By Martin Jarvie

TWO revolutions – one industrial, the other digital – have left their mark on Glasgow, bequeathing it a legacy of bold civic and manufacturing architecture that has sometimes failed to find a purpose as commerce, communications and the way we live has changed.

More recent buildings too, many from the 1960s and 70s, have also failed to keep pace with current needs and are now faced with lingering decline or demolition, neither of which seems like a satisfactory outcome.

But a third revolution – this time environmental – could be the saviour of Glasgow’s built heritage and help the construction sector to address its CO2 emissions.

Refurbishment and retrofit may not seem like radical climate activism, but they have the power to provide us with adaptable and inspiring spaces, fit for many different purposes, and with just a fraction of the carbon footprint of new builds. It turns out that the greenest building is one that already exists. So before we take a wrecking ball to any more of Glasgow’s redundant buildings and spaces, let's recognise that these unloved and sometimes ugly places can be coaxed into life again.

That’s what has happened at the University of Strathclyde’s Learning and Teaching Project, which we have reimagined from the existing Colville and Architecture Buildings, into something fresh and exciting. The Colville Building was stripped back to its structural frame, revealing high floor to ceilings and large volume spaces ideally suited to current educational needs. By creating new voids, inserting open staircases and joining both buildings with a sweeping galleria, the four-storey campus is now home to a variety of teaching spaces, a 400-seat theatre, the Student Union and Student Engagement and Enhancement services. The listed Architecture Building underwent a more sensitive light-touch refurbishment.

Along the way new entrances have resolved old accessibility issues, and recladding the exterior has almost halved energy consumption, and while the final result may look like an entirely new building, the fact is that the original skeleton, and the stored carbon locked up in it, still remain, providing the Learning & Teaching Project with the story, rich texture and atmosphere that newer structures take decades to acquire.

Glasgow has always been an ambitious city, renowned for its streetscapes and progressive architecture and in the wake of the COP26 climate conference we have an opportunity to tie our climate ambitions to the built landscape, creating the future without discarding the past. In taking this approach to the Learning & Teaching Project, we were fortunate thatthe University of Strathclyde was a willing partner, keen to make something special from what they already had and agreeing with our sustainable approach of using only the materials that we needed.

It will take a fresh and brave approach for architects and their clients to opt for retrofit instead of choosing instead to build from scratch, but Glasgow has the opportunity to lead the way on this, cementing the Climate Pact that bear’s the city’s name and adding to its cultural capital by retaining buildings that would otherwise be lost and creating a new future on the foundations of the past.

Martin Jarvie is an architect associate at BDP