Ian Ritchie Architects won an international competition in June 1997 to design innovative social housing on a site in East Glasgow overlooking Glasgow Green.
The client, Thenew Housing Association, are being supported by Scottish Homes and Glasgow UK City of Architecture & Design 1999. The 1999 programme’s aim is to celebrate the best in contemporary architecture and design to improve the quality of living in the city, through a process involving people with the design and development of their city. Ian Ritchie invited Jane Kelly, artist, to work on the project from the beginning.
Visits and design discussions were held with the new tenants to understand their expectations and to explore new ideas.
The client’s aspirations are to develop innovative solutions for the provision of housing on an inner-city site which will provide long term desirable, affordable, environmentally sustainable and attractive homes, and which will be recognised as a world-class urban housing project capable of providing a pattern making vision of city housing for the next century.
A contemporary shelter is one which must provide and adapt to changing financial security for non-owners, and is fundamentally a space which can be economically built and repeatedly customised over many decades in response to changes in family structure, living patterns and mobility. Sound isolation, sunlight, low bills and low maintenance are priorities.
Part of the art of residential design is understanding and balancing the private and the public elements in a manner which is urban. The 'outdoor' room and redefining the living space offer new ways of interpreting this urbanity. It is this new synergy - space(s) inhabitant(s) in tune with our age - where modernism’s segregation of work, play and living accommodation is no longer valid. Housing has to try and catch up with the way most people now live.
The project was completed in December 1999.
2001 The Regeneration of Scotland Supreme Award
2002 Civic Trust Award
(Homes for the Future)