NEW plans have been drawn up for a high-rise Glasgow City Centre riverfront hotel development — complete with glass-floored balcony 20 floors up.
CitiHome Ltd have applied to demolish a building at 8 Dixon Street, at Clyde Street, and build an ‘iconic’ aparthotel, with a glass, roof-top restaurant, plus a ground floor restaurant, bakery, cafe and gym.
Plans for floors two through to 17 show each would have 12 studios and suites. There would be penthouse suites on 18th floor. Full planning documents have still to be made public. Permission was previously given for a 17-storey hotel at the site. The site is adjacent to a major hotel development based around the historic Custom House.
A statement lodged with city planners as part of the new demolition proposal explains: “Throughout the design development process, emphasis has been continuously placed on the need for the proposed building to express itself as both a daytime and a night-time building.
“In other words, it must function 24/7 as an icon for both the city and the company so that it will have high visibility and yet, at the same time, be understood, purely and simply, as a Glasgow building with new and specially interesting characteristics.
“Among these features there will be a glass roof-top restaurant where diners can admire the lively ‘City Lights’ threading through the city as well as shimmering silently in the dark flowing river Clyde.”
It adds: “To augment the uniqueness and elegance of the building it is proposed to have a glass-floored cantilevered balcony where diners can sip an evening cocktail while waiting to be seated at their table, chat a little or simply and quietly admire the City stretched out below their feet.
“This architectural device could stimulate interest among people and encourage them to come down from Buchanan Street to see the building, have coffee and cake during the day or a candlelit dinner in the evening and become, perhaps, a little curious about what the experience of standing on a transparent glass floor will be.”
The statement continues: “The building will function as an enabler/facilitator to help the City achieve its planning objectives of reintroducing the populace to the Clyde and by doing so reintegrate the river with the City in an entirely new role i.e. a unique visitor attraction.
“The building will be much more than a sharp contemporary piece of modern architecture; it will have laid down its credentials as an urban node point, a significant urban marker but, even more than that, it will enable some of the City’s planned objectives to become real possibilities.”
“The building will also become an integral part of a number of tall neighbouring buildings either presently under construction or about to be built. This range of tall buildings will clearly alter the character of the Broomielaw but, in a sharply contemporary way which chimes well with the age we live in.”