Penny Lewis on the City of Glasgow College’s new Riverside Campus by Reiach & Hall and Michael Laird

Words
Penny Lewis
Photos
Keith Hunter, Edmund Sumner

The rise in the popularity of the SNP has changed the character of Scotland’s urban politics. In the immediate past, Glaswegians living in this Labour-controlled city were encouraged to see urban regeneration as the key to a better future. Today’s policy initiatives feel more national than city-based and their focus is on skills, employment and ‘re-industrialisation’ rather than place-making. The city’s celebrated regeneration projects of the 1990s and 2000s have created a patchwork of pockets of development along the Clyde, but economic slowdown means that visitors are never far from a gap site.

In response to high levels of youth unemployment the Scottish government wants employers, schools and colleges to collaborate. The further education sector has undergone several mergers (from 37 to 13 colleges in four years) and a 10 per cent cut in staffing. The government’s attempts to reorganise secondary education to suit the needs of Scottish employers may meet some resistance but there is also an enthusiasm for teaching concrete skills to young Scots. The new City of Glasgow College is an expression of this hankering after a more recognisably productive society.

The merger between Glasgow Metropolitan College, Central College and Glasgow Nautical College has created a new super-college with 40,000 students and 1200 staff. The recently-opened Riverside Campus, the first phase of a £228 million redevelopment of the estate, sits to the south of the city centre where the Gorbals meets the Clyde. Travelling north along the city’s old High Street you find the second phase (close to the Cathedral and Strathclyde University), which will be completed this summer.

The Riverside Campus is made up of three distinct elements linked by a cloistered garden – the main teaching tower, the engineering block and a residential tower – which read as separate elements within a whole, linked by a common approach to structure, facade design and materials. Despite the fact that it is surrounded by scrubland, the new campus has a civic quality that addresses the city in a formal way and creates a modest but meaningful public space which is imprinted with the qualities of the institution.

unlike the majority of PPP projects, no design decision has been left to chance”

The architects, a joint venture between Michael Laird and Reiach & Hall, made a conscious decision that the workshops and teaching spaces would be open or glazed and arranged around shared spaces, so that the very particular and tangible character of the maritime and engineering skills taught can be easily observed by both students and visitors.

The main teaching spaces comprise seven storeys of glazed classrooms centred on an atrium that overlooks the river and the city beyond. In the engineering block, banks of lathes imitate a real ocean liner workshop in which failing ship components can be re-engineered from scratch.

The department was designed as a single volume, with activities organised in a horseshoe around the edge and a central court – like something in a museum – devoted to big engineering plant.  The block’s steel structure is painted orange to reflect the industrial character of the academic programme.

The architects’ decision to separate the functions, articulate them and then bring them together would have worked even without a colonnade. The clarity of the geometry of the built form (and the voids within them) and the elegance of the composition might lead the visitor to imagine that the configuration was simply the pragmatic outcome of the programme, but the decisions have been carefully made. The design team deliberated about the proportions of the tower, the transparency and volume of the main atrium, the treatment of the facades in relation to the proportions of floors, the spacing of openings and the profile of mullions.

The building was procured under a new Public Private Partnership arrangement (NPD) designed by the government’s Scottish Futures Trust. Initially three teams bid for the project, reduced to two at the second stage. The successful team, led by Sir Robert McAlpine with Michael Laird and Reiach & Hall, and the other led by BAM with BDP, worked for a year on the development of the scheme – a reminder of how wasteful the PPP process can be.

Nevertheless, a very creditable outcome has been achieved in this instance. Having looked at many such PPP schools and numerous new higher education buildings, the Riverside Campus feels quite different.

While some materials might be low cost, unlike the majority of PPP projects, no design decision has been left to chance. Some contemporary buildings – especially public ones – are, like a curate’s egg, good in parts, with one or two effective moves and the rest left to its own devices. Reiach & Hall’s work is good all the way through and this collaboration with Michael Laird has the same quality. There is an incredible consistency in concept, planning, massing, proportions, facade details, through to finishes and fittings. We can assume that the level of careful thought and deliberation that went into this project is not truly reflected in the scale of the architect’s fees.

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