Anyone surprised?

KB, pretty ambiguous comment there, can you be a bit more specific about your apparent dissatisfaction ?

That is some image looking up. It tells a story, but the aesthetic and planning problem is a good deal more 'structural' in that BG suffers greatly from the, 'One shopping centre - Ours!' Lendlease' zeitgeist from the Bluewater Kent era. Hence, its totalitarian appearance within the grain of the city centre.

The story for me is that one can not just superficially 'democratise' this Leviathan a la Lucien Kroll with various stick-ons and alterations etc. The intrinsic 'structural' planning problems will still be there as detailed previously by various contributors.

But good luck, though i think these alterations will just delay the eventual demolition of the Bath St connecting bridge and the proper splitting of the site into 2 separate and visual parts, south of the last Leslie martin 'bookend' and the removal of the precast panels to remodel the elevational form of the resultant floor plates.

See you in another 25 years.
ps. Someone has to break it gently to the commercial geniuses that they can not have their cake and eat it.

" I suspect the architects will be hamstrung by the lack of flexibility in the plan (as did Foster's) but find it irresistible to add/clad/ to the already Frankensteinian facades. I wish them luck with a difficult brief but I'm afraid we're not going to get a particularly urban (and therefore resilient) solution out of a diminished program like this."

https://www.urbanrealm.com/news/11397/Foster_out_%26_ThreeSixty_in_as_Buchanan_Galleries_downshifts.html



This is what I predicted in March, however I had not realised that the monster was going to be quite so ugly and turning the top of Buchanan Street into a fairground freakshow.

The existing PoMo facade has, at the very least, a modium of coherence that is wiped out by these turgid and jarring add-ons. And the infill block adjacent John Campbell's A-listed Brittannia Buildings resonds to neither this nor the shopping centre both in scale and in detail. It clearly needs to be 6 /7 storeys.

I haven't studied the application in detail and can ony hope that these images are conjectural- they are already giving me indigestion. Yik.

PS despite my reservations about Foster's previous masterplan, the right thing to do was disaggregation - creating new streets and connections where there once were none. This has the look of a temporary makeover that will be out-dated and out-moded in 5 years or so (I'm being generous - it already looks out-moded). Compared to the quality of some new retail establishments across the UK, this feels like the new Savoy Centre. A new Savoy Centre with green glazed bricks...

Not an ounce of green space created, very sad to see!

Agree with the above inso far as the new build infill won't work only on one level but needs to be 6/7 levels

Oi ... scream for cream ... anyone for - Eh Network Rail?

wtf is this... do we all now get a shot at a retrofit/rebuild design?? This seems very much like an excuse generator to knock the whole thing down

#2 Your assumption of my dissatisfaction is completely misplaced. My apparent lack of surprise is that the development is NOT being pulled down as speculated, rather it's being remodelled....the far cheaper option. Perhaps I am just being completely cynical about the development - just as I am with any proposals with St. Enoch. For that you can call me guilty.

Great, just what we need. More bloody student accommodation……….

And where’s the darn allotments?

Sprawling? That was a label given to the peripheral housing estates on the outskirts of Glasgow back in the 80's and it's now applied to the hulk that is Buchanan Galleries, guess the mantra is to keep on dreaming the American dream.

Selective demolition is what is needed:

1. Remove bridge structure
2. Retain R.C. floorplates and amend accordingly
3. Remove curtain walling and precast elements
4. Re-elevate and re-model as two distinct urban blocks.
5. Retain the rotunda space as access to John Lewis and the Car park and to what floorplates remain north of Bath Street.

Ther ye's go, less dotting the i's and crossing the t's, that wasn't that hard now was it?