Scottish Writers’ Centre & Glasgow School of Art: Architecture & Literature

Throughout 2013, Glasgow’s Mackintosh School of Architecture (Glasgow School of Art), in collaboration with Strathclyde University Architecture Department and various architecture schools across Europe (Berlin, Dublin, Naples, Stuttgart, Vienna, Weimer), instigated a project for 4th and 5th year students to design a new “literary institute” building within the city of Glasgow. This brief coincided with one of the primary aims of the Scottish Writers Centre themselves: to raise funds for a permanent new home in which the functions of the organisation could grow and blossom in a future Scotland.

Current and outgoing chairpersons Jacqueline Smith and Douglas Thompson collaborated with the Mackintosh School in developing the brief and reviewing the projects. The final result has been not just a series of exhibitions across Europe but a sumptuous 336 page book that showcases many of the very best design solutions that the students came up with for five different sites across Glasgow. The book also contained four short stories by Glasgow writers, specially commissioned to explore the relationship between literature and architecture. Those writers, Magi Gibson, Donal McLaughlin, Douglas Thompson and Brian Whittingham, will be reading from their work, alongside Mackintosh School tutors Mark Baines and Johnny Rodger in order to generate and illuminate the meeting of two parallel art forms in one future vision.