Yujue Ma

Sauchiehall Street has historically been one of Glasgow’s most significant commercial, social and cultural streets, shaped by retail, entertainment, music venues and everyday public activity. However, the decline of traditional retail, increasing vacancies and the loss of cultural spaces have gradually weakened its role as an active civic destination. At the same time, Glasgow retains a strong musical identity that exists across different scales, from professional institutions and independent venues to street performers and informal music culture.

The Glasgow Citizens’ Cultural Music Hall explores how architecture can use music as a form of civic infrastructure to reconnect cultural production, public participation and everyday urban life. Rather than proposing a conventional concert hall as an isolated destination, the project investigates a hybrid cultural model in which formal and informal musical activities coexist. It asks how architectural space can mediate between street and building, public and professional, old and new, and performance and everyday life.

The proposal combines the adaptive transformation of an existing building with a new music hall, connected through a central public plaza. Its functions range from open street-performance and social spaces to exhibition, rehearsal, recording and professional performance facilities. A gradual spatial sequence from the street towards increasingly dedicated music spaces allows different users and levels of cultural participation to overlap while maintaining appropriate acoustic and functional relationships.

The project is developed through historical and cultural research, site and user analysis, mapping of Glas- gow’s music network, precedent studies, function development and iterative spatial and formal testing. Within the wider framework of civic experience and public gathering in the twenty-first-century city, the the- sis argues that cultural architecture can operate beyond the boundaries of a single institution. By integrating existing urban fabric with new public and musical functions, the project investigates how architecture can support cultural continuity, encourage everyday participation and contribute to the regeneration of Sauchie- hall Street.