Bistable Art School

The University of Dundee’s Crawford building has fallen into disrepair. RAAC Panels are falling out, units are being displaced, and the entirety of the art school is waiting for the day when the building will be able to live up to the student work presented here.

The retrofit of the existing campus building will not hold back the architecture, instead inspiring a breadth of new possibilities; a mindset coined as “hedonistic sustainability.”

The Bistable Art School will not only reinvent the Duncan Jordanstone College of Art & Design, but also do so in an environmentally sustainable way. The design is repeatable, yet functional as the existing structure is based on a bay system. The internal spaces will be transformed to accommodate catered galleries for the different programmes with a mechanical bistable facade that mirrors the effects of a slap bracelet and Japanese folding fan. tessellative patterns found in Islamic architecture inspired the repetition and invention of a continuous tessellation of these facade panels to provide a visible and iconic frontage for the school.