An Arts Collective for Glasgow
My thesis is an exploration into an arts school appropriate for our times. The conception of the project is rooted in fiction, and grew from a reading of Alasdair Gray’s Scottish novel, “Lanark”. Written over a period of 27 years, “Lanark” follows the entangled worlds of its two protagonists, Lanark and Duncan Thaw, existing in the contexts of Glasgow and the dystopian city of Unthank. Consequently, the project is situated in Glasgow where Duncan Thaw lived, and attended the Glasgow School of Art. Whilst the GSA is an example of an exemplary piece of architecture, the nature of what an arts school is has changed since the conception of the GSA, I decided to look towards an alternative institutional framework – the point of this being to offer an architecture that is true of the requirements of the teaching and practice of art in a modern context, which then differentiates the new school from the already established GSA. The project inhabits a city block in the ‘Merchant City’, an area in Eastern Glasgow. The city block has an existing Grade B listed warehouse framing the southwestern corner of the site. The scheme involves the adaptive reuse of this building as well as a motivation to include large, flexible working spaces that can be altered and manipulated by students, housed within the large scale new build that completes the city block.