City of Glasgow College: City Campus

City of Glasgow College was a new ‘super college’ created from the amalgamation of three Glasgow Colleges. Consisting of both the City and Riverside Campuses, both located in the centre of Glasgow, the City Campus provides 60,000m2 of accommodation over eleven floors. MLA designed and delivered this project in conjunction with Reiach and Hall Architects who acted as a sub-consultant to MLA.

The City Campus provided accommodation for eight of the ten schools within the college including the schools of building, catering and design. All of these had prescribed teaching, demonstration and making facilities that had to be incorporated into a building that provided flexibility for future change and adaptation. It also had to accommodate offices for over 1000 staff.

One of our key design aspirations was to make every square foot of the building; inside and out, a place for teaching and learning. The building is a very complicated proposal due to the essential adjacencies and wide variety of spaces required. One of the key briefing requirements was to create a building that fostered as much interaction between schools as possible. This was achieved through clever solutions the adjacencies and the creation of circulation space that doubled as meeting/ breakout space.

The building facilities also had to be industry standard so that students were best prepared for working life and business partners would have confidence in the college.

Central, flexible spaces that can be used for presentations and gatherings to enhance both learning and social interaction. To be used both formally and informally, these spaces provide a useful extension to the allocated classrooms and cafe spaces.

Spaces for students to refresh, socialise and study are provided out-with the classrooms and workshops. These are not necessarily fully catered cafe spaces but also areas supplied by vending machines with various seating configurations to allow ad-hoc gatherings and conversations.

MLA were responsible for the overall design of the project from inception to completion. The project was won in a competitive NPD bid along with contractor; Sir Robert McAlpine. The winning design took the design to RIBA Stage 3. Having won the bid we were then part of the team that delivered the project in a very fast programme; starting the Stage 4 Design in Feb 2014 and handing the building over in July 2016.

We sub-consulted the services of Interior Design, Landscape Architecture, Fire Engineering and Wayfinding.

The building has been proven to be very successful, attracting more students and staff and also winning many respected design awards.

This project saw design collaboration between MLA and Reiach & Hall with the consortium, led by Sir Robert McAlpine Ltd, including FES, Arup Scotland, Hulley and Kirkwood, Rankin Fraser and Graven Images.