Design students create mirrored look-out in Scotland
Strathclyde design duo's £5,000 stainless steel structure debuts in the highlands
Mirrored cladding is clearly en vogue at the moment, from a visitors’ centre in a French ski resort and MVRDV’s winning design for a Rotterdam museum to Farshid Moussavi’s six-sided Museum of Contemporary Art Cleveland, Ohio.
But none is as bijou and immediately engaging as the latest offering in a Scottish national park. This one is a look-out designed and hand-built by a pair of final year architecture students at Strathclyde University in Glasgow.
The duo, Angus Ritchie and Daniel Tyler took up the challenge set out by the Scottish Scenic Routes Initiative. They developed an idea they’d worked on as first year students around a room with a view. “The main concept taken from the first year design was the mirrored material, which the national park was particularity keen on, and framing of three views," explains Tyler.
The long Lookout block has a ‘room’ carved out of one side with space for a small bench, and another with a single seat. Once seated, visitors can enjoy views up Loch Voil and Loch Doine. The slatted nature of the seating gives the place a Japanese reference.
Their reflective material of choice was mirrored stainless steel, which was glued to slightly bigger birch ply sheets and then fixed to a timber frame. The views reflected on the sheets are given a frame by the edges of the panels, which were treated. It was built off site.
Tyler and Ritchie pulled this off on a budget of just £5000 and their Lookout now sits in the Loch Lomond and Trossachs National Park.
If you're a fan of this kind of mix of naturalism and abstraction you might be interested in our new Phaidon Focus book on Georgia O'Keeffe.
From her early charcoal abstracts and radiant watercolours through to the triumph of her renowned flower paintings and surrealist-inspired portrayals of bones and clouds, O’Keeffe’s art also reflects the solace she found in nature.
Our Focus book illustrates O’Keeffe’s work within the context of her husband Alfred Stieglitz’s artistic circle, as well as within the broader history of American and European modernism. You can take a closer look at it here and download the iBook here.