GSA Degree Show 2023: School of Architecture

This academic year has seen the Mackintosh School of Architecture, in its home at the Bourdon Building, operating at full capacity once more. The graduating student cohort have addressed the challenges of climate change and biodiversity in their responses, exploring how design can provide solutions to pressing societal issues and focusing on the benefit of the people who inhabit the spaces, both in the communities of Glasgow and Europe.

Students have also had the pleasure of being able to attend a Friday lecture series, organised by Stage 4 students, that explored ‘Re-establishing Identities’. The series highlighted ways practitioners are engaging, collaborating, and co-creating architecture through alternative creative processes. MASS, the School of Architecture's Student Society, also championed student engagement. Throughout the year the team, comprised primarily of Stage 2 and 3 students, organised several successful social events, some of which focused on developing the relationships between students and staff.

Stage 3 students imagined new ways of cohabitation and engaging communities in the form of an Urban Food Exchange (UFEx), the low-energy home of food growth, production, and education. Through re-establishing a function for the Forth and Clyde Canal, an arterial remnant of Glasgow’s industrial past, Stage 3 looked to breathe new life into forgotten infrastructure that celebrates our city’s rich urban fabric and vibrant history.

Rachel Houston’s Vertical Factory emerged from a synthesis of context and community where place meets people. Within a glazed circulatory atrium at the building’s core, Rachel’s vertical assembly line is inspired by the need for food education and transparent food production that promotes individual wellbeing and the building of community. The building itself acts as a beacon of light within the landscape, has a locally sourced and low carbon material palette and is a physical representation of circular economy.

Donnie Reid draws on the history of a place and how industrial vernacular may inform future urban development. His response seeks to provide flexible and interconnected spaces through the freedom of open plans. Terraces create horizontal connection between spaces despite the steeply sloping site and reinterpret the existing landscaping enhancing the link between canal and community. The result is a building that, embedded in its landscape, enhances the relationship between people as well as the urban and rural realms.

Kirsten McCall seeks to connect food with architecture. Her project Slate Six Ways refers to an experience in a Michelin Star restaurant and explores how architecture can be interpreted and experienced. On her ‘material menu’ she gives us slate chips, tiles, slabs, walling, clay, and gabion baskets, all sourced from pre-existing stocks, reusing slate commonly found in Scotland on roofs and as country boundary walls. The food in focus within this dark building is produce that favours shady corners, all grown, prepped, sold, cooked, and eaten on site. Kirsten’s response creates an immersive experience that educates communities about food and architecture.

Anthony Di Gaetano intends to connect the public to food, the arts, and horticultural education in his Urban Sanctuary of Horticulture and Conviviality. An interplay of masonry and timber expresses sacred typologies through ornament and form which create architecture with atmosphere. Sacred spaces are intended to evoke a sense of tranquillity and transcendence in the user that create a sense of connection and meaning between user and their context.

Calum Paterson sought to reimagine the potential of the Forth and Clyde Canal as a means for better and healthier living. His UFEx acts as a multifunctional building typology that aims to revive the canal as a biodiverse, low carbon hub for the transportation of food to the wider city. He explores community exchange and believes the right to a healthy lifestyle should be universal. His building seeks to transform its local context creating a landmark that will foster the re-emergence of the canal as a place to serve your community.

Stage 4 have had a focus on reinvigorating culture, education, and the arts within the community. By focusing on deprived areas of Glasgow the cohort explored how developing a sense of place and bringing people together can be a catalyst for local change and progression.

Nirali Bhatts-Roberts looks to develop multiculturalism in Dennistoun in Glasgow’s East End by creating a multi-faith place of worship. By uniting people of all faiths under one roof the building celebrates people’s similarities whilst still allowing for individual worship in smaller rooms that cater for the needs of each faith. The natural material palette and ventilation create a sense that the building is born of the earth, deepening the spiritual connection people experience within its walls.

Beatrice Rogojan's housing development seeks to attract young families to Dennistoun in a bid to transform it into a vibrant and thriving community. She does so through various housing typologies that are interconnected by a winter garden, and which display vernacular design elements. The Earth Housing project focuses on ecological and economical design aspects through circular materials in the hope that their use is reflected in how occupants live their lives.

The final year students in Stage 5 undertook their own interpretations of 'The Ethical City’, and after a trip to Brussels have produced some breathtaking work. This work, as well as Stage 3 and 4, will be available to view at gsashowcase.net from 4.30pm on 1 June.

Rachel Crooks' project, Quarrying the Ruinscape to Bring the Palais to Justice, draws on Kengo Kuma’s essay on the Anti-Object alongside the concept of ‘Ruin-lust’ as captured in the etchings of Piranesi. Her thesis has the intent of reinvestigating the potential to reignite a global circular economy, by setting up a framework to identify redundant buildings as pre-emptive ruins to be quarried and recirculated. With a focus on the Palais de Justice in Brussels, its spolia would be harnessed to initially construct a network of material workshops to aid material flow, reworking and realignment to circular practices.

Olivia Bissell’s project explores the themes of cultural protection both conceptually and physically in the form of an archive for the city of Brussels. The theme of protection is symbolized in the heavy floating structures encapsulated within a light ethereal skin. Her concept aims to allow for public engagement with the archive, whilst protecting and celebrating the objects and information within. The building itself sits as a beacon within the city of Brussels, nestled in the diverse and rich districts of Molenbeek and Anderlecht, aiming to engage and connect a diverse population through the landscape it creates as well as the space within.

Adam Cowan’s project responds to the slightly claustrophobic density of Brussels’ historic territory, Marollen. Themes of repair, connection and collective resource were identified and used as the architectural thesis, leading to the design of a climate campus – an international hub for institutions and activists, drawing on Brussels’ political significance in Europe. Unpicking the patterns of Marollen – from the urban scale to the city block, down to the block interiors – reveals intimate, organic spaces of surprisingly varied use. He aims to create new civic spaces while maintaining the intrigue of the historic blocks’ streets, thresholds and interiors.

Myia Robinson’s thesis presents itself as a holistic and multicultural masterplan proposal for an underutilised site beside the canal’s edge in an area of Brussels between Molenbeek, Anderlecht and The City of Brussels. Led by a strong interest in organic architecture and from the recognition that there is a general lack of accessible, green, public spaces around Brussels, her thesis proposes an expanse of new urban landscaping and natural pools which reshape the existing canal’s edge and utilises its water source. 

For any reader interested in design, architecture, model making, illustration or indeed the development of Glasgow, please do take the time to visit this year's Degree Show. Having the opportunity to see this amazing body of work in person is not to be missed! 

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The Mackintosh School of Architecture Degree Show runs 2-11 Jun at Fleming House, 134 Renfrew Street, and the Grace and Clark Fyfe Gallery, Bourdon Building, Glasgow. It is also available to view online at gsashowcase.net