The Concrete Deck 



port the height; and the concrete deck with its cargo of ice, the 

 roof with its corrugations or rafters. There is only the sense of 

 distance and therefore, of perspective. It is one of the very few 

 modern forms of architecture that attains a truly Attic simplicity. 



But Aberdeen is not Athens. It is far north of the Mediterran- 

 ean and has a climate to match its latitude. It is cold in Aberdeen 

 and the sun has a slender, though dispersed, beam. And then there 

 is ice on a fishmarket. It is very cold. And the sea there is an oily 

 rainbow, promising only a green harvest of banknotes and often 

 going back on its word. It is hedged in by the concrete fish- 

 market. It is commercialised. Then too, there is granite and con- 

 crete and steel. There is no marble, no sculpture. Everything is 

 reduced to straight lines and the austere perspective between 

 them. It is all very impressive. 



As well as this there are the fish and the dirty ships that bring 

 them in, and the men who roll them on trolleys. A tourist would 

 see all these things immediately, but Jan was too interested in fish 

 to be able to dissociate them from their environment. For him 

 their tails were still flapping and flapping tails did not fit into con- 

 crete. So, since he could not avoid the vista, he unconsciously 

 avoided the fish. 



The ships, however, were easier to see lazing alongside in the 

 greasy water, their masts arranged in an irregular lack of pattern 

 that countered the straight perspective. They varied in size as they 

 varied in newness, in shape as they did in function. There were 

 the low wooden boats that had been mine-sweepers in the early 

 days of the magnetic mine, and that were now halibut liners fresh 

 from the Iceland grounds. There were the little ships, the seine- 

 netters, occasionally visible under the quay. And there were the 

 trawlers, blowsy bobbins of rust as some of them were, lean crates 

 of catching power blacked out by paint, and the odd streamlined 

 ship that looked as though she was good at her job. 



Jan's first thought was that some of them must be useless. A 

 trawler is such a special kind of generalised vessel that practically 

 nothing that floats, except in the designer's mind, could be effici- 



47 



