Cochrane Square Glasgow : Information + Images

Cochrane Square 1996 + 1998 CZWG Architects COCHRANE SQUARE, OFFICE BUILDINGS PROJECT NAME: Wheatley House (£5.25m) Cotton House (£6.8m) Cochrane Square: image from CZWG Architects DATE OF CONSTRUCTION START : March 1993 COMPLETION : Autumn 1994 ADDRESS : Cochrane Street, Glasgow G1 LOCATION : Merchant City, Glasgow ARCHITECTS : CZWG Architects, London CLIENT : G.A. Properties Limited Woodside House 14 Woodside Terrace, Glasgow CONSTRUCTION : In-situ concrete frame. New sandstone elevation to Cochrane Street. Retained stone facade to Ingram Street. Other elevations in buff facing brick. ACCOMMODATION : 5 storey office building (to be occupied by Housing Department of Glasgow District Council) above basement car park. APPROX. SIZE : Site - 30 m. x 58 m. Height - 21 m. GROSS AREAS : Ground to 4th. inc. 55,275 sq.ft. Basement 14,899 sq.ft. TOTAL 70,174 sq.ft. COST : £75 sq. ft. including cost of fitting out for Glasgow District Council Housing Department. Cochrane Square: image from CZWG Architects COCHRANE SQUARE, OFFICE BUILDING CONSULTANTS ARCHITECTS : CZWG 17 Bowling Green Lane, London QUANTITY SURVEYORS : Tozer Gallagher 17 Atholl Crescent, Edinburgh STRUCTURAL ENGINEERS : Blyth and Blyth Associates (Glasgow) + SERVICES CONSULTANTS Scottish Legal House 145 North Street, Glasgow MANAGEMENT CONTRACTOR : G.A. Management Woodside House 14 Woodside Terrace, Glasgow FIT OUT ARCHITECTS : DEGW Scotland 22 Montrose St, Glasgow 1073 Cochrane Square Phase 2 - Cotton House The Cochrane Square site lies between Ingram Street and Cochrane Street where the Merchant City meets civic Glasgow. Phase I (70,000ft²), Wheatley House was completed in autumn 1994 for client GA Properties Ltd and occupied by the Housing Department of Glasgow District Council. Phase II (75,000ft²), Cotton House continues the Cochrane Street elevation and turns the corner into Montrose Street and was completed in December 1998 for the same client and will be occupied by the Inland Revenue. When constructed, Phase III will be a public courtyard with shops and restaurants. The Cochrane Street elevation is clad in figured Scottish sandstone over a granite plinth. The prow balconies permit views through George Square and up Vincent Street to the west. Client Cochrane Square Developments Consultant Alan Dickson Architects QS Tozer Capita Services Structural Blyth & Blyth Associates Space planners DEGW Contractor HBG Construction Scotland Subcontractors Stirling Stone Piers Gough is advisor to Frank Gehry on the King Alfred site in Hove, England and is also working on Brighton Marina, England. CZWG Architects are based in the City of London Cochrane Square Photos by Adrian Welch Cochrane Square: extract by Deyan Sudjic A handsome new city block in Glasgow's Merchant City just across the street from the heroically scaled city chambers offers both urban fabric and architecture. It's known by its developers as Cochrane Square, but in fact it will eventually come right up to the street line on three sides of the site it occupies, and butt directly against an existing building on the fourth. The 'square' tag refers to an internal courtyard that will eventually be part of the scheme; but the architectural action is all on the street. Cochrane Square is big, filling an entire city block, and rising up to a peak of seven floors in an attempt to live up to the scale of the grid, the great generator of the city's nineteenth-century core. The essence of Glasgow's city centre depends on stone, on classicism, and on the grid. CZWG, working to a brief that is essentially speculative, have demonstrated that it is possible to re-deploy all three elements in a convincingly contemporary take on the dynamic that gave Glasgow its original urban character. The building is at the eastern edge of the urban grid, marking its limit. The site is now occupied by two different office buildings, one of them the preserve of the city's Housing Department, Wheatley House, the other a tax office known as Cotton House. The buildings look anything but the part, they look like the fabric of a busy commercial city, rather than a bureaucratic landmark or a conventional architectural filing cabinet. They are scaled up at street level to acknowledge pedestrians. Later stages will involve ground-level activity such as shops and cafes. The long façade on Cochrane Street, which faces the 'frenchified' classicism of City Chambers' later extensions, is dominated by Piers Gough's brand-new invention, the Clyde Order: giant stone columns, topped by capitals that take the form of ships' prows, in cast concrete with iron handrails. The giant order of columns, four storeys high, marches in stately fashion across the Cochrane Street façade sitting on a comfortable rusticated base, the rhythm underscored by three-storey high glass bronze panels cut into the stone on each side of the columns and interrupted by an inflection that marks the main entrance. The schemes second phase turns the corner into Montrose Street and offers quite a different character with a zig zag façade that suggests that this is the extreme edge of the grid and that the city beyond marches to a different rhythm giving Cotton House the effect of two quite different facades. On one side it shares the vocabulary of giant columns with the housing department, on the other side the flavour is a little more deco. The point is the that the two offices have been designed at the urban scale, rather than at that of the individual building. The corner is itself marked by a series of setbacks, each of which rises by an additional storey before setting off on its riveted bronze and glass zig-zags. The exact form of Phase III is still under discussion, but will eventually complete the block as a symmetrical façade with stone wings at each corner before turning into Ingram street where it will face the austere pediment of the citys' long-derelict sheriff court. Phase I (70,000ft²) was completed in autumn 1994 for client GA Properties Ltd and occupied by the Housing Department of Glasgow District Council. Phase II (75,000ft²) continues the Cochrane Street elevation and turns the corner into Montrose Street and was completed in December 1998 for the same client and is now occupied by the Inland Revenue. When constructed, Phase III will create a public courtyard with shops and restaurants.