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Blueprint No 298 January 2011 _ Best British Buildings of the 21st Century
SCOTLAND
The brouhaha surrounding the new parliament building has eclipsed smaller examples of work that epitomise the excellence that can be found in Scottish architecture.
Back in the 1980s Alasdair Gray popularised the expression 'work as if you live in the early days of a better nation'. It appears as one of 28 quotes cast into the Canongate Wall, one of the public faces if the Scottish Parliament in Edinburgh. In a few words it captures that particular Scottish mix of aspiration and realistic self-reflection. The architect, EMBT, designed a projecting window seat for each MSP to sit and reflect on the issues of the day. That these seats have proved superfluous, says more about politicians than an architect with a romantic sensibility.
The new building at Holyrood has had a negative impact on architectural culture in Scotland. The competition process undermined
the nationalists' idea to develop a Scots-but-modern architectural language. Scottish architects were invited to participate as junior partners to internationally recognised stars. Then, when Enric Miralles took the idea of the land and the culture but gave it greater expression using an aesthetic developed in Spain, it made the notion of essential Scottish forms, materials and tectonics hard to sustain. The misery and drama of the four-year construction programme, with all the media hype, political horseplay and cost overruns evoked a defensiveness among Scottish practice. What the building didn't do was provoke architectural debate. Even when it won the Stirling Prize, there was little evaluation of the building's architectural quality.
Instead, the most interesting building for Scottish architecture this decade is the Pier Arts Centre in Orkney. In the 1970s Margaret Gardiner gave her collection of British abstract art (including work by Nicholson, Hepworth and Paolozzi) to Orkney. Levitt Bernstein converted a single warehouse to house the works. In 1999 Reiach and Hall won the competition to extend the gallery that sits within the narrow warehouses along the harbour.
The building is made up from three components: the meeting house (the original residence); the strong house (the original warehouse); and the black house (the new extension). The original gallery is domestic in scale with deep window reveals. In contrast, the extension is much lighter
– a dark zinc-clad structure with mullions at 450mm centres and a glazing system that can appear black and solid or transparent, depending on vantage point. The only clue it's a public building is the large entrance cut out of the street face.
Reiach and Hall's work had an intellectual rigour – well organised plans, tidy sections and legible structure – in much the same way Rab Bennetts' work does, though somehow gentler. It is the epitome of everything that is good about contemporary British culture in the same way that Tate St Ives is symptomatic of all that is frustrating. The comparison is revealing. Both galleries exhibit work by the same group of artists. Both are built at the most extreme reaches of the British Isles. Tate St Ives underestimates its audience and undervalues its local artistic output. The Pier focuses attention on the art. Children are made welcome without being indulged. At the top of the building there is a library for people who want to study. There is no café – Reiach and Hall's design director Neil Gillespie felt the centre's neighbour already provided a good café. There is a shop but it's modest and doubles as a reception. When describing the Pier, Gillespie uses the words 'thin, low northern light, reticence and stillness'.
It seems strange to suggest that a modest little project on the edge of Scotland should trump the parliament
– and yet it does. Reiach and Hall works as if living 'in the early days of a better nation', and as such provides inspiration for many others. NORD's 80m-long Olympic Park Electricity Substation in London has attracted much attention and Sutherland Hussey was shortlisted to design the Dundee V&A. Outside the Central Belt, there are a number of practices exploring the possibilities for new rural buildings such as Dundee's LJRH and Perth's Fergus Purdie, Neil Sutherland and Gokay Deveci in the north east and Rural Design and Dualchas in the west.
Penny Lewis
ISSN 0268 4926 _ copyright Blueprint 2010
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