Red Road Dialectograms

Glasgow Dialectograms explore the use of illustration as record, information as art.  Superficially a pastiche of scientific, anthropological and architectural illustrations, dialectograms comment upon contemporary city spaces, public, private and personal, through creating an extremely detailed schematic of a place that condenses and includes both subjective and objective information into a single piece. They show facts, thoughts and feelings. They use a deliberately loose and organic ‘anti-architectural’ drawing style to describe not just what it is there, but who uses it, what a particular space means to someone, and how relationships between people shape their environment. The term ‘Psycho-Geography’ applies, but put simply, they are made by talking to people, sharing ideas and processing them into visual forms – a diagram, a dialogue, a dialectic, but also a dialect of technical drawing – hence, Dialectogram.

Drawing of the Niven’s Flat

The Nivens from S(i)even was put together with the kind help and assistance of the Niven family, residents of the scheme for 40 years. The Nivens moved out in 2008, and their flat is long gone but, with the aid of Bob Niven, whose memory is somewhat encyclopaedic, I was able to reconstruct his family home as best I could.

Click on the image below to zoom and pan for more detail or you can view a full size drawing here >

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Drawing of the Concierge Station

Drawing of the Concierge Station, 10 Red Road Court when visited in November 2009, July and December 2010. This drawing was made by Mitch Miller, and is an example of one of his ‘dialectograms’, a map or diagram of places and spaces that records ideas, stories and memories. Each drawing is a document of what it depicts, as well as a very unusual image. Mitch will be drawing a number of dialectograms around Red Road over the next few months of tenants, offices and public places around the scheme.

Click on the image below to zoom and pan for more detail or you can view a full size drawing here >

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For more information

If you are a past, or present tenant of Red Road and would be interested in taking part in drawing a ‘dialectogram’ of where you live, then please contact Mitch at [email protected] or 07919 035 037. You can find out more about the work he is doing in Glasgow at http://dialectogram.wordpress.com