I had my doubts when the office decided to work on a master plan competition with the Scottish firm RMJM for the creation of a new academic campus for the University of Strathclyde in Glasgow. My initial impressions were unfounded - by combining RMJM’s considerable experience in the planning of higher educational facilities with our office’s particular approach to the design process, we achieved a master plan solution that hugely exceeded my expectations. Although we did not win the competition, I remain very proud of our submission.

I had never been to Glasgow before we started work on the project. Naively, I imagined the existing campus to be of Neo-Gothic style quadrangles combined with study halls designed by Charles Rennie Mackintosh. It turned out that the University of Strathclyde’s current campus is scattered along Cathedral Street, one of the city’s main thoroughfares, in a collection of turn-of-the-century and uninspired modern buildings. In this context, it was imperative that the master plan must seek to unify the existing buildings to establish a strong sense of institutional identity for the campus.

We only had six weeks to develop the concept. As in our other master planning efforts, we invited the designers from RMJM to our studio in LA for an intensive workshop. Together, we analyzed the site conditions through numerous diagrams and prepared a site-model to help us visualize the scale and scope of the project.

Using the colored building blocks, we identified the different program requirements for the various academic departments. Working together, we created a number of different scenarios for the new campus.

We debated the pros and cons of each emerging scheme (image on left); and combined the best attributes from each scheme to present to Mr. Gehry for his input (image on right).

The preferred scheme was then inserted back into a larger context map, to further refine the massing and reinforce the university's connections to its surrounding neighborhoods. Working at this larger urban scale afforded us better insights into the potential for the university to engage these neighborhoods in pursuit of a better synergy between the campus and the community.

At the end of our workshops, our team documented the final massing blocks both manually and digitally, in preparation for the final submission.

The final master plan was based on the following urban design principles: 1) Re-animate the street-scape along Cathedral Street 2) Reinforce a sense of arrival at the campus’s various entry points 3) Connect the campus to its broader urban context by encouraging pedestrian permeability 4) Create a new urban neighborhood capable of operating a variety of scales 5) Establish a new learning-resource center as beacon for the revitalized campus.

In the spirit of a work in progress, we opted to describe our massing proposals in the presentation model with simple, rectilinear volumes; and to suggest potential concepts of materiality by the following ways: 1) Dark (walnut) wood representing brick or masonry 2) Light (bass) wood representing render or concrete 3) Translucent (acrylic) blocks representing glass 4) Silver (milled aluminum) blocks representing stainless steel or other metals.

Our key aspiration for the university’s new campus was that it would draw its richness from the textures and materials of the existing city without lapsing into pastiche; and forge a coherent architectural expression with contemporary form and ground-breaking technology. Our intervention aimed to re-invent an urban university campus the 21st Century - an approach that promotes flexibility and variety over conformity and homogeneity.