Glaswegians named it themselves. The architects at Foster and Partners had drawn the form as an interlocking series of ship hulls, a deliberate reference to the Clyde's shipbuilding heritage, and they were correct that nobody outside the practice would describe it that way. By the time construction finished in August 1997 the building was already, universally, the Armadillo. Forty metres tall, silver and segmented, hunched along the north bank of the Clyde, it looks unmistakably like the South American mammal of the same name. The official name was the Clyde Auditorium when it opened, and it is officially the SEC Armadillo today - one of three venues on the Scottish Event Campus. Nobody calls it anything except the Armadillo.
Plans for a new auditorium to expand the SECC complex were initiated in 1994. Foster and Partners - the London firm later responsible for the Gherkin, the Reichstag dome, and a great deal else - got the commission and broke ground in September 1995. Construction took just under two years. The 3,000-seat venue opened in August 1997, immediately drawing comparisons to the Sydney Opera House. The Foster team insisted those comparisons missed the point. The actual reference was the Clyde's shipyards - the cathedral-scale dry docks where ocean liners and warships had been built throughout Glasgow's industrial peak. The interlocking hull-like sections were a quiet tribute to a vanished industry, made by a London practice that understood it could not pretend the heavy industry was still there. The Crowne Plaza hotel and the SEC Centre are connected to the Armadillo by passageways, allowing performers to enter and exit without having to step outside into the Clyde wind.
On a Saturday in early 2009, a 47-year-old volunteer church worker from Blackburn, West Lothian walked onto the Armadillo's stage to audition for Britain's Got Talent. Susan Boyle had told the interviewer she wanted to be a professional singer like Elaine Paige. The judges and the audience laughed before she opened her mouth - the typical reaction to an unremarkable-looking middle-aged woman with no obvious showbusiness pedigree - and then she sang I Dreamed a Dream from Les Misérables. The performance became one of the most-watched television moments of the early YouTube era, viewed by hundreds of millions of people. Boyle's debut album sold over nine million copies. The Armadillo hosted the Scottish auditions of Britain's Got Talent from 2008 to 2010, and also auditions for the first four editions of The X Factor. A great many singers walked across that stage. One of them changed her life there.
The Armadillo's calendar is a curious mix. Interaction, the 63rd World Science Fiction Convention, presented the Hugo Awards here in 2005 - the genre's most prestigious honour, awarded to writers like Susanna Clarke for Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell that year. During the 2014 Commonwealth Games, the building housed the weightlifting competitions, hosting some of the most concentrated effort the venue has ever seen. Every Christmas season, the Armadillo hosts pantomime - that enduring British holiday institution of cross-dressed dames, audience call-and-response, and fairy tales topped with topical jokes. The same room that watched Susan Boyle audition watches small children shout He's behind you! at a wicked stepmother every December.
Together with the OVO Hydro next door, completed in 2013, and the SEC Centre to the east, the Armadillo turned a stretch of post-industrial Glasgow waterfront into a destination. Once this riverbank thundered with shipbuilding - the cranes, the riveters, the launching ceremonies for vessels that would carry the world's commerce. After the yards closed, the Clyde here went quiet for decades. The Foster building was part of how Glasgow imagined a different future. It is recognisable from almost any vantage point along the river, from passing trains, from inbound flights into Glasgow International, from the south bank at Pacific Quay where BBC Scotland and Scottish Television built their own modern campuses. The Armadillo became a logo for the city even as its name remained a small joke about how a building can look like one thing and be designed as another.
Located at 55.8595 degrees N, 4.288 degrees W on the north bank of the River Clyde just west of central Glasgow. Easily identifiable from the air as a segmented silver dome adjacent to the larger translucent OVO Hydro. Best viewed from 1,500-3,000 feet. Nearest ICAO airports: Glasgow International (EGPF) about 6 nm west and Glasgow Prestwick (EGPK) about 25 nm southwest. The Scottish Event Campus cluster is the main visual landmark; look for Bell's Bridge crossing the Clyde to Pacific Quay (BBC Scotland and STV) on the south bank.