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Piece of news
Homage to Catalonia
Costs have spiralled and critics have condemned it,
but Enric Miralles's Scottish parliament will be a masterpiece, says Jonathan
Glancey
Climb to the top of Arthur's Seat, look down on festive
Edinburgh and you will see one of the world's finest cities shimmering
on both sides of the railway ravine that saws through its green, granite-lined
chasms; those glorious, man-made punctuation marks: castle, university,
cathedral, school of divinity, North British Hotel, Calton Hill. Here,
like almost nowhere else, architecture, engineering, town, gown and landscape
seem all of a piece.
But step slowly down to the old town, and further on to the new, and the
reverie is broken several times by new developments that seem far bigger
and bolder than they should be. Edinburgh is changing and, sadly, there
is little or no gentility in the changes. Not only are its fine, 18th-century
shopping streets now lined with the glib chain stores, bars and cafes
you can find anywhere, but its latest architectural adventures seem overweight,
overambitious, out of scale and out of place.
If you are here for the festival, take a look at the new Calton Square
office and leisure development at the foot of Calton Hill. Or make your
way to the new row of stone-clad offices and steely restaurants and bars
that culminate in the Scotsman's ambitious new home on one of the sloping
ways from the Royal Mile to Holyrood Palace.
There is, though, one new building, still largely under wraps, that is
a masterpiece in the making. Not just a great building, but one that addresses
Edinburgh specifically and offers something out of the ordinary.
This building is, of course, the new Scottish parliament. It is a glorious
design, but derided by the press for being costly and late. True, its
cost has risen from a nominal £10m at the time it was first seriously
mooted in 1997, to £40m when its design was approved, to £100m
when its scale was tripled, to £300m more recently, and to £345m
today. This is a lot of money - but what a building. When completed, some
time next year, it will be the finest new building in Scotland for many
years. And, it needs to be completed to be seen. This is a rich, complex
and crafted design, as much landscape as architecture, a building that
will connect the city centre emotionally and physically to the hills beyond,
expressing Edinburgh's embodiment of Scotland's political and cultural
will.
These are big claims. While the parliament building has been (slowly)
rising, those muscular commercial developments have been invented, designed
and built, no doubt on time and to budget, yet without showing more than
a cursory delight in Edinburgh itself. History mattered, though, to Enric
Miralles, the big-spirited architect who won the competition to design
the new parliament in summer 1998. Miralles, a Catalonian architect practising
in Barcelona, died, aged 45, in 2000. So, too, did Donald Dewar, the force
behind the new building and the Scottish parliament itself.
Dewar wanted something special, and Miralles and his wife, Benedetta
Tagliabue, made sure he got it. Working with Scottish practice RMJM and
engineers Ove Arup, Miralles developed the design of a building and landscape
(the two will be inseparable) that take their cues from sources as diverse
as upturned boats along the Scottish coastline to the delicate flower
paintings of Charles Rennie Mackintosh. In fact, if you can imagine the
new parliament building as a successful amalgamation of the work of Scotland's
architect-hero, Mackintosh, and Catalonia's architect-saint-in-the-making,
Antoni Gaudi, shot through with the originality and sensitivity of Miralles,
you will have at least some idea of what to expect.
Every day that passes reveals some new and unexpected detail of Miralles's
posthumous masterpiece. Here, an extraordinary courtyard, there, a wall
with windows like you have never seen before. It is hard to make sense
of such an original design. Luckily, Murray Grigor, director of some of
the best contemporary films on architecture, has made a short video on
the creation of the building on show daily at the Tun, the swish new Edinburgh
home of the BBC and some smart restaurants and bars.
Grigor's film offers an intelligent appreciation of Miralles, Dewar and
the unbridled quality of the architectural designs. Surrounding the film
screen are models of the building and some of Miralles's magical coloured
drawings. This is no soulless, commercially driven, computer-glossed monument
in the making, but one that will yet win all brave hearts.
Which makes it all the sadder that, however hard they may have tried,
Scotland, and even Edinburgh's own architects, continue to display less
sensitivity towards the capital than Miralles, the outsider. Calton Square,
the titanic new £100m office and leisure development designed by
architects Alan Murray and newly completed at the foot of Calton Hill,
may boast handsome roof gardens. And it may well be a big improvement
on the kind of poor, postmodern offices that have disgraced the city in
recent years. Yet it feels too big and blustering. From pavement level,
its two powerful buildings seem to be squaring up for a fight. Perhaps
Calton Square is redeemed by its five-star hotel, health and fitness clubs,
12-screen multiplex, 190,000 sq ft of offices and, above all, its roof
gardens. It is good to look down on modern buildings and not see clumsy
clusters of rooftop air-conditioning equipment, lift motors and the like.
How much better, though, if the site had been broken down to a more intimate
scale and the buildings had been made more a part of Edinburgh's ceaselessly
intriguing cityscape.
Equally, the big, new, late-flowering postmodern buildings by architects
CDA that include the new headquarters of the Scotsman are too big and
wide-mouthed for the city. These architectural guppies belong more to
the 1980s and appear to ignore the landscape. True, the Scotsman building
is generously built, well finished and boasts ocean liner-like balconies
from which journalists can gaze lovingly at the hills beyond. But how
much more in tune with those hills is Miralles's design, featuring garden
paths that appear to lead beyond the city and into the stirring landscape
beyond. It is nice to know, too, that the parliament gardens will bring
sweet-scented Scottish flowers to the heart of the city. Miralles was
entranced by plants with names such as Sticky Catchfly, Tufted Loosestrife
and Biting Stonecrop.
The Scottish parliament is growing from its site like some memorable
flower. Branches, tendrils and shoots can already be seen. Hopefully,
it will create what Miralles liked to call a "dialogue across time",
an "extended conversation" between the city, its citizens and
the buildings. "It is not," he said, designed to be "a
building in a park or garden, but of the land."
As the burghers of modern Edinburgh race towards a new horizon emblazoned
with the alluring colours of big business, bigger money and buildings
that might belong almost anywhere, they might yet stop to take a leaf,
albeit an expensive one, from Miralles and RMJM's fine garden. One day,
they will all feel very much better for it.
JONATHAN GLANCEY
The Guardian
Monday, 11th August 2003
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