Building Design

When Zaha Hadid presented her competition-winning Riverside Museum for Glasgow City Council even she managed to mix her metaphors. Not only was its fluid form “a third metallic river” on account of its site at the confluence of the rivers Kelvin and Clyde, the £74 million scheme was also “a public building that has its own skyline”. But that’s fine, especially in Glasgow, where every building has a nickname. It turns out, though, that this mix-up is intentional. Both ideas — the river and the “skyline” — are embodied in the form of the transport museum’s zinc-clad, standing-seam roof. The “skyline” — a two-dimensional study of an imaginary roofline that serves as the building’s north, city-facing elevation — is extruded along a zig-zagging path which terminates at the river Clyde’s edge with a south-facing, mirror-glazed elevation. The resulting roof form resembles a “metallic river”.