A DRAMATIC hole in the ground in Glasgow's city centre marks the foundations of the city's new £50 million art school building.
The construction of the art school site opposite the famous Mackintosh Building at the Glasgow School of Art is well under way, with three buildings now demolished and cleared away to make room for the building designed by the American Steven Holl Architects in partnership with JM Architects of Glasgow.
The construction of the building, undertaken by Sir Robert McAlpine, with engineering by Arup, now clearly shows its extensive footprint in the Garnethill area of the city.
The vast hole, supported by enormous yellow tensile beams, will form the foundations and the basement floor of the new building, which is due to open in the autumn of 2013.
The basement will hold a 300-seat lecture theatre, a centralised workshop, assembly spaces and storage.
Mr Holl has said the building will be coated in a skin of matt glass, giving it a translucent quality but one that will not be overly reflective.
The entire 11,250 square metre construction has replaced the demolished Foulis Building and Newbery Tower.
The new building will be lit internally by shafts of natural light down through the depth of the building.
As well as studio space, the building will contain the Centre for Advanced Textiles, digital media spaces, a lecture theatre, as well as exhibition space.
It will immediately face its internationally renowned and Grade A listed building in Renfrew Street, designed by Charles Rennie Mackintosh between 1897 and 1909.
More than 700 students and staff have temporarily relocated to the Skypark in the Finnieston area of the city while the construction of the building is under way.
Mr Holl says the building will be "in complementary contrast to Charles Rennie Mackintosh's Glasgow School of Art – forging a symbiotic relation in which each structure heightens the integral qualities of the other."
The architect added: "We envision a thin translucent materiality in considered contrast to the masonry of the Mackintosh building – volumes of light which express the school's activity in the urban fabric embodying a forward-looking life for the arts."
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