Edinburgh has long been called 'The Athens of the North', and deservedly so. With its combination of the Old Town, dominated by the Castle, and the Georgian New Town built on the hill that slopes down towards the Firth of Forth, it has one of the most beautiful city centres in Europe. Why then, when the time finally came to create a building to house the new Scottish Parliament did they employ a Catalan rather than a Scottish architect? If ever there was an opportunity to create something really special that celebrated the best aspects of Scottish architecture this was it. Instead we have one of the most hideous monstrosities imaginable plonked at the bottom of the Royal Mile opposite Holyrood Palace.

Of course people witter on about how daring and exciting it all is, and it has picked up a couple of prizes in the cosy, self-congratulatory world of international architecture, but that's all just a variation on the emperor's new clothes. Take my word for it, it is a hideous hotch-potch of concrete, perspex and wood, and we should be ashamed that we ever allowed it to be built in the first place. You can tell it's crap just by reading the nonsense people have spouted to justify the vast expenditure on something so utterly inappropriate - in the same way as screeds of gushing pseudo-intellectual mumbo-jumbo are used in gallery catalogues to lend credibility to empty, soul-destroying pieces of 'modern art'. Here's some hilariously pretentious twaddle by a guy called Neil Gillespie in an article published in an architecture magazine in 2004 - just before the building finally opened; late, and squillions of pounds over budget of course. He describes it as:

... a building which we should intuitively know and understand. It evokes a landscape, a hyperborean landscape, a FINN land, a White land. It is about the glacier, in the crush and folding of space and form. It is about the birch tree, the girl of the forest, given architectural form in the delicate timber screens to MSP offices. The concrete Canongate wall throws fragments of stone and drawing to its surface like some glacial moraine. It eschews passing beauty for something more profound and grounded in this territory. It is about a place beyond the restrictive parochial boundaries of Scotland, it is located firmly in a northern territory. This is not an easy landscape, it is the chaos of the moraine, the anxiety of the gorge, the horror of the void, the silence of Munch’s scream.



I just love the get-out clause: 'It eschews passing beauty for something more profound'. Who are they trying to kid? Philosophy is profound; civic architecture is glorified brick-laying, and it really only has two legitimate aims - to create something functional that keeps the rain out and lets the light in, and to make it aesthetically pleasing at the same time, because the people who live or work there feel better as a result.

Compare the two photographs above. The top one shows the 'The Watergate', a building immediately opposite the Parliament at the foot of the Royal Mile and adjacent to Holyrood Palace and Abbey. It's in the style of Edinburgh's Old Town, and as far as I know it's fairly typical of early Scottish architecture in general - a style which Charles Rennie Mackintosh, the greatest Scottish architect in living memory, took as a basis for some beautiful buildings of his own design. The bottom photograph is of a part of the front of the Parliament building. Can you see any architectural connection, any hint of sympathy with the prevailing style? Well, I certainly can't. I can see the horror of the void, yes, and I can hear the silence of Munch’s scream, but I wouldn't have thought such angst-ridden attributes rank high on the check-list of the average town-planner. Give me passing beauty any day.