The building was designed by
modernist architect
Sir Leslie Martin of South Bank, London, with some of the conceptual ideas for the building dating as far back as the mid 1960s. Some of the basic thinking behind the scheme had been directly influenced by the
Bruce Report, which had proposed dividing the city centre up into distinct zones for various types of activity once slum housing had been cleared. In 1964,
Glasgow Corporation had already envisioned a new civic square which would be created following the planned closure and demolition of
Buchanan Street railway station (which by this time had been decided as part of the
Beeching Cuts). The new square would effectively be a
superblock created by realigning
Parliamentary Road to an approximate east-west axis (making it essentially an extension of Renfrew Street), and also realigning North Hanover Street so it ran directly north-south. Conceptual drawings from the period showed that the square would have looked very similar to
Lincoln Center in New York City, containing an art gallery, civic theatre, concert hall and repertory theatre. With Leslie Martin appointed as project architect, later plans showed that the proposed new technical college along the north side of the site on Cowcaddens Road would occupy part of the site – this would eventually be built as Glasgow College of Technology (now
Glasgow Caledonian University) in 1971. By 1968, the scheme had been revised further and scaled down considerably. A decision to close and consolidate two bus stations (Dundas Street and Killermont Street) into one, resulted in the newly created superblock being used for what would become
Buchanan Bus Station in 1976, and the new "civic centre" would move to what would become the ultimate site of the Concert Hall. A multi-story car park was erected on the site of the former railway station building that same year. Even as far back as the late 1960s, Leslie Martin's initial concepts showed familiar aspects of the building that would be recognised today – the extensive use of
colonnades (which would only be ultimately used on the north entrance of the building), and the cylindrical shaped entrance on its south facing side, which would be centred on the former intersection of
Sauchiehall Street and Parliamentary Road. By the mid 1970s, the first ideas that the eastern edge of the site would be devoted to shops began to appear, but it was not until the 1980s that this began to develop into plans for the giant shopping mall that was eventually built. In 1988, the retailer
John Lewis & Partners had signed up as the
anchor tenant of the proposed development The "Buchanan Centre" as it was initially called – would adjoin onto the side of the concert hall and John Lewis would occupy half of the mall's planned area, although it would be 1999 before it was finally realised – as the "Buchanan Galleries". The Edinburgh-based company
RMJM and partners were appointed as project architects for the Royal Concert Hall in 1988. Councillor
Pat Lally symbolically drove in the first concrete pile of the building in the April of that year. ==Performance spaces and facilities==