Michael Fry: From security headache to eyesore in one go

Plans for the fortification of the Scottish Parliament could well blow up in our faces

SUPPOSE I were a member of al-Qaeda intent upon blowing up the Scottish Parliament as a symbol of the western imperialism which always and everywhere has been and is an enemy of Islam. Do not prate to me of the Scots’ lack of complicity in this matter: remember the role of the regiments.

Arriving at the portals of Holyrood, then, and ignoring the odd looks cast at my turban and jalabiyyah, I approach the security check.

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“Please lay your Kalashnikov on the moving belt,” the polite and friendly staff tell me, “and any scimitars you happen to have about your person.”

“Infidel dogs”, I mutter to myself, but my chain of colourful curses is interrupted as my bomb belt sets off the metal detector. “Fraid you’ll have to leave that here, sir,” say the staff with smiles slightly more forced.

Perhaps I can still throttle an MSP? Or at least seek martyrdom by leaping from the public gallery on to the floor of the house, there to be kick-boxed to death by Ruth Davidson.

However, at the front desk I learn I need an invitation to meet an MSP, and even then must be escorted from here to the meeting by an aide.

As for the public gallery, I should have requested a ticket in advance. No go, in other words: time to retreat and rethink.

Perhaps like that martyr at Glasgow airport, I should get myself a 4x4 and drive it straight at the entrance, assuming I can negotiate the bollards in front of the Scottish Parliament – but even then, I observe, the main door is at an oblique angle to the foyer, so I am not going to penetrate far inside. And Edinburgh may have its John Smeaton, too.

A couple of minutes of connected thinking will thus reveal, I submit, that security is adequate for all normal purposes at what remains for the time being an obscure provincial legislature.

This happens also, however, to be an exceptionally fine example of modernist architecture, from the hand of the dead Catalan master, Enric Miralles. The question now is whether any abnormal threat that may arise can justify the deformation of the languid palace front he left us with an excrescence devoted to enhanced security. Such is the plan that has been unveiled this week.

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The best that can be said about it is that it continues modern Edinburgh’s tradition of eclectic crassness, of innovation in the townscape which alternates between the distinguished and challenging on the one hand, the cheap and nasty on the other.

For every old St Andrew’s House, there is a New St Andrew’s House; for every Museum of Scotland an Omni Centre.

What makes Edinburgh one of the most beautiful European cities is its inherited architectural harmony – and there have been those who think that this and its scenic setting make it the most beautiful European city of all. It is not a museum, though, not a Venice or a Dresden, but a good, hard-working city which takes some risks.

Edinburgh has also taken its architectural risks with prestige projects.

Here the benefactors were usually private rather than public. They included the former proprietors of The Scotsman, the Findlays of Aberlour, to whom we owe the National Portrait Gallery (now superbly renovated), the Dean Village and their own magnificent mansion overlooking it from the West End. In a sense these buildings, too, violated the classical harmony of those preceding them but were designed with enough taste to make future generations find in them agreeable variety. And so it will be also, I believe, with the best of our most modern buildings. The difference between Edinburgh and Paris is the number of really vile erections that have also gone up here in recent times.

To appreciate how many there are it is necessary to climb Calton Hill and survey the scene from Greenside round to the St James Centre to Jury’s Hotel in Jeffrey Street to Dynamic Earth, taking special note of the gap site, the so-called Caltongate, where something even worse may be constructed before long: no wonder the city is in danger of losing its world heritage status.

The glen between here and Salisbury Crags could be a delight, something like Florence from Fiesole. Yet it is a hotch-potch of the odious, saved only by the thread of the old Canongate running through.

Saved, too, by the Scottish Parliament – except that now the first serious attack is being planned on the integrity of Miralles’s external design.

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It is worth recalling a part of the brief to which the Catalan genius worked and for which he found an ample fulfilment.

It was that, unlike the hermetic world of Westminster where only the privileged can enter, this should be a parliament visibly open to the Scots whose patriotism and persistence had been the reasons why it came into existence.

Security may be a legitimate concern, but that original inspiration should be a greater concern. The late Donald Dewar would not have stood for enhanced security to be enforced by a piece of architectural vandalism, and First Minister Alex Salmond should show himself no less zealous in the same cause.

All great buildings and institutions change through time: their form will tend to reflect this. I doubt myself if the jigsaw-shaped representations of Scotland on the outside walls of Holyrood will all still be there at the end of the 21st century.

But if money is to be spent, let it be in fulfilment of an unfinished part of Miralles’s design: the cladding of the internal walls in wood, covering concrete, to strengthen the sense of homeliness and recall the Caledonian forest.