Design for Photography Museum

This project was the final submission for my second semester of my second year at Robert Gordon University in Aberdeen, Scotland. This was an individual project and all the work produced here is my own.

My brief for this project was to design a photography museum. I was given a long narrow site that ran between the main street of Aberdeen city and its historical predecessor. My project was inspired by Scottish Baronial architecture. Exploring the occupation of walls, the building’s labyrinthine circulatory system was punctuated by moments of openness provided by courtyards and galleries. This commented on the built environment of Aberdeen where visible landmarks had been subsumed into obscurity by recent development.

Recently completed projects in the area had no reference to context and were actively uninterested in engagement. This led to an absence of public space in the city. I provided a counterpoint to this with my design. It contained false façades at either end which were punctuated to encourage possible interaction. This was strengthened by the immediately visible public courtyards that offered a cloister-like oasis.

George McIntosh Keith’s work as a city architect for Aberdeen during the 1960s influenced my design. His buildings which were in the Brutalist style had an honesty and clarity in their use of material that directly echoed Aberdeen’s historical granite construction. This inspired the gradient of elements chosen for this project.

It was important that there would be a slow softening of textures as you moved into the heart of the building to generate an understanding of the changes in Aberdeen’s built environment. For this reason, concrete slowly gives way to brick. This material would be reclaimed from an existing edifice currently on site which was a derelict mill. Its bricks are made from the city’s now vanished clay pits and offered a textural document of the site’s built history.

My design in effect aimed to serve the same primary function as a photograph, representing something past, the embodiment of a constructed memory.