Tradeston’s urban grain is one of flux, where scattered industrial remnants and a substantial depletion of housing shed light on its current underutilised state. This slender housing intervention seeks to mend this fabric – and to speak for the wider housing crisis – by establishing a high density of separate households within narrow urban confines.

Echoing the proportions of the neighbouring ‘Grainstore’ building allows for an efficient continuation of modular form, signalling the development of a block with a dense, scalable, and identifiable urban housing type.

The Filament endeavours to inspire shared belonging in a context where communal strength has eroded in tandem with the area’s bygone residential fabric. A sequence of thresholds softens the transition between public and private realm as a social imperative, encouraging interaction without intrusion. Ground materiality and façade canopying indicate a gradual phasing from street to shelter while maintaining a frontage with a sense of quiet dignity.

Areas of distinct ownership are suggested through materiality and separation devices that allow residents to alter spatial permeability. Entrance alcoves may be utilised for solitary pause or casual exchange; rear terraces allocate external platforms for peaceful retreat or to invite neighbourly engagement. Seclusion and openness may be determined by the changeable desires of occupants.

The Glasgow Film Institute intends to serve as a beacon for Film City Glasgow, promoting and celebrating the art of filmmaking within the City Centre to captivate a wider audience. The Institute seeks to expand on the cleint’s footprint within Glasgow, occupying a key location within the urban grid. Incorporating educational, entertainment, cultural, and leisure spaces – whereby all aspects can function as one mechanism to enable a co-existence of proactivity and recreation – communicates core tenets of Film City Glasgow’s ethos that value the promotion of interactive collaboration and cultural exchange.

The proposal is driven by the tectonic language that can be associated with analogue film, chosen for its connotations of tactility and functional legibility. In an architectural sense, this is led by emulating the mechanism of a camera by way of configurations, structure and form; components such as the “viewfinder”, the “body”, the “lens”, the “spool”, together work as harmonious elements that this proposal aims to interpret as guiding elements for the composition, organisation, and proportioning of space. This analogy allows the architecture to reflect the tactile beauty of filmmaking, giving the Institute an identity that is both functional of symbolic of the artform.

In an experiential sense, with analogue film we associate terminology about “exposure”, “aperture”, “focus”, “frame”; this proposal aims to utilise these principles as a tool to articulate the appropriateness of humane-scale architectonic equivalents to these terms, namely where to prioritise daylighting, openings, views, and structure.