A crowd of residents look up at the tiny figure high above them. A panoramic view of the city, almost entirely rebuilt in the last 50 years, reaches all around.
A multi-screen film and video installation, High Wire was filmed at the Red Road housing scheme in North Glasgow in 2007. When it was built in the early 1960s, Red Road was the highest social housing in Europe, a triumph of the city planners' dreams to rebuild the city. Into the void between the planners' concrete dreams, another kind of dreamer, the French high-wire artist Didier Pasquette, steps out - at first gracefully, then hesitantly, and then he stops...
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High Wire didn't have to happen in Glasgow. As soon as the decision was taken to site it at the Red Road flats, however, the work took on a particular character unique to its location. The slab blocks built in the mid-sixties are an iconic part of the city's history, representing both the best and the worst of urban planning.
Post-1945 Glasgow saw attempts by the city council to tackle its inner-city slums, recognised as the worst in Europe. A Glasgow Corporation Engineer, Robert Bruce, laid out a vision for the regeneration of the city in two documents the First Planning Report and the Clyde Valley Regional Plan. The projected changes were radical, even by the standards of post-war planners. A surviving film of an architectural model of the new city centre shows that almost all the Victorian buildings would have been demolished...
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