The average drill is estimated to only be used for a mere 13 minutes in its entire lifespan. While many households lack the necessary tools and space to repair their broken goods, the more well-equipped households often don’t fully utilize their equipment and space. This project aims to explore a solution, proposing a centralized, community-led workshop that serves as a collective resource, accessible to everyone in Pollokshields.
The project envisions a centre dedicated to the right and means to repair, aiming to ignite a spirit of resourcefulness and sustainability within the neighbourhood. At its core, the project establishes a series of communal workshops – dynamic spaces for sharing expertise and tools, where ‘repair’ Is celebrated. With a variety of spaces to facilitate a various repair requirements and users of all skill levels, ‘After the Break’ proposes to be more than just a tool rental repository; it is to be an interactive and animated library of resource and collaboration – a response to a prevalent throwaway culture, grounded in the conviction that everyone deserves not just the right to repair, but also the means to repair.
Phase one of ‘After the Break’ retrofits an A listed print factory into an on-site material refinery and production workshop. This workshop will process demolition and construction waste from the new-build phase of the project, into reusable materials, primarily K-SlipsTM for the proposed cladding of the urban building. K-slips are a cold pressed, low-carbon brick/ceramic alternative made form nearly 100% recycled content, by Kenoteq based in Edinburgh. Producing these on site further lowers embodied carbon, through eliminating the need for the transportation of raw demolished material and the final product to/form site. The facility aims to produce these tiles in a controlled variety of shapes and sizes (visualised in the image on the right) and also involve the Pollokshields community in the making process, aiming to foster a sense of local ownership, community engagement, and of course, re-use.

Our group strategy for Pollokshields proposes a series of radical interventions centred along Albert Drive. One of our primary aims was to begin to blur the boundaries between Pollokshields’ districts, which distinctly divide the neighbourhood by class and ethnicity. Our strategy aimed to foster a denser, more connected, and diverse town centre, and while in conversation with the southside housing association, we identified a shortage of larger, family homes between 3-5 bedrooms. We proposed a strategic densification of certain areas of Pollokshields, while aiming to avoid the modern Glaswegian trajectory of ‘demolish and replace’. With this, we suggested the occupation of excessive private plots of land in the garden villa district of the area, proposing family homes with semi-private, common amenity spaces.
This theme was continued in my individual urban housing project – ‘A Familiar Co-op’. A big inspiration for my proposal was Hannes Meyer’s ‘co-op Interieur’, which envisions cooperative living as a means of sharing domestic responsibility out with the single-family unit. ‘A Familiar Co-op’ aims to echo this philosophy through positioning communal space as an integral element of the proposal, reflecting Meyer’s belief in creating environments that relieve the hierarchical pressures of the traditional family home and nurture a community identity.
The project envisions a community land trust which aims to provide adaptable housing structures and co-living solutions for a range of families. Crucial for a co-living arrangement, CLTs allow for the fair regulation of rental terms and help facilitate the collective ownership and maintenance of common spaces, through providing a structured framework for decision-making. My approach emphasises spatial efficiency, functionality, and equality, aiming to question the conventional spatial arrangements that emphasise the private over the communal, challenging the hierarchical structure that home-ownership implies upon a community and neighbourhood.