July 24 2024

Rapid progress at the University of Glasgow's new western campus will be capped off by a whole-life net zero-carbon building designed to address the climate and biodiversity crises.

The Keystone Building is a learning, teaching and research space, that will occupy the heart of the former Western Infirmary site, now established as an important new public space and extension of campus life.

Touted as more than just a building the development is heralded as the start of a new era of interdisciplinary collaboration. Planning documents prepared by HOK show how Keystone will anchor a network of new public routes from Byres Road to Kelvingrove Park at St Mungo Square, a new hub of university life.

Maintaining the height and form factor of the Advanced Research Centre (ARC) Keystone will intersect the public realm with a collonade with large format glazing inviting views within in an active ground floor extends to New Moy Street.

Detailing the relationship between both buildings HOK wrote: "Due to their locations facing each other on St Mungo Square, at the heart of the new part of the University Campus, the ARC and the Keystone Building will be in architectural dialogue with each other.

"The concept for the ARC consisted of a rational block of laboratories, wrapped in a ribbon of activity. The Keystone building contains the same fundamental DNA in its constituent elements - rational blocks tailored to their program and a ribbon of activity. As a result, the two share a deep similarity at a fundamental organisational level.

"The Parti, or concept diagram, of the Keystone Building however evolves this common architectural genetics by inverting the ribbon into the glazed streets of the building, resulting in a unique form reflective of but inescapably unique to the ARC."

The bulk of the building will be sliced through by two 'glazed lanes' that serve to improve circulation while punching natural light deep into the plan. This leaves three wings of teaching, laboratory and research space sheathed by a Passivhaus performance 'architectural veil' that facilitates natural ventilation. 

13 Comments

#1 Posted by Roddy_ on 24 Jul 2024 at 13:51 PM

More of the same alas.

More of the same coarse detailing and over-wrought forms, more of the same lack of active frontage (glazed and occupied doesn't really count as can be seen from the ARC building), more of the same sterile -could be anywhere- design.

What is abundantly clear is that 7N's parameter plan was simply not enough to create a beautiful and vibrant set of urban spaces and buildings. I think the 3rd image says it all really - among the myriad other issues - service spaces at ground level really ought to have been proscribed.

I think for anyone that had expected the University to be an inspirational patron - as it has been in the past- this is just about as disappointing as it gets.

Joyless.

#2 Posted by Hairy Hipster on 25 Jul 2024 at 11:53 AM

Behave - that looks cracking.

I'm not sure what you mean when you say 'could be anywhere design.' Can you give examples of any building that style is unique to a particular city? A lazy criticism.

#3 Posted by Fat Bloke on Tour on 25 Jul 2024 at 13:29 PM

If you want active frontage then go to the Fort.

Building itself has merit but the whole development is a huge wasted opportunity that shouts Warwick / suburban office park and not Gilmorehill for the 21st century.

The Western Infirmary had more presence and character than its replacement.

#4 Posted by Roddy_ on 25 Jul 2024 at 13:48 PM

@#2
You are clearly not acquainted with the idea of Local Distinctiveness - a key component of the National Planning Framework and a well understood concept/ theory in the domain of architectural design.

If you don't understand that as a concept, you clearly won't understand what I meant by 'could be anywhere design'. I would invite you to research the concept and you might be forearmed with a more cogent and coherent response to my criticism.

Why not start with the typologies of Glasgow Tenement or Glasgow Square, Edinburgh Tenement, London Terrace or perhaps the Canal Houses of Amsterdam. Once those are embedded move on to Hausmann's Paris - it'll blow your mind. :)

#5 Posted by Mark on 26 Jul 2024 at 02:51 AM

It’s great to the university invest. But can’t help but think the smaller universities like GCU are always left out of the opportunities for investment in their campus.

GCU’s been a driver for home student recruitment and widening participation as-well leading up the ranks in learning teaching and research. I’d hope it’d be worth expanding their city centre campus and really innovating in terms of the changing landscape of Cowcaddens and making state of the art facilities designed around the students.

It’s always the bigger universities that get to have all the new facilities and investment opportunities. You’d think we’d have moved on from this kind of attitude and afford equal opportunity to those with great growth potential as GCU has demonstrated in recent years

#6 Posted by Sven on 26 Jul 2024 at 09:57 AM

I visited yesterday. There is some good landscaping but it is mostly a wind tunnel and feels like every other soulless business park. The entry to Dumbarton Road is poor. The space between buildings is too wide to remove the feeling of cosiness. I don’t think I met a single local there, which is a problem. International soulless architecture serving international transient students is not a way to expand a university with history. It could be a sub-prime university in Basingstoke, Paisley or a business park.

#7 Posted by Student on 26 Jul 2024 at 10:50 AM

#6 perhaps reserve judgement until you visit during term-time.

#8 Posted by Gandalf the Grey on 26 Jul 2024 at 13:33 PM

Oh, well, if it's a whole-life net zero-carbon building designed to address the climate and biodiversity crises, that's OK then! You could have fooled me because it looks more like a suboptimal business park of a quality which would be unacceptable round the M25, economical buildings in Sunday clothes, with the dismal leftover external spaces crudely landscaped. I doubt that this is going to attract many foreign students, but I guess they can still use pictures of the Gilbert Scott buildings in the prospectus. Oxford and Cambridge do this kind of thing very much better and other Glasgow institutions have achieved far greater quality of environment from a far more modest starting point. Forget the claptrap. This is a once-in-a-century opportunity squandered.

#9 Posted by Jake Janobs on 26 Jul 2024 at 14:11 PM

The buildings are acceptable but not great, given use and budget constraints (which must partly be from doing the whole lot in a one-er), but I agree with #6 that whenever I've been there (including during term time) the public space in the middle has been cold, windswept, hard, monotonous, featureless and unpopulated. Hopefully once the vacant plots are filled, the landscaping has matured and we experience a season approximating summer, it will become more animated and bustling, and the interfaces with the rest of the area will improve, but it does feel like they've missed a trick. I can't see students hanging out there much and using those bench structures except on the sunniest of days (if you can remember those).

#10 Posted by Jake Janobs on 26 Jul 2024 at 14:24 PM

The buildings are acceptable but not great, given use and budget constraints (which must partly be from doing the whole lot in a one-er), but I agree with #6 that whenever I've been there (including during term time) the public space in the middle has been cold, windswept, hard, monotonous, featureless and unpopulated. Hopefully once the vacant plots are filled, the landscaping has matured and we experience a season approximating summer, it will become more animated and bustling, and the interfaces with the rest of the area will improve, but it does feel like they've missed a trick. I can't see students hanging out there much and using those bench structures except on the sunniest of days (if you can remember those).

#11 Posted by Lovely on 26 Jul 2024 at 14:34 PM

It's good to see that they are being honest and showing their new corporatist outlook on everything in their anodyne and faceless architecture too.

Meantime just for the record there is absolutely no such thing as 'a whole-life net zero-carbon building' and the idea that such a glassy monster like this will solve the 'climate and biodiversity crises' in a city with loads of empty buildings is beyond daft.

#12 Posted by Gandalf the Grey on 27 Jul 2024 at 08:38 AM

Once the current overplayed fashion for the Chipperfield Neofascist idiom for anything academic, civic or public whatever is past, this dull collection of boxes will be seen by everyone for what it really is.

#13 Posted by Bemused_Citizen on 31 Jul 2024 at 08:07 AM

The Centre of Gravity deserves to be so much better. Imagine, as an architect, getting a brief to create a new building that will be called the 'Centre of Gravity' ... and coming up with this. Yikes.

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