- GSA Stage 3 architecture students unveil speculative designs for a residential music retreat and performance hall on a site beside Loch Lomond for Sistema in Graduate Showcase 2020
- Designs had to be sensitive to the site – a place of natural beauty in the National Park – and the global challenge of climate change and the needs of the proposed client.
- The proposals have been unveiled in Graduate Showcase 2020
Stage 3 architecture students at The Glasgow School of Art have developed innovative and creative responses to a brief for a residential music retreat and performance hall by Loch Lomond for Sistema. Their ideas have been unveiled in Graduate Showcase 2020.
Each year the Stage 3 students are set a particular challenge in which they have to not only consider the needs of a building’s users, but also its situation. This year the students were set the task of designing a residential music retreat and performance hall that would be sited beside Loch Lomond in which they needed to understand and respond to the issues of working in a National Park context. Further, recognising the greatest challenge facing global society – climate change – the students were also asked to optimise the energy efficiency of their building proposals.
In the first semester, having spent time getting to understand the place by master-planning the site, the students then designed the first of the two separate, but thematically linked, buildings – the music retreat. In the second semester the students got together in multifunctional design teams working with students from the disciplines of architecture engineering and quantity surveying to complete the design with the performance hall.
“Architects at their core are placemakers,” says Tilo Einert, Stage 3 Tutor. “The aim for this project was for the students to engage with both the poetics and pragmatics of working in a national park context.”
“As climate change is the greatest global design problem of our time, we wanted to make sure that the students devoted their attention towards optimizing the energy efficiency of their building proposals, so we set the challenge for everyone to take a ‘how low can you go’ approach to the carbon footprint throughout the design process,” he adds.
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| Design for a music retreat and performance space by Olivia Bissell |
“My exists as a true reflection of the needs of its client, Sistema Scotland; a charity endeavouring to bring music and a sense of community to children of all ages and backgrounds,” says Olivia Bissell.
“There is a delicate edge between public and private as the client requires a safe, intimate environment for potentially vulnerable children to retreat to, learning music whilst buried in a new landscape, for any time from a few days to a few weeks’” she adds.
“However, the second arm of this scheme requires a public space, a space that the students feel belongs to them, but also one which ties the project back to the community of Balloch. A performance space becomes the end point of the musical journey the students have embarked on during their time in the musical retreat. The phrase “celebration” is one I feel encapsulates the atmosphere this space should hold as it signifies achievement and camaraderie.”
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| Design for a music retreat and performance space by Rachel Crooks |
“In response to our brief to design a performance space and accommodation for the music charity ‘Sistema Scotland’ in Balloch, I have proposed a linear building which acts as an extension of Balloch Park,” says Rachel Crooks. “This acts to connect the train station and main road with Loch Lomond and ‘The Maid of the Loch’. The positioning allows for performance to spill out of the hall spaces and into the park, harnessing it as a musical destination.”
“My overall concept reflects the linear park with the accommodation placed directly behind the performance hall to allow students to have maximum freedom whilst remaining safe within the building,” she adds. “As a result the building provides a deeper feeling of security as you venture further through its layers into the bedroom spaces. A break out space in the form of a raised external courtyard separates the two buildings and provides a stopping point to reflect upon the surroundings. This also provides private access for students from the accommodation into the performance space.”
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| Pauls Rietums – The House That Was Always There |
“Instead of taking place in sparse acoustic venues, Sistema orchestras have always dwelled in non- specialist settings directly within communities in need, prioritising social action over education tradition,” says Pauls. “I asked how can a venue custom built for Sistema maintain this notion?”
“To address this, I compared Sistema’s methods to those of Levi Strauss’ bricoleur,” he adds. “Sistema defines a venue by holding orchestra recitals in the available settings. By so doing, Sistema itself is shaped by the conditions and accessible resources and at the same time creates new meanings and events within the environment.”
“My response to the brief – The House That Was Always – is not a design of a new building to be placed on the site, but rather an assemblage of the honest and mundane objects of the River Leven. A frame of one of warehouses on the riverbanks is dismantled and moved to a parking lot on the Balloch pier. There, it is furnished with rooms akin to giant bunkbeds and inhabited by the orchestra. A place to celebrate the education programme and the unspectacular River Leven.”
See full details of all these projects and more on the Graduate Showcase 2020 digital platform
The graduating students will be able to develop their profiles on the platform for the next twelve months adding further work as it is produced.
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For further information contact:
Lesley Booth
07799414474
@GSofAMedia