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Scottish Parliament

From the news section: "It's no secret that we love the Scottish Parliament by the late Enric Miralles."

I've tried to like this project. I had a studio with Miralles and I'm looking for the discipline and the elegance of the work he spoke about and showed to us then. From the pictures the parliament looks like a baroque-modern collection of gimmicks. I can see that there's an attempt to feed off of Mackintosh and related Scottish themes, but maybe some of them should have been edited. This is more over-the-top than later Stirling!

I don't know if this project is being celebrated as a way of honoring Miralles post-mortem, if it's because it's really better than the pictures would suggest, or if the project is just so crazily exuberant that it seems to hip to be questioned.

My suspicion is that this was cobbled together from random ideas of Miralles' by a group of disciples after he died and that he himself might have pulled together the chaos of half-baked ideas if he had had the time.

What do the rest of you think?

 
Oct 23, 04 12:31 am
bigness

the inside looks a lot like the shopping gallery at canarywarf, overpolished marble for an expensive commercial development. but then again most of the details were drawn by another practice whose name i cant remember now. I think that if you look at the original drawings by miralles it is still, in form, an incredibly poetic building. try and imagin it all made out of concrete and wood, with non of the "decoration" applied afterard...take the new market in barcellona. there the decoration had a certain gaudi feeling about it and perfectly fits with the surroundings (at least from the pics). in th scottish parliamet it all looks rather postmodern...

the riba journal has a very extensive collection of intereio pictures, i think the spaces, deprived of their cheap materiality (for which i believe mirales was not responsible) look very human, specially for an istitutional building

Oct 23, 04 1:10 pm  · 
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