Degree Show 2025

Glasgow’s modern art cultural scene feels stagnant.

With the Glasgow Wood Institute, I wanted to disrupt that pattern. This isn’t just another building to drift through; it demands your attention, urging you to pause, question, and remember. I envision the Wood Institute almost as an architectural art installation—a structure that, while simple in its exterior form, transforms movement into narrative and space into experience. The staircases modulate and slow the pace, while bridges invite reflection.

“Structures are experienced as having a protective and calming quality as well as accommodating human bodily orientation. When landscape structures harmonize with mental structures, we enter deeper dimensions of living in a particular landscape or building.” (Lauri Louekari in Architecture of the Forest)

My design aspires to harmonize these physical and psychological dimensions. The spatial qualities of a forest—its layered depth, verticality, and the ‘aggressive’ interplay of light and shadow—serve as generative principles. This orchestration of slow, deliberate circulation and visual permeability is intended to foster active participation, transforming passive observation into a personalized journey.
Materiality is fundamental to this immersion. Expanses of glazing make the structure visually accessible, dissolving the boundary between the building’s interior and its exterior. The selective use of Corten steel cladding introduces an organic, weathering element, reflecting the forest’s process of transformation.
Is the artificial reproduction of a natural process possible? My design does not seek to mimic nature but to distill its essence through its unpredictability, its tactile depth, its interplay between light, shadow, and texture. The proposed Wood Institute challenges the limitations of purely visual perception, advocating for a holistic, sensory engagement with architectural space. It extends an invitation to the visitor—to traverse, to interrogate, and to experience.