UK: A Glasgow real estate firm has been given permission to demolish a vacant office building to create a new hotel.
Artisan Real Estate, in collaboration with design firm HawkinsBrown, will begin construction on the new project, named Vienna House.
Artisan acquired the old building in late 2019, with plans to take part in urban regeneration efforts. The site was chosen for its city centre status, as well as its opportunity to help transition the central business district into a more mixed-use area.
The building is also planned to be highly sustainable. Artisan worked alongside environmental design consultants Atelier 10 to bring the plans up to highly sustainable specs.
Charlotte Swanson, regional development manager at Artisan said to Scottish Construction Now: “The building as a first, also achieves Glasgow City Council’s required Gold Standard for carbon reduction, with air source Heat pumps providing low carbon space heating and heat generation for domestic hot water. The proposal achieves a 38% improvement on the CO2 emission requirements of the Scottish Technical Standards and a 20% reduction in annual CO2 emissions via Low and Zero Carbon Generating Technologies.”
Vienna House will fuse the classical Georgian/Victorian style of the old city with the highly modern cityscape of the western area. The group will be cladded with terracotta features, paying homage to the city’s ceramic identity.
Peter McLaughlin, Scottish head of HawkinsBrown said: “To reference the traditional use of ceramics in Glasgow and some of the tones that characterise this tradition, there will be a varied palette of double-height green/teal/turquoise profiled terracotta cladding, set within an articulated limestone frame, to give this new building a bold and distinctive character, but one rooted in the context of Glasgow.”
Glasgow’s Redhurst Hotel is also currently set for renovation, with a £3 million redesign on the way. Further approvals in spite of the current lockdown also include an Edinburgh members club refurbishment.
