Glasgow School of Arts / Steven Holl

Steven Holl Architects, in collaboration with Glasgow-based JM Architects, was awarded first prize in the international design competition for the Glasgow School of Art Competition.  The selection committee, chaired by Barcelona-based architect David MacKay, sought to select an architect-led team, not a design.  The committee unanimously chose Steven Holl Architects because Holl’s work demonstrated “a poetic use of light and their submission demonstrated a singular creative vision, scale of ambition, profound clarity and a respectful rivalry for the Mackintosh Building.”

More about Holl’s project after the break.

The project will sit opposite the iconic Charles Rennie Mackintosh’s building and “will significantly enhance the teaching, learning and research facilities available to GSA students and staff and the access which the public will have to their work.”

Inspired by Mackintosh’s “inventive manipulation of the building section for a tremendous variety of light”, Holl’s design consists of studio volumes shaped by light and connected by a “circuit of connection” to encourage creative interaction among the students.  The envisioned building skin is also 100% recycled glass with an intelligent solar cavity harvesting heat in winter and cooling in summer.

Steven Holl said, “100 years after completion, Mackintosh’s building continues to inspire as a work of architecture and a place to make art….We feel the urgency of recovering the integral action of “thinking and making” in the use of the highest new technologies available. We imagine the new Glasgow School of Art to be a celebration of Knowledge: the phenomenological and experiential joys of perception supercharged by the techniques of tomorrow.”

All images courtesy of Steven Holl Architects.