Gayfield Creative Spaces was an arts hub based in and around a former tyre depot by Gayfield Square in Edinburgh that provided a venue for exciting artist, designer, maker and gallery initiatives from 2013 to 2017. GRAS was tasked with redeveloping the tyre depot to establish a range of venues, workshops, galleries, studios and flexible events spaces that could support high-quality, cross-disciplinary collaboration.

Prior to alteration, the building was composed of a series of beautiful but disconnected and dysfunctional post-industrial spaces with remarkably varied characters. The challenge was to subtly unite these spaces and allow them to work together, creating a new, versatile home for the arts that was far greater than the sum of its parts.

Through the design process, the proposed interventions were simplified and reduced to their absolute necessity in a constant distillation and re-evaluation of the brief. The result was the most modest of interventions required to unlock the building, providing new facilities and circulation routes using a consistent and binding architectural language.