New Building for Glasgow School of Art
Glasgow, Scotland: September 9, 2009 – Steven Holl Architects, in collaboration with Glasgow-
based JM Architects, has won the international design competition for the new building of the
Glasgow School of Art (GSA) on the site opposite Charles Rennie Mackintosh’s Masterwork. The
new building will significantly enhance the teaching, learning and research facilities available to
GSA students and staff and the access, which the public will have to their work. The competition
to find an architect-led team that will ultimately create the building design, was organized by GSA.
The Selection Committee, chaired by Barcelona-based architect David MacKay, selected Steven
Holl Architects with JM Architects by unanimous vote.
According to a statement from the Glasgow School of Art:
“The Selection Committee considered that Steven Holl Architects’ work showed a poetic use of
light and their submission demonstrated a singular creative vision, scale of ambition, profound
clarity and a respectful rivalry for the Mackintosh Building. The Committee believed that Holl’s
approach to the craft of building, his understanding of the opportunities of new technology and an
enjoyment of the challenges of sustainable design, promised a great step forward in the
development of architecture in an urban setting.”
Steven Holl Architects strategy was inspired by Mackintosh’s inventive manipulation of the
building section for a tremendous variety of light. The plan for the new Glasgow School of Art
draws upon the push-pull typology of light of the Mackintosh building but moves forward using a
new language of different light. The building is composed of studio volumes shaped by light and
connected by a “circuit of connection”, which encourages the creative contact central to the
workings of the school.
The street level will open up connecting school and city. The envisioned building skin is 100%
recycled glass with an intelligent solar cavity harvesting heat in winter and cooling in summer.
Steven Holl said, “100 years after completion, Mackintosh’s building continues to inspire as a
work of architecture and a place to make art. The invention of an original architectural language
is as fresh today as it was then. Its intensity of detail, light and material calls for the highest
aspirations of a phenomenologically-driven architecture of our time. We feel the urgency of
recovering the integral action of “thinking and making” in the use of the highest new technologies
available. We imagine the new Glasgow School of Art to be a celebration of Knowledge: the
phenomenological and experiential joys of perception supercharged by the techniques of
tomorrow.”
Steven Holl Architects has realized cultural, civic, academic and residential projects both in the United
States and internationally. Steven Holl Architects (SHA) is a 49 person architecture and urban design office
founded in 1976, and working globally as one office from two locations; New York City and Beijing. Steven
Holl leads the office with partners Chris McVoy (New York) and Li Hu (Beijing). Most recently completed is
the Linked Hybrid mixed-use complex (Beijing, China), third on TIME magazine’s list of Architectural Marvels
of 2007; the Knut Hamsun Center (Hamarøy, Norway), and the Herning Center of the Arts (Herning,
Denmark). Currently in construction are the Nanjing Museum of Art and Architecture (Nanjing, China), the
Vanke Center (Shenzhen, China), Beirut Marina (Beirut, Lebanon), Cité de l’Océan et du Surf with Solange
Fabião (Biarritz, France), and the large mixed-use complex in Chengdu, China: the Sliced Porosity Block. In
2007 Steven Holl Architects opened the highly lauded Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art (Kansas City, Missouri).
Recently the office has won a number of international design competitions including Sail Hybrid (Knokke-
Heist, Belgium), Meander (Helsinki, Finland), the LM Harbor Gateway (Copenhagen, Denmark) and the new
Center for Creative and Performing Arts for Princeton University (Princeton, New Jersey). Steven Holl is a
tenured Professor at Columbia University's Graduate School of Architecture and Planning.