From their base in a reconditioned victorian school in main Glasgow, Hamilton Hay Van Jonker talk to AT about their love of connection and change, ‘Speed Mentoring’, and what it’s like to work as ‘one chapter in a structure’s long history’.
Melanie Hay (Director), Tess Hillan (Architect), Cara Taggart (Architectural Assistant), Chloe van Grieken (Partner), Laurence Misick (Elder Designer), Nick Van Jonker (Director).
We think about our involvement as simply one chapter in a building or place’s history. There’s a kind of humbleness in this, but it’s also empowering– other people have actually made modification here previously, and others still will once again in the future.
We are an incorporated studio of architects, heritage experts and sustainability professionals. Dealing with ambitious customers we establish inspirational jobs which connect individuals to their environment, their past, and to a shared sustainable future.
It is our intent to guarantee we create in a way that assists in future generations making changes to fit their own needs. It is no coincidence for that reason that most of our work involves the change of existing, substantial structures.
The style of continuity and change is so interesting to us. Lepus Arts is a task in a former church in Midlothian, where the neighborhood– some of whose parents got married in the church decades back– are now utilizing the hall in new methods, the vision being to create a brand-new space which brings music, tune, community and care back into this building.
We recently finished a tactical evaluation of estate-wide energy use for a client who runs 35 UK entertainment venues. We produced assistance on net-zero targets, industry best-practice, and benchmarking. Bespoke metrics customized to the home entertainment location typology were designed to identify target venues for additional research study, offering a framework for a progressive method to enhancing the carbon performance of these unique buildings.
In June 2025, we held our 2nd “Speed Mentoring” occasion in Glasgow. The purpose is to link early profession designers with a large range of specialists whilst fundraising for Designers Benevolent Society; a charity that supplies assistance to the architectural community and their households.
Our studio remains in an old school building on the bank of the River Clyde in Glasgow, and 80 metres from the entryway to Glasgow Green, one of the city’s largest parks. It means we can utilize active travel networks along the river and through the park, offering us fantastic chances for stress-relieving breaks or having lunch together in the Green.
We’re currently teaming up with a customer in Caithness, Scotland to establish an experimental archaeology task checking out Iron Age structure methods. It consists of a visitor destination that combines cultural heritage and traditional skills with nature stewardship and biodiversity enhancement efforts. The website is a mix of nationally considerable environments, consisting of peatland, a few kilometres from the UNESCO World Heritage Site designated “The Circulation Country”.
At the other end of the scale we are working on significant arts and heritage tasks in nationally essential public buildings in the centre of Glasgow and Edinburgh. But an aim to make locations helpful, beautiful and meaningful for people, while being good caretakers of our natural and cultural resources is the thing which connects all this work.
Hamilton Hay Van Jonker
Glasgow
Reinventing practice functions participants in the Regenerative Architecture Index.