Scottish Parliament Building - Critical Response

Critical Response

Public reaction to the design of the building has been mixed. In the first 6 months of the building being open to the public, 250,000 people visited it, which Presiding Officer George Reid has said showed the public were "voting with their feet". Critics of the building, such as Margo MacDonald MSP, have pointed out that the high number of visitors does not prove that all of them like the building. As well as cost, criticisms of the building stem primarily from the modernist and abstract architecture, the quality of the building work and the location of the building.

The mixed public reaction contrasts sharply with the response from architectural critics. Its rampant complexity, iconography and layering of meaning and metaphor are widely regarded as producing a building which is "quite a meal". This prompted Catherine Slessor, writing in the Architectural Review, to describe it as "A Celtic-Catalan cocktail to blow both minds and budgets, it doesn't play safe, energetically mining a new seam of National Romanticism refined and reinterpreted for the twenty-first century." Jencks attempted to dampen criticism of the cost overruns by questioning how 'value for money' might be judged. For him, the building is not just a functional or economic enterprise, it is an exploration of national identity and in comparing it to other comparable assemblies, not least the Palace of Westminster, he argues the cost is comparable. The conception of the building has been singled out for praise, particularly in the way it re-establishes Scotland's traditional focus towards mainland Europe and its values by means of the layout of the non-adversarial debating chamber and the creation of the public spaces in front of the building, "where people can meet and express themselves as a force". In an era of the Bilbao effect and the iconic building, Jencks is impressed that rather than being a monumental building, as is usual for capital landmarks, the building creates a complex union of nature and culture that nestles itself into the landscape.

The building has also won a number of awards, including an award at the VIII Biennial of Spanish Architecture, the RIAS Andrew Doolan Award for Architecture, and the 2005 Stirling Prize, the UK's most prestigious architecture award. The inclusion of the Scottish Parliament Building on the shortlist for the Stirling Prize in 2004, led the judges to describe the building as "a statement of sparkling excellence". In October 2005 the building was identified as Scotland's 4th greatest modern building by readers of Prospect magazine.