This is her first major building in the UK (so far she has built only the Maggie Center and a school in London, which opened in 2010). Next in line will be the Olympic Aquatics Center for the 2012 Games: despite endless budget cuts and project distortions, this will be the only truly interesting building in the entire Olympic Village.
The Riverside Museum is dedicated to the history of transport in Glasgow: its exposition includes locomotives and ships produced here (most often in the form of models), cars, trams and even baby carriages. The idea of movement influenced the formal design of the project: in fact, these are five parallel "pipes", energetically curved in the middle and looking like a folded surface of a fabric or a sequence of waves. Both ends of the building are almost identical: these are glazed surfaces with five "peaks" of completion (each of the "pipes" has its own overlap): one facing the city, the other towards the Clyde River, at the mouth of which Glasgow is located. Thus, the museum serves as a "space of transition", connecting the two main elements of the landscape, but not directly, but away from the shortest path between two points.
The museum is located on the site of an old shipyard, in the industrial part of the city, so its zinc-sheathing is a reference to this industrial heritage. Inside, the main exhibition hall, devoid of supports, occupies the central three "pipes", while the side ones contain auxiliary spaces and black box galleries for special expositions (for example, in the museum you can see the original historical interiors of a pub, cafe and shop). The interior is clad in fiberglass-reinforced gypsum boards; their surfaces are painted yellow-green. This curvilinear space is further enhanced by the bridge, which allows one to take in the entire exposition at a glance from above.
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