Responding to the brief to design the Glasgow Film Institute, the home of the organisation Film City Glasgow, this project explores how an institute with a mission of nurturing a ground-up Scottish film industry and empowing people in accross Scotland to tell stories and control the narrative, might be architecturally realised.

The context

The film and TV industry is notoriously hard to get into, with precarious work and the necessary relience on social networks and being well resourced creating a barrier to entry for many. In the context of Glasgow, policies have attempted to encourage film production as a viable industry in the city’s post industrial economy by leveraging both the versatile urban and surounding lanscape environments and cheap, out of use industrial spaces. A critical take on this approach could interpert this as another reiteration of the many forms of extraction and exploitation that the landscape of Scotland, and the people living off it have been subject to over the centuries. Having agency over the image, narratives of and around your environment could be as important culturally as access to it’s material resources.

Considering this context, the programme is organised to physically embed the ethos of open access learning, practicing and creating and celebration of film into the building. The main circulation weaves and twists its way through the various spaces dedicated to the film process, from viewing and celebrating through shooting and production processes, to research and writing and finally at the heart of the process, storytelling. This circulation connects all the facilities, creating an open library that acts as a resource for developing film makers practice.