Creating a Scottish Parliament Quotes

“Why this weak indulgent puppet of France and the Roman Catholic Church should have become such a romantic figure in Scottish myth is inexplicable. (So peculiar was this last Jacobite rebellion that some historical pespective is necessary: it took place while Benjamin Franklin was corresponding with his English associates on electricity, the brothers Adam were still at the University of Edinburgh, and the idea of building a new town was forming in the imagination of Provost [George] Drummond.)”
― Alan Balfour, Creating a Scottish Parliament

“Yet here he has consciously denied the Parliament of Scotland a familiar consumable image. When a lesser architect with a less wise client could have contrived a form, an image that could have popularised the project and the mission of government (playing with the stereotypes of Scottish history and charcater), Miralles has given a form to Parliament devoid of symbols (at least easily recognised symbols), devoid of answers or illusions, its form representing nothing but its own nature...

...the Parliament seems to be an object outside of history, a place speaking only of the circumstances of its own nature and use... the architect of the Scottish Parliament has created an object promising nothing but itself. At this time and place in Scottish history and to a public wary of the easy promises of politicians, it is too early to say anything. ...what the Parliament will symbolise will be formed in the events of the history it makes, formed and reformed over the centuries in response to the laws made within it and its relation to the changing idea of Scotland. It is not shaped to be loved, to be immediately attractive, to make promises it cannot keep, to toy with vulgar myths or to play with representations of history or culture, and it may never be comfortable.”
― Alan Balfour, Creating a Scottish Parliament

“The politics of the Miralles imagination has made this Parliament an informal, restless place, seeking an experience of continual change (his realities like his personality could not abide being bored), anti-authority, continually open to new ideas and possibilities. It confounds expectations, it makes no predictions, suffers no illusion. It is architecture as landscape, not portrait - it is not readable in stylistic ways, it has no word traces of classical or medieval figures; even the simplicities of modernism cannot explain what is going on here. This is a thing shaped by the poetic manipulation of the circumstances of its context and its construction.”
― Alan Balfour, Creating a Scottish Parliament

“Beginning with the Adams family and the making of classical Edinburgh, through the creation of the mercantile palaces of Glasgow and ending in the work of the brilliant and forlorn Charles Rennie Mackintosh, Scottish architecture in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries had a creative ambition that at times had an influence across Europe, yet failed to develop in the twentieth. It was a failure not of talent but of patronage: the wealth and wish for prestige of the landowners, the industrialists and the nobility had either gone or gone south.”
― Alan Balfour, Creating a Scottish Parliament

“There is, however, a more fundamental and interesting issue behind the apparent receding popularity of the Parliament, and that relates to the 'ownership' of the institution. Put simply, whose Parliament is it anyway? This is a serious question which grows out of the long process of Home Rule. The failure of Westminster parties to deliver devolution - and let us remember that a majority voted yes in the 1979 referendum meant that it was left to civil society to agitate for the Parliament. The twent-year campaign since 1979 was waged by a motley crew of campaigners and civil associations from trade unions to churches and women's groups, all unelected, but all donning the mantel of speaking for Scotland. Some parliamentarians like to think that as elected representatives, they alone represent the nation, but that is not how the nation sees it. Parliament became the people's forum, on loan to the political class, as long as they treated it, and them, with some respect, given the partiality of poitics in the twenty-first century. Power sharing - between government, parliament and people - is a three-way system, and not the preserve of any single agent.”
― David McCrone, Creating a Scottish Parliament

“Would Scotland have built its Parliament if it had known then what it knows now? Probably not. Should it have done so? Indubitably yes. Many of the key decisions in the life of a nation depend less on careful and considered judgement, and more - more often than we like to admit - on happenstance, serendipity, and sheer bloody-mindedness. 'There shall be a Scottish Parliament. I like that.' said Donald Dewar, on whom the title father of the nation sat, like his suits, ill at ease. It was the combined vision of this awkward, accomplished and deeply cultured man with the quixotic, sometimes infuriating, dream of the Catalan, Enric Miralles, which gave it birth, and which left the rest of us working it through, defending its costs, filling in the spaces.”
― David McCrone, Creating a Scottish Parliament

“Miralles' parliament is therefore neither grand nor patrician. For those of us who work there, it feels more like a village - a natural continuation of the Royal Mile, with its marketplace in the Garden Lobby, and its nooks and crannies reflecting the vennels and closes of the Old Town of Edinburgh and the barrios of Barcelona.”
― George Reid, Creating a Scottish Parliament