Stage4

Urban Building

GBPT Institute

The core mission of GBPT is to repurpose and repair heritage buildings, ensuring that heritage is accessible to every Glaswegian and remains relevant within Glasgow’s contemporary built environment. By transforming these historic structures into spaces that meet the needs of local communities, GBPT seeks to foster public engagement with heritage and reconnect people with their local history, essentially returning these buildings to the communities they once served.

Beyond restoration, the continued use of Glasgow’s heritage buildings, even with modern functions—helps preserve the city’s collective memory. It allows the stories and legacy of past generations to live on and inspire the future through its architecture.

Architectural Position

Glasgow Building Preservation Trust Institute

The proposed GBPT Institute seeks to extend the public realm inward, creating a new “Glasgow Room” within the city’s continuum of historic spaces. Rooted in the ethos of the Glasgow Building Preservation Trust, the project repurposes heritage architecture to serve contemporary civic life, ensuring Glasgow’s stories and built identity remain alive for future generations.

A key design move introduces a break in the urban grid, connecting Sauchiehall Street and Renfrew Street to form an accessible civic threshold. The spatial journey unfolds as a theatrical procession—transitioning from compression to openness—culminating in a grand multifunctional hall. This central space, constructed in sandstone as a tribute to Glasgow’s architectural fabric, is conceived as a flexible venue that accommodates a variety of uses: from public talks, markets, and exhibitions to moments of quiet rest and reflection.

Rather than over-prescribing the programme, the design leaves the space open to interpretation, empowering the community to shape its purpose. The building acts as a beacon, its structure emerging from the monolithic stone base, echoing the city’s historic landmarks while signaling a vision for the future.

Through this synthesis of preservation and innovation, the GBPT Institute becomes more than a building—it is a living civic room that adapts with the rhythms of the city, celebrating both its heritage and its evolution.

Buildings on the Risk Register within the Grid

Risk Register

Scattered across the grid, various buildings quietly stand on the edge of disappearance, listed on the risk register, yet brimming with untold stories, rich heritage, and the echoes of lives once lived. Beneath their worn façades lie the memories of generations, the character of communities, and the soul of the city itself, waiting patiently to be remembered.

By repurposing these neglected structures and thoughtfully weaving them back into the rhythm of daily life, we do more than preserve stone and timber, we rekindle a dialogue between past and present. These buildings are not relics to be admired from a distance, but living spaces to be reimagined, reinhabited, and re-loved, so that heritage is not only remembered, but lived

Glasgow Rooms

Behind grand façades scattered across Glasgow lie the hidden ‘Glasgow rooms’, spaces of quiet beauty, rich character, and untold stories. These rooms once echoed with life and purpose, their charm known only to those who had reason to enter. Many have faded from memory, lost to time, their doors long closed and their histories quietly slipping away. They are the forgotten layers of the city, unseen, unspoken, yet deeply woven into its architectural soul.

Site, Sequence, and Experience

With the programme arrangement guided by the site’s history, a theatrical procession into the main public space unfolds through the primary Sauchiehall Street entrance. This journey is defined by a sequence of spatial compressions and releases, moving through the existing building. It begins with a moment of compression, offering a glimpse of openness, followed by another constriction, and finally expanding into the grand openness of the main space. A large curtain at the threshold between the existing structure and the new space further transforms the experience, altering the user’s perception with each visit. The spatial and material qualities of the main space also shift with the time of day and the nature of the activity, whether it’s a casual stroll, a public talk, a market, or an evening event.

Spatial Arragment

The existing Building is stripped down and its spaces are restored to an erlier stage. A series of clearance takes to create open space, and then the middle part of the building is selevtively demolited to allow for a new structure.

The new spaces are arranged following the site’s historic use, where public spaces are mainly through the ground floor

REFLECTION

Throughout this project, the core principle of reuse, inspired by GBPT, remained central. The spatial arrangement was deliberately kept flexible to allow for future adaptation, ensuring the building could be repurposed over time. This openness extended to the function of the spaces themselves, intentionally left undefined to invite users to shape their own experiences. In this way, the building remains alive, capable of evolving and offering new interpretations with each use.

The ideas of architectural theatre, procession, and tectonics were instrumental to the design process. The goal was to create something deeply rooted in Glasgow’s identity, something that resonates with the city’s built heritage while also speaking to its future. The interplay between heavy stone construction and lightweight steel became a symbolic gesture, reflecting Glasgow’s industrial past and its ongoing transformation. Employing traditional load-bearing stone, though unconventional today, added a sense of melancholy and memory to the Main Space, evoking not just people, but the collective stories of the city itself.

One of the most rewarding challenges was curating a diverse sequence of spaces, each with its own character and function, into a cohesive whole. From the intimacy of the gallery to the expansiveness of the amphitheatre, to the immersive, subterranean experience of the vault, the project sought to offer a rich architectural journey, where contrasting atmospheres coexist within a unified spatial narrative.

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