Charles Dunn

The collective memory of Glasgow’s industrial heritage is fragmented with a similar fragmentation evident in its urban fabric.

Taking existing patterns of both urban and cognitive fragmentation, the thesis seeks to repackage these in a newly conceived architectural proposition; instead considering industrial infrastructure and the non place as artefacts within the city – the non place becomes a place with the ability to evoke and engage.

The architectural approach takes phenomenology and the poetic image as a starting point to engage with both the intimate and collective memory within the city while also interrogating this in its current form.

The thesis proposes an architecture which works to engage with the distinct tectonics of the landscape, spatial qualities of the River Kelvin and character of those remaining remnants in order to engage with both the intimate and collective poetic image, thus creating a repository of collective memory in the city.

The proposition of a hybrid typology; a museum of industry with a direct air capture plant, seeks to reshape our conception of production and industry and instead present an architectural offering which is to be celebrated and which demonstrates a thriving urban coexistence with productive, functional architecture.

The architectural language is driven by the characterful, honest and often jarring expression of function, materiality and form common within the historical typology and territory – referencing the divergent assemblage of geometry and materiality of both building and landscape.

A locus within the city, the museum sits at the intersection of numerous key routes while exploiting the polarity of a striking vertical landscape, both natural and built. Mindful of this, the architecture references the spatial conditions present along the river; exploring notions of constraint, enclosure, expanse and threshold to construct an interior landscape and tectonic approach which speaks of the environment it finds itself in, punctuating the visitor experience.