[un]Faithful Reinstatement – Exhibition Opening and Panel Discussion
Mackintosh Queen’s Cross | Thursday 30 October 2025 at 7.00pm
The exhibition runs from 31 October – 9 November 2025 during normal opening hours.
The Mexico City Architects Saving Their Heritage by Altering It
[un]Faithful Reinstatement is an exhibition looking to reframe how we view heritage building reuse in Glasgow.
To do so, it makes the comparison to a city with heritage at its core – Mexico City. A place that may feel like worlds apart from Glasgow with its Aztec roots and subtropical climate – but much like Glasgow, its currently tackling a problem of decaying architecture in its central neighbourhoods.
Abandonment compounded by earthquake damage has degraded the once opulent townhouses built during the dictatorship of Porfirio Diaz.
The structures left standing contain layers of the city’s history, a nation that was expanding post colonisation, becoming an enclave for artists, writers and political thinkers in the 19th and 20th Centuries.
This research exhibits successful examples of reoccupying these places, using the often ruinous existing character as the focal point.
It set out to discover how Mexican architects and entrepreneurs have reinvented the ruins – taking hold of their city’s resources and activating them. Often this reactivation involves being unfaithful to the original architectural intention, reinterpreting the program, circulation and atmosphere of the buildings former self.
It exhibits individual success stories of reusage, explaining through built examples different pathways to reopening—looking at the structural interventions; interior finishes; business models; navigation of the listed system; adherence to building code; as well as the philosophical implications of the decision-making process.
These stories were investigated through interview with designer and inhabitant, documenting each example thoroughly and revealing the process to new inhabitation.
But what about Glasgow?
This work forms a counterproposal to the attitude towards conservation in the UK, where heritage buildings are covered in red tape, implemented to protect them, but leaves developers unwilling to engage, stagnating their decline until the wrecking ball arrives
In a conversation that so often revolves around finance, Mexico City’s precedent reveals the economic advantage of neighbourhoods utilising their historic assets for cultural usages, displaying how this can be done simply without high costs of comprehensive restoration often stipulated in the UK context.
A panel discussion will be responding to the potential of applying similar principles to buildings at risk in Glasgow.
What is applicable? What are the obstacles? What would have to change?
Mackintosh Queen’s Cross, 870 Garscube Rd, Glasgow, G20 7EL
30th October Opening and Panel Discussion, 19:00 arrival for 19:30 start.
Exhibition runs 31st Oct – 9th Nov normal opening hours.
With funding from The CRM Society and Glasgow City Heritage Trust.
