Ailsa Hutton
(She/Her)
Across both Stage 4 projects, my work explored how architecture can create stronger relationships between people, materiality, and the urban environment. Through the Urban Strategy and Individual Housing project in Tradeston, Glasgow, I became particularly interested in how housing can repair fragmented post-industrial urban conditions and encourage community within dense city environments. My projects focused on themes of “life between buildings,” thresholds, and the balance between public and private space, investigating how architecture can create opportunities for interaction without compromising privacy. Inspired by the Glasgow tenement, I reinterpreted traditional housing typologies to encourage social connection through inward-facing active spaces, shared courtyards, balconies, and layered circulation routes.
Alongside this social focus, I developed a strong interest in materiality and sustainable construction, particularly through the use of brick, glulam, CLT timber, and explorations into bio-based materials such as mycelium. My work consistently explored how materials can communicate atmosphere, memory, and identity while responding to environmental concerns and the future of sustainable urban living.
A significant part of my design process was communicated through physical and spatial experimentation, particularly through model making. Throughout both projects I used massing models, material studies, and detailed spatial models to test relationships between density, circulation, thresholds, and human scale.
Model making became an important design tool that allowed me to explore atmosphere, light, and spatial experience in a tactile and iterative way, helping translate conceptual ideas about community and materiality into architectural form. Combined with hand drawing, collage, and diagramming, these models demonstrated my interest in architecture as both a social and physical practice, where thoughtful spatial composition and material expression work together to shape meaningful environments for everyday life.
Planting a Seed of Community
This housing project explores how architecture can repair the fragmented social and urban conditions of post-industrial Glasgow, particularly within the disconnected area of Tradeston. At its core, the project is driven by the idea of “planting a seed” of community within an area dominated by derelict land, car infrastructure, and isolated developments.
The proposal critiques the way contemporary urban development has become placeless and disposable, contrasting Glasgow’s historic sandstone identity and industrial permanence with the temporary, fragmented nature of modern construction. Through extensive urban analysis, the project identifies boundaries created by roads, railways, rivers, and zoning as key contributors to social isolation within the city. In response, the housing strategy focuses on reconnecting people through pedestrian movement, shared courtyards, and layered thresholds between public and private space.
The Glasgow tenement becomes a central inspiration, viewed as a resilient housing typology that successfully fostered urban community in contrast to failed tower developments. Rather than replicating the tenement directly, the proposal reinterprets it for contemporary living by turning active spaces such as kitchens and living rooms inward toward communal courtyards, encouraging visual connection and interaction between residents. Balconies, mews streets, and semi-private circulation spaces create opportunities for casual encounters while still respecting privacy and individual choice. Materiality also plays an important narrative role, combining brick facades that reference Tradeston’s industrial past with glulam and CLT timber structures that represent a more sustainable urban future.
The project carefully explores the contrast between the solid, protective street facade and the open, social courtyard facade, reinforcing the transition from the noisy, isolating city into a calmer shared residential environment. Influenced by ideas from Jan Gehl and Jane Jacobs, the scheme ultimately argues that architecture cannot force community, but it can create the spatial conditions for community to emerge naturally over time. The proposal therefore becomes less about designing iconic buildings and more about designing relationships, encounters, and meaningful life between buildings.
The People’s Framework – Urban Building
This project began with an observation of disconnection within the contemporary city, where despite constant digital connectivity, meaningful social interaction in places like Glasgow’s city centre has diminished. The site at Mitchell Street, currently occupied by a car park, became a catalyst for challenging this condition, highlighting how urban priorities have historically favoured vehicles over people. Through this, the project set out to reclaim space for civic use and reintroduce opportunities for connection, discussion, and shared ownership within the city.
The development of The People’s Framework reflects a shift from designing fixed programmes to creating an adaptable architectural system. Early iterations revealed that overly prescriptive layouts limited the building’s potential, leading to a more resolved approach based on loose-fit principles, modular structure, and flexible spatial arrangements. The use of a glulam structural frame and movable partitions supports this idea, allowing the building to evolve over time in response to its users rather than remaining static. This adaptability reinforces the project’s ambition to create a civic space that is inclusive, accessible, and responsive to change.
A key learning throughout the process was the importance of methodology. By incorporating playful, physical modelling techniques inspired by participatory practices, the design process itself began to reflect the project’s ethos of collaboration and experimentation. This approach allowed for a deeper understanding of scale, massing, and spatial relationships, particularly in addressing challenges such as daylighting and the integration of the building within its dense urban context.
The final proposal demonstrates how architecture can act as a framework rather than a finished object, supporting a wide range of uses, encouraging participation, and fostering a sense of ownership among its users. By prioritising pedestrian movement, activating the street edge, and introducing new public routes and spaces, the project contributes to a broader urban strategy that reconnects fragmented parts of the city.
Ultimately, this project suggests that adaptable architecture has the potential to address social disconnection by creating environments that invite engagement, negotiation, and collective use. While the design resolves many spatial and conceptual challenges, it also acknowledges that the success of such a building depends on its continued occupation and reinterpretation over time. In this sense, The People’s Framework is not a completed solution, but an ongoing process, one that relies on the people of Glasgow to define its purpose, shape its use, and sustain its relevance into the future.
