'Let Water Flourish' ERYN McQUILLAN

The design for a Museum of the Clyde challenges how Glasgow, a city shaped in many ways by the river, accommodates water in the built environment and the existing dichotomy between wet and dry landscapes.

Contemporary architecture often battles to keep water out, resisting the elements and time through hard, impermeable surfaces and “waterproofing”. In contrast, Scotland’s traditional architecture accepted the process of weathering, utilising porous materials and crafted weathering details.

Traditional detailing, exhibited in the collection of existing buildings retained for permanent museum collections, is used as a lens to reconsider contemporary relationships between water and the built environment.

Water in the form of both river and rainfall is celebrated through the design of the riverfront interventions which includes temporal gallery spaces, a sculpture garden and reinstated saltmarsh landscape. The river links old and new via an excavated canal running below the busy thoroughfare which currently disconnects the city from the Clyde.

The design emphasises the phenomenological experience of water in an urban context, highlighting the power that the weather and climate has on the built environment.