, lived with Van Gogh and his brother Theo in that house. So that absurd connection was what Dunoon was. As a kid we went to Glasgow a lot – Mackintosh, Alexander Greek Thomson, James Salmon, David Hamilton. Glasgow has a great history of architecture that predates Mackintosh and extends through it.

My mother was a wonderful lady. We had built the Round House in London, a wonderful shed from the 1850s, as an art center. I wanted to do something similar in Dunoon. In September 2008, almost the day the recession began, I found out through my mother that the Burgh Hall – the first theater in Argyll built in the 1870s – was going to be demolished. It was derelict. I went to see it and was taken by the local group trying to save it, run by a guy called Dave McEwen Hill. I bought the building for a pound from the housing association. That was the most expensive pound I've ever spent. At Christmas 2008, my family went to stay with my mother and we had the keys. The main street was derelict, the hall empty. My youngest daughter said, 'Dad, how much did you pay?' I said a pound. She said, 'You were ripped off.' We had a meeting with local people who were suspicious of me. I said I wanted to turn it into a cultural center. Dave suggested we have an open house. We did that in May of the next year, and 3,500 people came. It got the building back in use, and from there we got funding and completed the project.

What I feel very strongly is that smaller communities don't get enough credit for their appetite for culture. They're often fed rubbish. I've always opposed that. In Dunoon, we experimented with exhibitions – the Robert Mapplethorpe exhibition, an Andy Warhol exhibition – and there was a huge thirst for culture. The only reason we got funding from the Scottish government was because we demonstrated that Dunoon could be an exemplar of a small community with a thirst for culture.

I think in part that's what I was meaning. Architects and engineers are not invited to the table. The government gave £1.6 billion to the arts, but if you interrogate that, there isn't much for enhancing venues – better ventilation, front and back of house. It's all about keeping jobs, but you save jobs by getting venues back into operation. We need to innovate: how can venues be improved so people feel safe to come back? You need to get to 50-60% capacity to be economically viable. We came up with a plan for West End theatres. In Dunoon, we got funding to build a retractable seating system for about 80 people in the main hall, with COVID-friendly social distancing.

Homelessness is a real issue. In London, as the city got wealthier, it forced people out and homelessness increased because it's impossible to find affordable accommodation. It's swept under the carpet. The first thing we did was to demonstrate that homeless shelters needed categorization that would make them an attractive proposition for developers to build as part of a private development mix. For example, above a certain number of units, you have to provide up to 40% affordable housing. We said give homeless shelters part of that mix, so a shelter for 40 people equates to five affordable units. That gives it value to a developer. The second thing was to bring redundant buildings back into use as shelter accommodation. We did a competition led by Heather Macy for a homeless shelter project for New Horizons Youth Centre, a charity working with homeless young people. During the pandemic, it's become even worse; charity income is low and homelessness is escalating.

From an early age, I was interested in some form of social initiative. I had a reasonably difficult upbringing, then I experienced the very best education. My family background taught us that part of life's responsibility is to give back. About 20 years ago, my wife and I set up our family trust. I skimmed off profits from the firm and put as much as we could into the trust. It's not about giving money; it's about making things happen. We offer time and engagement with young people on projects that might otherwise not be realized. That's a real thrill.

In Sydney, the real impact is that the project has continued at pace. Construction has continued, and Central Station is about five or six months ahead because they used the time when the station was barely in use. We haven't really considered the long-term impact on design because it's 2024 and we hope to return to normality. Customer-focused design is front and center – space provision, intuitive wayfinding. At King's Cross, we finished eight years ago, but we're now involved in a temporary booking hall to encourage safe movement and resolve bottlenecks that the pandemic highlighted. We need to make safe travel environments so people feel confident to come back. That's the critical reason people in London are unwilling to return to work – long commuting times and feeling unsafe on the crammed underground.

It's not for me to be critical of how these projects are developed, but if you look at King's Cross, it took about 30 years from first conversations. That painfully slow process allowed a mix that otherwise wouldn't have happened – Central St Martin's is not a commercial building. King's Cross is emerging as an authentic piece of city because of the time taken to get it right. The danger of moving too quickly is a Hudson Yards scenario: five huge buildings with no character. The only reason Hudson Yards works is the High Line generated 10 million users. In Sydney, the challenge is to identify priorities: creating proper physical connections, making it a real place, giving it time so it doesn't just become towers. The pandemic may have a positive impact – more time to get it right.

This might sound a little brutal, but I think the National Trust would probably be best as a volunteer organization. Employing thousands of people to protect heritage is not necessarily the right way. In Scotland, a third of young people could be unemployed by Christmas. Why aren't they being trained to repair and renew our national heritage? Spending £300-400 billion on the pandemic with nothing at the end but unemployment is catastrophic. The volunteer sector, like the 100 volunteers at Burgh Hall, shows the power of local involvement. The National Trust should be a volunteer organization, creating employment through heritage projects.

Absolutely. I don't want to touch on a sensitive subject in your homeland, but the whole Aboriginal history and how indigenous populations have been treated is incredibly important to address and work with. In this country, I went to Dollar Academy, founded by a slave owner, John McNabb. It was never talked about when I was at school. But five years ago, the school confronted that history and made it part of the curriculum. They acknowledged his murky history, albeit he paid for poor kids to be educated. You have to confront these issues. The Bristol Colston statue being toppled into the harbour – that needed to happen. It becomes an education tool in the museum.

You've hit a very sensitive point. In the case of Doha, we sought advice on labour conditions on the Msheireb site, where the workforce was 25,000. The contractor, Turner International, was as appropriate as possible in the context of Qatar. The museums we worked on were identified by Sheikha Moza, the wife of the Emir, addressing the issues of slavery. There is a museum of slavery in one of the buildings – a very brave subject for her to champion. We designed it with Ralph Appelbaum. It addresses both the history of Qatar and the wider area. For me, that outcome – building a museum of slavery – confronts those issues head-on.

For Kericho, we were invited after a talk I gave in Dundee about our Malawi schools project. The existing design was scrapped; it was a monumental edifice inappropriate for the place. We started again, built simply with local materials, expressing the local vernacular. Critically, we added an educational and community component to the brief, so it wasn't just a cathedral. That enriched the program and worked better.