The city of Glasgow is both blessed and cursed. It is blessed as one of the few cities around the world that appears to have acquired a distinctive identity through the work of one man. Glasgow's man is the architect Charles Rennie Mackintosh; in Barcelona, it's Antoni GaudI; in Ljubljana, Joze Plecnik. Glasgow is cursed for the same reason: it cannot forget Mackintosh.
But Barcelona is no longer the city only of GaudI. Now, in likewise fashion, although on a more modest scale, Glasgow is striving to impress a new urban identity as the host city of the UK Year of Architecture and Design for 1999.
The idea that an identity - for a city, or region, or country - can be physically constructed troubles many people in Britain. Manchester is now learning, but in England generally the invention of tradition through architecture is not a conscious process: the best of the millennium projects here will be accidental statements of identity, not calculated ones, though perhaps none the worse for that. The very idea is regarded with suspicion in Wales, where they threw away millions of pounds in 21st-century tourist revenues by rejecting Zaha Hadid's design for the Cardiff Bay Opera House. Northern Ireland never gets a chance. It is understood only in Scotland.
From Ossian to Walter Scott, Scotland's record of invented tradition is a distinguished one. In Glasgow now, the need for more of the same is accentuated by the loss of industry and the ever-present rivalry with Edinburgh, the seat of the new Scottish Parliament.
Mackintosh is still honoured there. His first major work, the Lighthouse, the former Herald newspaper offices, is being refurbished as shops and a design centre. But there is a serious attempt to offset the Mackintosh effect with the rehabilitation of another past hero. The Lighthouse will start its new life with an exhibition of the work of Glasgow's other architectural son, the inspired Victorian classicist Alexander "Greek" Thomson, Scotland's Schinkel.
But Edinburgh sets the pace in new architecture. It is not just the future parliament. The city already has one new monument to civic nationalism. Gordon Benson and Alan Forsyth's Museum of Scotland opened on St Andrew's Day last year. Turning around a huge stone tower cut with a giant cross, the building is full of ideas drawn from medieval Scottish castles as much as from Le Corbusier and Aalto. Slits and slots occur at intervals across the building's smooth sandstone and white concrete walls so that they look like a Stockhausen score. Inside, the design pulls off the considerable trick of making every floor seem as if it is bathed in overhead daylight. Above them all, a roof terrace offers one of the most spectacular views in Britain, sea and rock and architecture. The museum offers proof, if it were needed - and increasingly, it seems that it is - that you don't have to bus in a celebrity architect from halfway round the world in order to produce a thing of beauty in a British city.
Less spectacular but part of the same trend of civic aggrandisement through culture is the conversion by Terry Farrell - a national, not a local, architect - of the grand Dean Orphan Hospital into the Dean Gallery extension of the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art, which opened in March. Farrell is in restrained mood here, allowing colour to make the most of the interiors, and introducing skylights and glazed floor panels to allow the light to penetrate. The overall feel is reminiscent of Sir John Soane's house, although the contents are very different - some of the best surrealist art to be found anywhere.
Glass is a prominent feature in Enric Miralles' Scottish Parliament, too, though here as much for metaphorical reasons as for functional ones. Acres of "transparency" have become de rigueur for contemporary parliament architecture. But there is much more to the Catalan architect's defiant assemblage of cantilevered masses and sharp fragments; time will tell whether its parts are wedges coming together or shards being blown apart.
Ironically, Miralles' design can presently be seen to best effect in Glasgow, where a model of it is the star turn at an exhibition, "The Architecture of Democracy". The show traces the classical and nationalistic schools of assembly buildings around the world. Among modern designs, an interesting rediscovery is the plan by Robin Spence and Robin Webster for British MPs' offices, a 1970s project to which the scheme by Michael Hopkins presently under construction bears a striking similarity. In Spence and Webster's scheme, a kind of Pompidou-on-Thames, parliamentary debates would have been projected on screens in a public courtyard. Naive as that now seems, it was surely more progressive than the present plan with its private central court.
Glasgow's year will be punctuated by such exhibitions. But the "UK City of Architecture and Design" also aims to make a lasting contribution to the urban fabric and to commercial life.
Local, national and international architects come together, as they should these days, on Glasgow Green. Here the first phase of a £10 million project will see a hundred homes squeezed around a tiny triangular garden, an early exemplar of the government's crusade for brownfield development. It's not perfect. The pot-pourri of materials and construction techniques employed by five project teams have clearly caused headaches for the site manager and may do the same for some passers-by. Elsewhere around the city, derelict ground will be transformed into five small urban parks. The project consciously follows a successful scheme in Barcelona, using teams of artists, architects and landscape gardeners to bring new character to neglected neighbourhoods.
The most potent initiative in the month that Kvaerner put the last Clyde shipyard on notice could be one to regenerate manufacturing industry. Glasgow, like Scotland as a whole, has a distinct tradition and fine schools of design. But whereas architects, graphic designers and textile designers often remain in Scotland (proudly so, to judge by the names of their companies: EH6, Timorous Beasties and so on), there has been little work for graduating product designers north of the border; north, for that matter, of the Watford Gap.
Hence the Glasgow Collection, a too-precious title to describe a scheme to fund the development of 45 new products from concept to manufacturability. By getting designers to take a fresh look at manufacturing processes and suggest new routes to market, there is the chance to bring an unlikely new lease of life to sectors of Glasgow industry. The most startling product so far must be the stainless steel bath created by the local design consultancy Submarine. The first surprise is that it costs £10,000; the second that a dozen have been sold. The tub is made by Associated Metals, a company in Glasgow's East End more accustomed to making indestructible lavatories for prisons. It reaches its buyers through high-style design magazines and exhibitions, media quite alien to the manufacturer.
Another local firm of designers, called One Foot Taller, helped Glasgow retailer Nicehouse create a plastic chair. The challenge was to find a fabrication process that avoided the substantial capital investment needed for injection moulding. Having found a more affordable technique - the rotational moulding employed by an Irvine maker of traffic cones - the designers' task was then to create a chair of sufficient elegance that customers would never guess its lowly origins. A third product is a lampshade made of the paper pulp used for egg boxes. The achievement in each case, according to Bruce Wood, the collection's director, on secondment from the Glasgow School of Art, is "to take the materials into an area of desirability".
What's gone is the grit and sweat of the old Glasgow. The smoke and clamour of a newspaper office become the pastel walls of a design centre. Eggbox lampshades and baths for grimy plutocrats take the place of shipbuilding. Before you know it, they'll be playing croquet at Ibrox Park.
