Eilidh Duffy
(She/Her)
My work is driven by an interest in how architecture can foster connection within a world increasingly shaped by social fragmentation, passive consumption, and environmental neglect. With experience in Edinburgh and Melbourne, I have developed a diverse skillset and built on my understanding of architecture’s role within the challenges of today’s social, cultural, and environmental landscapes. I am interested in how prevailing systems and cultures of ‘uncare’ shape our civic and ecological environments, and in our capacity to either perpetuate or challenge these conditions. Through both studio projects and research, I aim to demonstrate how an attentiveness to the realities and trajectories of place, alongside lessons drawn from time-tested materials, vernacular practices, and collective social models, can inform more inclusive and grounded systems of design. By de-abstracting social and material systems, there is potential to reconnect people with one another and with their environments through design that is socially attuned, legible, and rooted in everyday experience.
Let People Make Glasgow: A Civic Tool for Conviviality
Cities are not abstract compositions of objects; they are shaped daily by the lives, negotiations and improvisations of the people who inhabit them. Glasgow is a city of nuance and resilience, yet in the post-industrial era it is increasingly subject to neoliberal systems that distance citizens from those who commission, design and control the city. Decision-making feels abstracted, participation procedural, and the building and planning process a mystery to those who experience its outputs. The result is an often fragmented urban condition in which engagement – with place and with one another – is somewhat diminished. As Sarah Wigglesworth notes, “Any discipline which denies the everyday will be denied everyday”, underscoring the need for architecture to engage directly with lived reality rather than retreat from it. This is particularly relevant in the context of one of the most pressing challenges of our time: the contested nature of public space and the shaping of collective pysche. The project asks: Who makes Glasgow? Who knows it and where are they? How can planners and non-planners meet?
Framed through Ivan Illich’s concept of Conviviality, the project proposes a new civic building in the centre of Glasgow which will act as a place of discourse for the future planning and making of the city; housing clients such as the GIA and Glasgow Buildings Preservation Trust. In this context, conviviality refers to autonomy realised through interdependence: the capacity for individuals to shape their environment while acting in relation to others. The building acts as a ‘convivial tool’ which returns a sense of autonomy to the people of Glasgow, achieved through legibility of materials, low barrier entry, and a contextual response which acknowledges lived reality. The project therefore seeks to restore civic agency by creating a permeable piece of infrastructure which amplifies everyday urban life and brings together an assemblage of users and values – reinforcing the importance of shared systems that work for the common good.
