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Editorial:
February 2001
With
the Edinburgh Park Competition (Burrell Company) winner announced
- not the most adventurous of schemes - and the completion of the
landmark Princes Exchange building at Tollcross this month we are
focusing on the contemporary public realm: what is it? is it endangered?
who controls it's creation?
Recent reports suggest Edinburgh's architecture is blossoming, but
buildings just completed on Lothian Road, in Leith and in Edinburgh
Park suggest otherwise. Although there were many bold and imaginative
projects for the Edinburgh Park
Competition, none were chosen or even commended. We continue to
find corporate clients building faceless power buildings which don't
engage with locals or locality.
Festival Square, Edinburgh: Clydesdale Bank: by
Adrian Welch
Blank, scaleless street frontages and windy car parks abound, and
on Lothian Road so-called public squares, unused but by the companies
and their clients: the press briefings make much of public routes
and piazzas but these raised spaces sit immediately adjacent to
large corporations' office entrances: not places to linger if unconnected
to the owner. The routes from say Festival Square - or Ceaucescu
Plaza as Murray Grigor labelled it - lead to a hotel rubbish skip,
the immense blank wall of Hurd Rolland's Edinburgh One, or to a
blocked up stairway down to the car park. There is little hierarchy
of scale, especially a lack of smaller scales. The spaces - as well
as the built form - are soulless in a way that is not concomitant
with this great city of ours. The masterplan for this area seems
to have as much backbone as a chocolate eclair: how did internationally-renowned
architects, Terry Farrell, come up with such a mind-numbing and
people-unfriendly arrangement? Why was it allowed by the Council?
How do we stop this happening again? By getting involved.
Part of the same 'Exchange' masterplan, the Scottish
Widows building boasted public routes but these appear blocked
at present and always at night. Standard Life's public route is
a gloomy 'tunnel' emerging into a fairly uncelebrated chasm. The
over-scaled bridge between the insenstive Clydesdale Plaza and the
shiny 'bit of Croydon' (Baillie Gifford) is also blocked, so pedestrians
have to return to Lothian Road and cross the traffic highway.
Our city requires some sensitivity, celebration, diversity, sense
of place: just look at what John Hope has done in Holyrood and imagine
this bottom-up approach applied to the rest of Edinburgh. Different
localities will throw up different scenarios but the engagement
must become rooted once again in the context of Edinburgh. This
is not any old city!
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