We are facing a climate crisis that requires us to rethink about how we live together, in whatever form and scale that might be. We are required to reconsider our connections across borders as political and geograph-ical relationships are under sharp focus. It is no longer a question of political leaning, but of necessity, as the survival of millions of people directly effected by the climate crisis rely on it. In tandem with this, political polarisation is increasing and social divisions are in danger of widening further. It is imperative then, that we are serious about how we rethink our relationship with both ourselves and others.

Architecture is not separated from the world it is in fact inside the world. So how can we support our social cohesion, or our social contract so to speak through our cities’ built form?

By creating a new spatial contract within an existing building, this thesis works to develop a platform that supports a widened and more diverse opportunity for discourse in Glasgow. The aim being, that by ‘rehears-ing’ a new social contract in the microcosm of a building we can then disperse the experiences felt into the wider world, hopefully improving social cohesion and mutual appreciation generally.

By looking to understand how defining elements of a city’s built form reveal moments of the past, the pro-posal aims to question the ‘collective memory’ that Glasgow has developed since becoming the Second City of the Empire by evaluating how built thresholds and city fragments contribute to today’s collective rhetoric. By developing new threshold forms the proposal aims to become a physical representation of the parallel between the ‘lived and the built’, whilst being a place that inherently questions the colonial building styles that dominate in the city centre today.