Spirits are high on the Croft One site as our design for a new home, on one of our most beautiful sites, takes shape.  Based on passivhaus house principles with an efficient form, air-tight construction and detailing to minimise cold bridging these sustainable principles have been combined with sensitivity to its surroundings to produce a comfortable contemporary home.

We are delighted that the David Livingstone Trust (DLT) have won HLF Stage 1 approval for a radical transformation of the great man’s birthplace and museum at Blantyre, on the banks of the Clyde. Along with exhibition designers, Event, landscape architects, ERZ, engineers David Narro Associates and Harley Haddow, and the support of conservation architect, Andrew Wright, Hoskins have worked closely with DLT and the National Trust for Scotland, to update and expand Livingstone’s story, using the wealth of hitherto hidden artefacts which the Scots missionary collected over his lifetime of exploration. The design builds on ERZ’s award winning landscape masterplan for the surrounding woodland, beginning in the tiny single tenement room of his birth. Visitors then follow his life through the adjoining refurbished 18th century buildings, thence to a new wing, housing exhibition space, meeting rooms and environmentally controlled storage, to reconnect with the wider landscape and the start of further exploration. The team will now go on to develop the HLF Stage 2 application with the aim of the new Museum opening in 2017.

We are pleased to announce another successful Heritage Lottery Fund bid. The £15.3m redevelopment project for National Galleries Scotland has received a £4.94m Stage 1 HLF grant and is now proceeding towards a planning application. Hoskins Architects were appointed by National Galleries Scotland in 2014, via a competitive tender process, to be Architects for the new Scottish Collection Gallery on The Mound, Edinburgh. The project involves extensive reworking of the 1978 PSA designed Scottish Collection gallery, as well as linking to the 2004, John Miller and Partners, Weston link and creating a new rationalised circulation strategy. The project will also provide a new world class gallery space, below the Grade A listed, Playfair designed National Gallery building, to display the large collection of Scottish Works in the Scottish National Collection. The design includes forming a new façade onto Princes Street Gardens and proposes extensive landscaping to the gardens to enhance accessibility throughout the complex. The project will complete in 2018.

We were delighted that the Ball house, a private residence in Edinburgh’s Morningside Conservation Area, received a Commendation at this year’s Scottish Design Awards. Sited at the end of a string of traditional stone villas the contemporary design responds to this immediate context through the use of stonework & timber panelling, prominent bay windows, and carefully defined external spaces. As well as responding to the distinctive context within a sensitive conservation area the house takes advantage of long views over Midmar Paddock and is carbon neutral in operation.

Plans for the Weltmuseum in Vienna took a step forward this month, with the approval of the budget by Culture Minister Ostermayer. KHM Director Dr. Sabine Haag and Weltmuseum Director Dr. Steven Engelsman announced the decision here: http://www.weltmuseumwien.at/

The approval allows the collaborative team of Hoskins Architects and Ralph Appelbaum Associates to execute the plans to redevelop the exhibition areas and visitor facilities in the Weltmuseum in the historic Hofburg Palace in Vienna. The museum closed its doors in November 2014 in preparation for the refurbishment and is planned to reopen again in 2017.

The creation of a new home and creative hub for the National Theatre of Scotland took a major step forward this week as the project went out to tender.  With construction work programmed to start in July 2015, Laurie Sansom, the artistic director at NTS said the development will be; “A place of imagination, learning and play. A space from which we can begin to fulfil our ambitions, not just for the National Theatre of Scotland but for the wider theatre community and the entire nation.”

The redevelopment of a disused industrial shed on Craighall Road will feature four new rehearsal spaces including a dedicated Community Room, for outreach programmes, technical workshops and storage for set design and construction, a wardrobe department and office space.  For the first time all of the departments of the National Theatre of Scotland will be based in one building leading to greater collaboration and creative focus helping to continue NTS’s growth both nationally and internationally.

Located near Speirs Wharf on the banks of the Forth & Clyde Canal the development will become part of the regeneration of North Glasgow and the burgeoning Culture Quarter in that area.  The design retains the industrial aesthetic of the buildings in the area and is in keeping with the vision for a ‘creative factory’ with robust flexible interior spaces that will allow individual expression and community interventions within them.