Located on the largest island on Loch Lomond, in the South-Western Highlands of Scotland, The Space Below Ground imagines an architecture for a geological institute dedicated to the research and preservation of geological diversity and soils on the Highland Boundary Fault. The project investigates structural strategies for excavation and below-ground construction, and challenges existing interpretations of what residing below ground means.

The building programme provides accommodation for geological researchers in the form of four buildings, each one adopting a unique structural strategy to engage with the ground along the fault line. The project speculates on ways architecture might better enhance and reveal the ground strata within the excavation of an area of geological interest to gain a better understanding of the region’s evolution through geologic time. Challenging the existing invasive practices of excavation, stabilisation and the creation of space underground, a geological institute on Inchmurrin questions how architecture might change our perception of the subterranean as a resource and as an inhabitable space.