Designs on Glasgow

It's that time of year again, when thousands of people are descending on Edinburgh for the three-week arts festival. Just a short trip westward, its traditional rival, Glasgow, is holding a different festival: the year-long UK City of Architecture and Design, Glasgow 1999.

Billed as the largest celebration of architecture and design ever attempted, the festival includes over 300 events, including exhibitions, tours, films, lecture series and educational workshops. The programme is easier to recommend than define, with exhibitions ranging from retrospectives of individual architects and designers to shows exploring how animals build, the architecture of democracy and the design of arcade games. When it officially ends in December, it will have left a permanent endowment of new buildings and urban spaces.

One of the purposes of the programme is to demonstrate the way design is central to culture as we experience it every day. This is pointed up by exhibitions organised around key themes - sports, food, and the home.

The Food: Design and Culture exhibition is set in the grand Victorian pile of Kelvingrove Museum in the city's West End. A series of case studies examines instances where the work of designers and the consumption of food meet: this includes the architecture and decoration of "Cathedrals of Consumption" (supermarkets) and "Theatres of Seduction" (restaurants). Other exhibits reveal the application of technology to the design of "special" food: to be consumed in space, on aeroplanes, and through intravenous drips. The final section shows the extent to which certain foods are designed as mass-produced consumer commodities and, as the accompanying book says, have "as much claim to be a designed object as a Ford motor car", and we are faced with cases of "novelty" delights such as ketchup-flavoured Thomas the Tank Engine potato snacks, and Heinz Barbie pasta.

The topic of food and design seems inexhaustible, and this, coupled with indigestion-inducing orange and pink graphics makes the show next door a welcome relief.

After the confusion of the Food exhibition, Going Out in Style: Fantasy Coffins from Africa is a gentler, affecting show. No amount of trendy graphics could compete with these amazing objects, which have, since the 1950s, been produced in the coastal area around Accra, Ghana. Each made-to-measure coffin reflects an aspect of the life of the deceased. Some shapes (usually of animals) are only available to those of a certain social standing: for example, antelope-shaped coffins are retained for the highest chiefs, hen-shapes for mothers. Others relate to occupations (a boat for a fisherman, an onion for growers of the crop), and to aspirations: the first "fantasy coffin" was in the shape of an aeroplane, and was made by Kane Kwei for his grandmother, who had always wanted to fly.

As well as such colourful shows, more traditional architectural exhibitions are being held, such as the Modern Masters series, which focuses on the buildings and furniture of key 20th-century architect-designers: Frank Lloyd Wright, Ludwig Mies van der Rohe and Alvar Aalto.

These three iconic figures are depicted on banners over George Square, alongside Charles Rennie Mackintosh, the figure most obviously associated with Glasgow architecture and design. But up there too on a banner is the face of another Glaswegian, Alexander "Greek" Thomson.

The reinstatement of this eminent Victorian as a major architectural figure seems part of the agenda of Glasgow 1999, through a programme of tours, workshops, lecture series and a major retrospective exhibition, Alexander Thomson: The Unknown Genius. Alexander "Greek" Thomson never went to Greece, never even crossed the English Channel (or the Irish Sea presumably). Almost all of his work was built in Glasgow, and he had more impact on the look of the city than anyone else. Commercially successful, he built warehouses, terraces, romantic villas, and churches with fantastically decorated interiors, described as "great Temples of Solomon for modern Presbyterians".

Thomson's turning to ancient Greece (flavoured with Oriental and Egyptian accents) from the mid-1850s was out of step with the most fashionable architecture of the day, which was largely Gothic Revival. Rather than picking over archaeologically-correct details, he found in ancient Greek architecture what for him were fundamental truths and from his study of plates and photographs, he invented his own sublime architectural language.

He was, in his day, radical not only in the style he used, but also in his belief that poverty could be tempered by sensitive city planning. The exhibition includes Thomson's proposal to provide glass roofs for tenement streets: this was to provide ventilated but warm areas for children to play in. While some of his buildings were demolished in the 1950s and 1960s, many remain, and it is wonderful for visitors and Glaswegians alike to be able to step outside the exhibition and discover Thomson's visions in situ.

This handsome-looking show, curated by architectural historian Gavin Stamp, is very carefully plotted, and the subject seems deserving of such care, and of the final caption in the exhibition, which states that Thomson created "extraordinary, resonant buildings, haunting in their strangeness and thrilling in their happy invention".

Downstairs from the Thomson exhibition, Vanity Cases by French designer Philippe Starck is whimsical and intimate. Fifty or so small cases are each balanced on top of a stool, and lit by an angle-poise lamp, creating little islands of light. Inside each case is an object designed by Starck, but scaled down to the size of a toy, and on the lid is a message from the designer giving his thoughts on the specific object. I liked his reasoning for the famous three-legged chair he designed for Cafe Costes in Paris (1984): Starck muses that the cafe had 500 of these chairs, and from this he deduced that if they had the traditional four legs, then this was 2,000 chair legs and so 2,000 possibilities of the waiting staff falling over a leg and breaking their neck. He concludes "Thus the friendly touch of removing one leg makes 500 fewer chances of the waiter tripping - that's a real favour. What was assumed to be mere style, was in fact a functional consideration."

Both the Thomson and Starck exhibitions are being held in what was once the Glasgow Herald building, Charles Rennie Mackintosh's first public commission. It has been radically transformed by local firm Page and Park into The Lighthouse, Scotland's new Centre for Architecture, Design and the City.

In addition to this flagship space, a series of brand new buildings have been created as part of Glasgow 1999. Situated on a brownfield site opposite Glasgow Green, in the neglected East End, the Homes for the Future development consists of seven different housing schemes, totalling 100 new homes, some for rent and some to buy. These are designed by leading local, British and international architectural firms, including Ian Ritchie Architects, designers of the O'Connell Street "spike". Their block of social housing, while interesting looking (it is clad in copper), is unfortunately still unfinished. However, other selected apartments in the scheme are open to the public until the end of October.

As a partnership between private and public bodies, it provides a model for inner-city redevelopment, and is one of the most tangible signs that the organisers of Glasgow 1999 have fulfilled their aim in bringing innovative architecture and design to the whole community.

For further information and a calendar of events, contact the Glasgow 1999 office (00-44-141-287-1999 or visit its website on www.glasgow1999.co.uk