The A-listed warehouse building is once more under threat of demolition after a lack of progress in recent negotiations aimed towards achieving a viable solution to its future.

The Alexander Thomson Society said “the purpose and ambition of its competition is to raise the public profile of the Egyptian Halls’ longstanding plight, its current predicament and increasingly precarious future”.  

Designed and constructed between 1870 and 1872, Egyptian Halls was the last in a series of highly distinctive commercial buildings designed by Thomson in the city centre. Standing four storeys high over ground floor and basement shops, it is distinguished by the inventiveness of its multileveled, colonnaded upper façade facing on to Union Street, one of Glasgow’s most heavily trafficked thoroughfares, the presence of the building immediately apparent on emerging from the eastern entrance to Glasgow Central Station enveloped within the adjacent city block.

The upper levels of the building have now lain unoccupied for nearly forty years with all the inevitable consequences of water ingress and inadequate levels of maintenance. The toll on the building’s fabric is not inconsiderable but, to date at least, certainly not beyond repair.

The Society said: “By inviting wide ranging, purposeful and creatively sustainable ideas that respond to the spatial potential of its cast iron framed, open planned floor plates and its innovative architectural facades, the Society sincerely hopes that the response will transcend previous proposals and extend the debate concerning a building which the Society, amongst many other bodies and individuals, believe cannot be abandoned to quietly succumb, without action, simply to join previous victims of Thomson’s already depleted range of buildings in the city.”

For details of registration please visit here.

The deadline for submissions is October 4.