City has designs on its own Guggenheim

AN AMBITIOUS dream to attract a Guggenheim art gallery to Edinburgh’s waterfront has taken a step closer to being realised with the unveiling of new architectural plans for the Leith project.

Jamie MacFarlane, the architect behind the design, says he wants to create a building as distinctive for Edinburgh as the Opera House for Sydney or the Guggenheim gallery for Bilbao.

The New-York based Guggenheim, famous for its spiral design and contemporary collections, is looking for other cities in which to open galleries and hold events after opening in Venice, Berlin and Bilbao.

Architects from the New York-based museum have held discussions with Forth Ports, the property developers behind the proposal, and have already inspected the Edinburgh site.

Mr MacFarlane, the director of architecture at Farningham McCreadie Partnership, said his plans, shown exclusively to The Scotsman, included designs for a second gallery facing the Guggenheim across Leith docks housing a permanent collection of European art.

Mr MacFarlane said: " The idea is to have one gallery as a showcase for international art which we hope would be the Guggenheim and the other would be to bring European art to Scotland by housing a permanent collection.

"The buildings will have a shoreline presence as distinctive as the Opera House in Sydney or the Bilbao home of the Guggenheim in Spain. Another feature will be the establishment of a water-taxi service to ferry passengers between the two galleries ."

The international collections art gallery is planned for Western Harbour, while the European contemporary art gallery is planned for the west end site of Edinburgh Harbour.

Terry Smith, the property director of Forth Ports, said the 200,000 square foot plot of land is the same size as the Guggenheim in Bilbao. "We are well aware that at the moment the Guggenheim has no immediate plans to install a gallery in the UK, but we are hoping to push ourselves up the pecking order by doing such planning now and creating a site with them in mind," said Mr Smith.

"When completed, the site will be one of the most striking in the United Kingdom putting Edinburgh on a par with other major European cities."

A spokesperson for the New York headquarters of the Guggenheim Museum said that although there were no immediate plans to install a UK gallery, "the position is not fixed over the coming years".

The idea of a secondary European art gallery in Scotland is being promoted by the arts impresario, Richard Demarco, who believes it will strengthen the city’s European standing. He said: "These projects, being right on the seaway, will provide educational facilities and a new kind of gallery right on the entrance and exit points of Europe. They will also establish the arts in an area of Edinburgh that traditionally no festival-goers venture to."

The Bilbao Guggenheim opened in Spain in October 1997 and within a year it had attracted 1.4 million visitors. Its success prompted more than 60 cities to enquire about building their own.