The opening of Zaha Hadid’s Riverside Museum on the 21st June 2011, exemplifies cultural and destination regeneration breathing new life into vacant city sites. The shimmering and seductive mass of zinc, its design playfully symbolising the city’s industrial and shipbuilding past. As the building prepared for its opening in 2011, the following text was submitted for a written review competition organised by the Architects Journal. I have edited this in 2025. It definitely reads more positively now and i think gives a better account of the building.

Things are changing on the edges of the Clyde. As Zaha Hadid’s shiny new Riverside Musem opens to the public, Patricia Cain’s paintings, drawings and collaborative artworks celebrate its construction in a mesmerising display at Glasgow’s Kelvingrove Museum. Beautifully curated, the achievement and primal art of constructing the new museum is relayed through a fusion of artistic, architectural, and industrial processes. Amongst the splashes of colour and intricacies of line that reflect the build process, unforgettable footage accompanies the exhibition from photographer Oscar Marzaroli’s film ‘Glasgow 1980’. A striking scene of a silhouetted figure watching a wrecking ball demolish tenements reminds me of a late night jaunt to watch one of the many concrete towers that break the city’s horizon, fall in a cloud of dust and debris. With the damp sounding thud of explosives resonating from deep within the structure, homes, memories, and failed visions for a better place are brought crashing to the ground in a clinical display of destruction. The short-lived ideals of the seventies, now acknowledged for their weakness in the frequency of these events.

Glasgow’s landscape has been scarred and cherished by successive layers of industrial scale construction. Whether building tenements, streets, shipyards or motorways, the city has been ingrained with a continual sense of rebuilding and reshaping to overcome fallen moments of its rich story, and to herald a brighter future. This demolition playing out across the city creates hope for the next generation to establish the renewal of their community, with decent housing, landscpapes, and opportunity. A recurring story of trial and transformation has strengthened today’s Glasgow, and in realizing its efforts, attempts are underway to revive the Clyde back into the life of the city, arriving full circle from its industrial heyday where once it was the life blood of the city; the pride of the city’s workforce welded grafted and bolted the frames of vast ocean liners, and from these waters flowed trading connections and prosperity.

Embracing the city’s reinvention as a cultural and progressive destination, a vacant yet prominent stretch of land opposite Govan where the River Kelvin opens into the Clyde is a fitting site for the new Riverside Museum, occupying the site of the former Pointhouse Shipyards. Echoing the fluid shape of Hadid’s zinc clad building that launches itself towards the river frontage, I’m further reminded of a Marzorali photograph of the QE2 under construction, her arched bow leaning from props that support her towards the water.

Today a scattering of cranes out west to the horizon cast pictures and distant memories of the bald commerce and ship building activity that once shaped the city’s fortunes. Triangular roofs of boatsheds still loom over calm grey waters, their vast scale diminishing with perspective as the eye is drawn out along the river’s edge. After decades of neglect, which saw Glasgow turn its back on the Clyde, the opening of the Riverside Museum celebrates and signifies an entwined relationship between Glaswegians, the city, and the river.

The dramatic folds and pleats of the museum’s twisting roofscape instilled the enduring image of the building into the Glaswegian consciousness. As built, and close up, this bird’s eye view is not as apparent in the surrounding landscape – a walk round the perimeter surprises with undulating and confronting surface; but its now familiar form nestled between the expressway and the river invites people to visit the building up close.

As a collection, encompassing the breadth of industrial and Clydeside development, trams, ships, teslas and flying machines, tell the story of Glasgow’s contribution to transport history – the building envelope being the vessel to embody the legacy and ambition of its conception.

Internally the sleek and dramatic pointy ceiling and engineered folds are ingeniously extruded throughout the museum’s length. Capturing the expression of architecture as ‘frozen music’ the structure of this roof is dynamically and abruptly expressed at either end of the building; facing north an open and public expanse beside the entrance, and to the south, the river frontage where the recently restored Clyde Built Tall Ship Glenlee resides.

As a catalyst for further regeneration, it is hoped that development on other ‘stalled’ sites nearby will be initiated by the museum’s location. Left to its own devices, and cut off by the expressway from the tenemental street pattern to the North, there is little built form for Zaha Hadid’s creation to directly address. The building reaches out however across to Govan, an integral chapter and place in the story of this city and river. The past and future, offering a more metaphoric context for the building to respond to.

The onslaught of much modernist architecture has led to a common dissatisfaction with the homogenization of place. The Riverside Museum embodies iconic architecture at a time when uniqueness and signature styling bring success to both place making and place branding.

Freeing itself from appearing superficial the building form responds intimately to the cultural language and personal story of Glasgow. It is more than just an iconic building that the city rightly wanted. People had also called for the design to go to a ‘Glasgow Architect’ or to be built on the other side of the river where its impact might drive urban change quicker, but the hope is that connections will run deep and allow for ideas to take shape.

The building shares notions of speed and fluidity that acknowledges architecture of the great train stations. The vast sensuous column free space appears to be moulded out of the building’s form, with the complex structure of engineered steel concealed between the zinc external skin and the internal surface panels (a unifying and reminiscent shade of green) that follow the shape of building.

Undoubtedly the Riverside will become a loved member of Glasgow’s museum family; the appeal for parents, residents, and visitors to the city, plain to see. The skyline and backdrop to the Clyde now has a new monument. Its arrival welcomes change, yet with imagery that mirrors the spires and entrepreneurship from which Glasgow grew. Reflecting the history of this city, its exports, its people and craft, it will inspire and educate; but hopefully the ability to spark new life on these tired river banks will be its legacy, and its real value may lie in reaching out, enticing people out to experience the surrounding landscape and the city’s relationship with its far reaching river.