The Herald: Where does a building begin? It begins in need and in the imagination. The need first. For 22 years Glasgow’s transport museum was housed in the Kelvin Hall after moving from the Tramway in the south side. Every year hundreds of thousands of people would visit it to see its collection of cars, boats, trains and bikes. On Sundays, when it was raining in the city (which meant most Sundays), the Kelvin Hall would be full of boys impersonating motorbikes and girls pretending to be bus drivers. Clyde-built kids coming to learn something about the vehicles their fathers and grandfathers might have travelled in, that their grandfathers and great-grandfathers might have worked on.
But there was a problem with the Kelvin Hall. Actually, there were a lot of problems. “It wasn’t designed as a museum,” explains Lawrence Fitzgerald, the museum’s manager. “It was designed in the 1930s as an exhibition hall from the structure of a Victorian building. It didn’t have a network for power data throughout the entire space. The heating and ventilating systems weren’t really to museum standards and it was slowly destroying our collection -- literally. You could see the cracks in the wooden trams because the ventilation and heating were just really damaging.”
There were other issues too. You had to climb stairs to the entrance, so accessibility was a problem, and there was no space outside to extend the museum’s activities.
“Transport’s about movement,” Fitzgerald says, “and to do a classic car rally -- and we did do things like that -- we needed to take over half our car park.”
And, of course, it was difficult to showcase Glasgow’s maritime history when you’re a quarter of a mile from the Clyde.
In short, there was a need for a new building. And there was an opportunity too. At the start of the new century the council was in discussion with Glasgow Harbour about the regeneration of the Clyde, and the idea of a new transport museum was mooted. It would be a fresh start for the museum and a fresh start for the river.
As for the imagination, well, that’s easy. You just have to stand outside the building that replaced the Kelvin Hall. The Riverside Museum down on the Clyde, with its rippling roof and jagged ends, is a thrilling agitation of steel and glass. It’s a dream of a building in every sense. It’s also proof of what 2500 tonnes of steel, 24,000 zinc panels, a ceiling of glass-reinforced gypsum, thousands of workers, the best part of 10 years of planning, preparation and construction and the vision of an award-winning architect can give you.
This is the story of how we got here.

Lawrence Fitzgerald is 54 years old. He has a background in aerospace, and talks in a soft-spoken Scouse (imagine ex-Frankie Goes To Hollywood singer Holly Johnson with a science degree). In a former life, he was a member of a John Peel-favoured indie band, The Diagram Brothers, and has a slight begrudgement about his adopted city’s continuing fealty to the cult of Charles Rennie Mackintosh and all things arts and craftsy at the expense of its immense scientific heritage. He is also the Riverside Museum’s manager and, since the start of the last decade, its project manager. In purely practical terms, the building is the way it is -- in everything from layout to colour -- because of him.
In the canteen, hard hat and yellow jacket laid aside, he is explaining how the project began. “We worked up a quite detailed brief, very practically laying out what we required on this site. Level access, landscape, column-free space.”
These were the practicalities that the architects who entered the competition to design the building had to deal with. Zaha Hadid was one of them.
“Zaha’s design responded to the brief in the best way,” Fitzgerald explains, “and in the most beautiful way, I think. That’s the best architecture. Architecture that is both practical and beautiful.”
Hadid is the poster girl for contemporary architecture. Born in Baghdad and based in London, her designs have always been at the cutting edge of cutting edge. What that has meant over the years is that she was for many years more famous for the buildings she designed that were never built than the buildings she actually completed. She was, it was said, not one for compromise.
But when it came to dealing with Hadid and her practice, Fitzgerald discovered that the reality parted company from the legend.  “Zaha’s practice had the reputation  of being very, very precious and very aesthetic-led. But they were very responsive and it showed in their initial response. It showed that they had been down to the site, they had looked to understand the context of Glasgow, and they tried to understand what we’re after as well as bringing their architectural knowledge to it.”
Some days later I’m in Hadid’s east London offices where young men and women with interesting haircuts sit in front of top-of-the-range computers and exude an air of “too busy to talk” distance. I’m led through the door into an airy conference room where Jim Heverin, the project director, and Johannes Hoffman, the project architect, responsible for the Riverside build on a day-to-day basis, are waiting. They show me photographs of the Riverside site before and after the build, and tell me that when it comes to buildings there is no clear architectural beginning. “I think in terms of design there’s no beginning or end,” suggests Heverin. “There’s not. You take with you something you were looking at in a previous project.”
So, if you want to find the origins of the Riverside Museum you could possibly find it in Spain. “It was a follow-on from another project, a much smaller project for a winery in Spain,” says Heverin. “That started from the shape of the old object transformed into a new object. And we thought that idea was quite interesting.”
Heverin points at photographs in front of him, singling out the BAE shipyard shed on the other side of the Clyde from the museum, the spiky silhouette of the building a final echo of a time when giant sheds lined the river, and explains: “You could take a cross-section which has a lot of memory in it  --  it looks like shipyards’ old sheds -- and  you can extrude it and it becomes very abstract, but there’s something very familiar about it.”
Talk to Heverin and he’ll tell you about the way the building speaks to the city and the river, how the flow of the magnificent suspended ceiling guides you through the space. And there’s a truth in all of that. But to get to that there’s a lot of brute work and muscle required. An architectural plan is only a plan until it’s built. And this was a more complex plan than most.
Johannes Hoffman wasn’t working for Zaha Hadid when the practice won the competition. He remembers reading about it in the trade press: “I saw that Zaha had won the competition and I was very interested in how the building would be constructed, not knowing I would be project architect. I was very curious about how they would be able to build this.”
As it turned out he was the one who had to work out how. But for that he needed the help of an engineer.

Jim Ward is 46 years old, originally from Dennistoun in the east end of Glasgow and now living in the west end. He joined the construction engineers BAM as an apprentice joiner in 1980. These days he’s a construction manager. Over the years he’s helped build the Strathclyde Business School, the Hermitage Academy in Helensburgh and “lots of office blocks” at Edinburgh Park. But nothing like the Riverside.
Other companies didn’t want the headache. Business was good at the start of the last decade, so why land yourself with a difficult project which had a high profile and a high risk factor? Especially with memories of the Scottish Parliament fresh in the memory, with all its cost overruns and negative publicity. BAM thought differently. “We wanted to build it for its profile,” admits Ward. “We wanted it for its complexity. We wanted it for its challenge. It’s a landmark project for the company. There’s not many of these jobs get built. And I don’t think there’s a builder in Europe, if you show them a picture of the concept of this building, who wouldn’t think: ‘I want to build this.’ Are you kidding? This is why you come into the industry.”
The project was a hugely complex one, probably unthinkable five years before. In terms of the physical build, BAM had to start by sinking piles into the ground in driving rain (“just Scottish construction weather,” says Ward), conduct deep-level excavation to put in 800 linear metres of service tunnels and then construct the structural steel, making sure to avoid the tunnels.
The steelwork was supported by a framework of trestles and props, a forest of temporary structures, until it was complete. It would move in the wind. There was even a weather station on site. “If we had wind speeds of more than 21 metres per second -- about 49 miles an hour -- there was a risk of damage.”
All this physical work had to be carried out while sticking to a budget. “At the start of the job, the industry was going crazy. Oil shortages and all that. Prices were going up for steel and glass and that had an impact, so trying to fit within the cost plan was challenging at times,” admits Ward.
For the architects, plans drawn up would have to be scrapped when it became clear they could not be afforded. “We had two or three extensive engineering exercises to reduce cost, which meant that months of work had to be binned to start afresh,” explains Hoffman. “We were always trying to catch our tail. Using zinc was one idea that shaved I don’t know how many million off the project.”
“To be brutally honest, it was about  price at the market at that time,” explains Fitzgerald, “and zinc is every bit as good. Would the public give a toss if it was clad  in zinc, aluminium or mercury? No, they wouldn’t.”
But, whatever the cladding, it would have been difficult. To add 24,000 zinc panels, each one bespoke, to the building, BAM opted to set up a manufacturing plant on site. “We actually had a mini-factory, bending, pressing and folding the zinc.”
“The geometry of the roof is extremely challenging,” says Hoffman. “Some of the details had never been done before and they were learning as they went along.” But it was worth it. “The workmanship on the zinc is fantastic.”
Jim Ward reckons this was the most challenging building he’s ever worked on. Does Hoffman agree? “For sure. When we started it there were many people who tried to say we couldn’t do it.”
It tested both men. It also made them friends. “It’s quite an intense relationship when you’re building something like this,” explains Ward, “and the contractor and architect are integral.
“I would say myself and Johannes had a seriously strong relationship throughout the project. I’m just off the phone to him. We got to know one another really well. We went to London for my wife’s 40th birthday and he came along.”
After nearly three years on site, BAM handed the building over on December 17 last year. About 10pm the night before, the whole BAM team were sitting in the empty building eating a Chinese takeaway and looking at each other as if to say “pretty bloody good, boys. Look at what we’ve done”. That, Jim Ward, says was a rare moment because, in construction, there aren’t many occasions when you get to step back and see what you’ve done (while eating chicken satay).

So now it’s built, what does the Riverside Museum mean? To Hadid’s practice, it’s its first major UK project. “There are a lot of ridiculous preconceptions about the office which we hope this goes some way to answering,” suggests Jim Heverin.
“The preconception is that we’re not pragmatic. We’re airy-fairy,” adds Hoffman. “This building has its airy-fairy parts. They’re there to elevate the spirit. But everything you see is extremely pragmatic in our view. I think we’ve shown that we’re able to work within a budget and still deliver to a very high standard.”
For Jim Ward, the museum is the “gold star” on his CV. “It’s there for keeps. I’ve got three girls and I can say, ‘Your dad built this.’ I always remember wanting to build something spectacular in my city. At the time I thought it would be an office block and then this came along. It’s pretty good.”
The city council puts the final bill at £74m and claim the project came in on budget. Critics say the real cost is more like £100m -- once infrastructure including roads is factored in.
One thing is beyond doubt -- for Glasgow this is a statement of intent for the future. “Projects like this act to regenerate,” says Lawrence Fitzgerald. “What would happen it we weren’t here, the BBC and the science centre wasn’t there? Sod all, really.”
It might take some time for the area around it to be built up. Time and an economic recovery. But, for the moment, the Riverside Museum stands alone. It’s not sod all. It’s anything but. That’s a start.