ASCENSION

This project explores the opportunities created by a lack of connection within the existing fabric of Dundas Street in Glasgow. Moreover, the plaza is located at a pivotal moment in the city centre as commuters and visitors often travel by train to Glasgow Queen Street Station, making this plaza their first experience of the city. 

Having faced numerous developments across centuries, the outcome is a disjointed plaza that produces a myriad of architectural vernaculars and volumes. The approach taken seeks to enhance the existing environment through architectonic interventions; proposing a new language that is threaded coherently through the site and provides functions otherwise lacking. Therefore, this project acts as a threshold between the station and city, ultimately as an intermediary moment for various modes of activity and diversion such as seating, shelter and social opportunities. 

Ascension aspires to avoid demolition, enhancing rather than erasing, using parasitic forms that utilise the existing surfaces thereby exploring the vertical plane as much as the horizontal. In experimenting with forms that ascend to roof height, new walkways improve the overall connectivity between adjacent streets and flow through the site to aid in establishing a new and visually striking vernacular that provokes a psychological response for the user to explore and escape into. These peculiar forms that inject colour into the otherwise monotone palate of Glasgow act as a visual form of escape, coupled with a circulatory route that ascends towards the sky, conceptualise a new and sustainable approach to the enhancement of an urban void.