Owen Clark

Gray's School of Art 

Adaptive Reuse

Aberdeen

The adaptive reuse proposal houses many different facilities; conference and exhibition centre, centre for northern culture and design, creative starter units, accommodation as well as cafe and restaurant facilities that service the whole building. The building in it's current state has lots of issues, and this project sets out to combat them; to restore the buildings character, to renew the quality of space and light and technical performance and to reinstate the intentional relationship to the landscape of the original building.

The main focus of this project is the exhibition space, located on the north of the building. The demands of an exhibition require high qualities of light and control of that light, in order to take advantage of the large amounts of natural light available the north facade features translucent insulating glass that creates the diffused light required as well as improving thermal performance. This natural light is supplemented by rail mounted spotlights that align with the structural grid of the building. In order for the exhibition space to function, there needs to be an element of flexibility to allow various different types of exhibits to be showcased. This is solved by a series of flexible partitions that can be arranged as required.

Overall this proposal re-energise the Gray's building, creating high qualities of space, that cater to many different functions and allow the building to be experienced and enjoyed by regular users as well as one-off visitors.