City of Glasgow College: Riverside Campus

The City of Glasgow College - New Riverside Nautical and Engineering Campus is a multi-award winning development located next to the River Clyde in Glasgow City Centre comprising of three buildings that surround a shared cloistered garden. The campus includes a new education building (which provides teaching/ learning accommodation over 7 floors arranged around a central atrium), an engineering building and a halls of residence building.

MLA formed a consortium with Reaich and Hall Architects on this project and provided the full architectural service from inception to completion, including briefing and stakeholder management.

It is an Engineering Building that makes the most of ‘blended learning’ across the variety of engineering and nautical courses taught on the campus. The building has transformed the old pedagogies in the College, enabling new ways of learning and cross-fertilisation of courses.

A large element of ‘maker’ spaces have been created where students and staff work together to observe and create pieces of engineering.

A clear requirement of the brief was to create a flexible design that will allow the college to reconfigure space with minimal cost and disruption. This is achieved using a holistic approach to the design of the structure, M+E and architectural elements; Our approach to the architectural design was one of reduction and refinement.

This stripped back aesthetic is expressed though all of the different college environments and this will allow the college to create a variety of accommodation types with great ease, as a teaching area can easily become an office or vice versa by simply relocating, installing or removing internal partitions. Robust materials have been selected which will allow for adjustment and reuse.

Innovative construction techniques were used to speed construction and prefabrication in particular was used wherever possible. For example, unitised curtain walling and large format precast concrete cladding was selected to construct the external envelope and prefabricated “plug and play” toilet pods were specified, which arrived on site fully constructed

The importance for the building to weather and age elegantly has strongly influenced the palette and how the materials are expressed and detailed to form the external envelope.

Wherever possible, it has been the aim of the design team to reduce the requirements for ongoing building maintenance and cleaning through considered design proposals.