West End

A look at new buildings in Glasgow's west end.

As we are bombarded with the news of dramatic new developments across the world, we hear from Glasgow news of the new Reid building at the School of Art, of the Riverside Museum by Zaha Hadid, and the other various neo-futuristic buildings that spring up on the Clydeside. There is another current in the design of the city that remains unreported.

The west end of Glasgow is awash with 4 storey victorian tenement buildings, all of very slightly different styles and heights, but all with the same basic concept. High ceilings, short roofs, shops at the bottoms, and a single shared stairway between the 8 or so flats within the building.

What we are seeing is a new generation of buildings which are forced to play nicely with the surrounding cityscape, but have different objectives.

This building, on Great Western Road, maintains the roofline of the historic road, while managing to cram in a whole seven stories, where the adjacent buildings manage only four. The glass roof has a cunning way of disappearing into the surrounding (grey) sky. It also highlights the differences in internal roof heights between now and victorian times.

This building, tackier in it's overall makeup, does a similar thing, The smaller floor heights are more apparent, but it is also a more extreme example. Off camera, the blue portion of the building goes down a further two or three levels below the road level, cramming 10 floors onto the normal street scape. It achieves this with both a hidden top level, and by adding an extra floor on the corner face of the building, while connecting to the rest of the street at the regular level.

There is a building in partick with achieves this affect too. The raised corner is actually quite a 'dramatic' effect, which gives us exaggerated, drawing like proportions. Note, the building doesn't actually lose it's top floor away from the corner, it just hides it.

Here is a building which uses 'jumble' to cast our eyes away from the extra floors. Again with the objective of subtly building as much living space of property in the high demand area. We can actually see an extra three floors beyond the conventional roofline.

The new annex to the Glasgow University Gym uses all the familiar hallmarks of these new buildings, but as I was a personal witness to it's construction, I can reveal it's secrets. The typical tenement buildings are made of solid sandstone blocks, but this used the thinnest plates of stone, all hung on a concrete, steel and breeze block frame. Less sincere, but these production methods will be of much lower cost. Will they stand the test of time?

This school building takes the graphic imitation a step beyond the stone tiles. In form it mirrors the classic school building, but with a much funkier modenature.  It has forgone bricks however, for coloured panels, which seems unjustly insincere.

So what of these secret skyscrapers? Initially I was put off by these buildings, seeing them as  cynical and insincere, but when you look at the bigger picture, wether or not developers were forced to consider their surroundings or not, these new buildings are much more considered than modern buildings in neighbourhoods without any historical context to preserve. A wander five meters off the main roads reveals travesties such as this:

So I guess this is an admirable that these new buildings, some more than others, are respecting the ir context. The cramming in of extra floors is, I guess, an unavoidable consequence of the increase in land value within the city. Let's hope we can maintain this considered level of urban density in the future, and not devolve into meaningless plate glass skyscrapers.