George Kerevan: Time to inject daring design into Scottish capital

Published on Wednesday 25 March 2009 21:12

HAVE you ever been to New Jersey? It's that big shopping mall and housing estate on the other side of the Hudson River from Manhattan. Actually, there are some nice bits to the state of New Jersey, but most of it is now covered in a uniform concrete sprawl that is the urban equivalent of a rhododendron bush – ever growing and gobbling up everything in its path.

I mention this because Scotland (and especially Edinburgh) is going the same way.

The one redeeming feature that a bust economic boom normally leaves behind is a legacy of adventurous and sometimes great architecture. When money is cheap and egos inflated, the Medicis of the era hire the Brunelleschis of the era to make them immortal. After everything goes pear-shaped, we are usually left with a few sublime buildings that outlast the insane folly (and venality) of their commissioners.

Unfortunately, that will not be the case with the late, great boom we have just lived through, although it was certainly the biggest economic party in human history. Only in a few countries did the bankers and property speculators splash out on decent, or at least adventurous, architecture. Spain definitely comes to mind.

The Spanish property bubble may have been pricked, but the country is left with a legacy of fantastic, exuberant and confident architecture embodied in new museums, civic buildings, stunning (yes, stunning) low-cost housing, theatres, public markets and parks (the things we used to put into Scottish cities in the 19th century).

Every major architect in the world has been building in Spain, plus a crop of local designers who are every bit their equal. But what did the boom bring to Britain? Blandness, blandness, blandness.

The country has been covered in a carpet of US-style shopping malls and boxy suburban housing estates. Welcome to New Jersey UK. Even our profligate bankers proved visionless. Sir Fred Goodwin may have kept changing the carpets at Gogarburn, but the new 335 million Royal Bank HQ is a monument to his lack of taste. It is architecture worthy of a 1960s further education college.

The best you can say for Sir Fred is at least he got the RBS HQ built – getting anything actually constructed in Scotland's capital is well nigh impossible. The major Caltongate development off the High Street was stuck in planning limbo for years and has just been aborted with nary a pile having been driven.

That said, the Caltongate scheme was another bit of repetitious New Jersey architecture and woefully out of context at that. What Caltongate represents in stereo is the capital's chronic lack of ambition and civic confidence when it comes to building things. You have only to look at the magisterial New Town to realise this civic funk is a recent phenomenon.

The response to the failure of Caltongate has been interesting. Some think it represents a disaster for the city. That's an exaggeration. In Barcelona, the recession has brought to a halt work on Richard Rogers's transformation of the old Las Arenas bullring into a leisure area, to Norman Foster's 230 million remodelling of the Camp Nou football stadium, to a soaring 34-storey office block by Frank Gehry; and to no fewer than ten tower blocks by Jean Nouvel. Now that's what I call a disaster.

Edinburgh remains one of the richest cities in Europe, is a political capital and has a global brand name. What it lacks is the vision and boldness to turn difficulties into opportunities.

Others have breathed a sigh of relief that Caltongate is gone. They are allowed that moment of schadenfreude, provided they help to come up with a replacement worthy of the city. One of the joys of Edinburgh is that people live in the city centre. Understandably, this makes them sensitive to what gets built in their backyard. But a major city like Edinburgh cannot be viewed as a series of discrete districts each inward-looking and purely domestic in scale. A global city needs hotels, museums and public spaces. Any redesign of Caltongate has to take that strategic agenda into account.

Building is by no means at a standstill in Edinburgh. Only this month, InterContinental Hotels signed a deal with developers to build a 17-storey hotel in Haymarket, due to open in 2013. The edgy, flowing design is by a local architect, Richard Murphy. However, this being Edinburgh, the proposal has been called in by ministers. There will be a public inquiry later this year.

Other cities are not letting the recession halt development – for one thing it's cheaper to build. Construction has just begun in London of Renzo Piano's dramatic Shard, which, when completed in 2012, will be the tallest building in western Europe, at almost 310m high. Gallous Glasgow is busy planning a 30-storey hotel, office and restaurant development in Sauchiehall Street. It looks vulgar architecturally, but Glasgow has always grasped what Edinburgh fails perennially to – civic boldness triumphs over civic timidity.

Actually, when all is said and done, it is probably better that Sir Fred Goodwin did not take it into his head to emulate the Medici in architecture. But we certainly need to do something to stop Scotland emulating New Jersey. Forget writing yet another architecture policy document. What we need is a Scottish planning academy, a place of research, teaching and public debate aimed at raising the standard of urban planning education in Scotland.

Our problem is not that we lack good architects, but that for a very long time Scotland has not had a serious debate about what it wants its towns and cities to be. The root issue is not the quality of design, but the social, economic and cultural definition we give our urban spaces.

Edinburgh in the 18th and 19th centuries wanted to be a centre of learning, a cultural leader and a great trading city. It built architecture to match that destiny. If all we build are suburban boxes, what does that tell us about our civic ambitions?