Barras Youth Hub' REECE OLIVER

The Barras Youth Hub provides a much-needed respite and opportunity space for the young people of Calton and the Barras. As part of Glasgow City Council’ s ‘Integrated Children Plan’ , the council-funded scheme will offer accessible space for young residents aged between 10-19 years. The hub offers a variety of learning, leisure and performance environments to cover a wide scope of non-curriculum and creative interests the young user group may have, to encourage alternative modes of learning alongside and after their school life.

The Barras Youth Hub provides an open programme of education and activities designed for the purpose of enhancing the personal and social development of young persons through their voluntary participation.

With the lowest average tariff score in Glasgow, there is a clear issue with the education and learning opportunities being provided in the district. Levels of deprivation and child poverty are significantly higher than average, and youth unemployment is the 2nd highest in Glasgow. In comparison to education performance levels in the city of Glasgow, Calton is ranked the worst, having the lowest Key Stage 4 tariff grades by a significant margin. Of those leaving school aged 16, 73% are found to be heading in a ‘positive’ direction, which is also the lowest percentage across Glasgow.

In the Calton Area Partnership Profile, published by Glasgow City Council, the two issues highlighted as a priority were the aid of Vulnerable People and Youth Unemployment. A 2015 survey from the residents of Calton identified ‘the lack of activities at community facilities’ as the main local issue, as well as services for young people and lack of health and wellbeing centres accessible in the area. There is currently no community outlet in Calton which offers the residents any kind of relief from the labours of the domestic environment. Aligning with the Studio theme of ‘Domesticity and Labour’, my thesis explored the ideas of ‘Leisure’, as defined by the philosopher Joffre Dumazadier.

In relation to Dumazadier’s theory, the Barras Youth Hub therefore sets out to establish all four capacities of leisure for the modern youth generation of Calton, as a response to the crucial need for youth support in the district.

‘Imagine a space where reading, performance, lectures, exhibitions, research and learning happily co-exist under one roof and the door is open to everyone. ’

The Barras Youth Hub provides a respite to the labours of living, offering activities defined by all aspects of Joffre Dumazadier’s 4 forms of leisure.

These educational categories have been defined architecturally by four distinct buildings enclosing a publicly accessible courtyard space.

The office block as a typology consists of two architectural devices, the façade and the core. A typology of spatial, economic and construction efficiency. Where value is derived per rentable m2. Thus, the architecture of the office block is an architecture of the limit, with one goal, to maximise the space within it’s perimeter. The project seeks to explore the office block as a site for the polis, a physical space contained for discussion and connection. For one evening the office block denies its original economic agenda, its space appropriated as a field in which people move through and interact within. The external facade presents a limit from which a landscape of situations to make connections presents itself.

Within the landscape of situations a table is laid for a meal, the table becomes a spatial catalyst for connection, an object-island in the space-sea.

For one evening a group of creative actors from across Glasgow’s cultural sector came together to share the pinnacle of office cuisine, the sandwich banquet, and connect with friends and strangers to open up a dialogue between artists, architects, producers, designers, and students which seldom exists outside of institutions. With no rigid agenda, chance encounters happened, and conversations across the arts and architecture took place as we all searched for connection.

The conversations were refreshingly centred away from architecture, when architecture did enter into the conversation it did so as the background to a story. A kind of ancillary architecture which enabled galleries, studios and cultural spaces to function, but that was always secondary to the activities and services themselves. The conversations wandered through individuals’ practices, current work, setting up galleries and managing studio spaces, prospective shows, influences, and cross-overs between institutions and organisations.

All the while, the facade of the office sat silent, a perimeter wall enclosing a space-sea in which people interacted and in doing so, a network was made visible. The evening served to render for a few hours an ecology surrounding part of the cultural scene in Glasgow, in which architecture plays a supporting, but lesser role to the individuals themselves.

Image: Walk-Up Avenue

Craigmillar, Edinburgh

Completed 2022

Photography: Will Scott

London

Manchester

Glasgow

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