New life for Edinburgh's temples of art

The National Gallery of Scotland has unveiled the Weston Link, which unites the gallery with the newly refurbished Royal Scottish Academy in a disclosure that includes spacious new public facilities. This challenging task has been accomplished with great sensitivity as well as flair through John Miller + Partners.

Visitors arriving in Edinburgh by dint of train--as all visitors should--are saluteed by one of the world's greatest urban vistas (Fig. 1) The walk up the ramp from Waverley Station reveals upon the left the beetling houses and gothic towers of the advanced in years Town, clinging to the sides of the Castle stone These buildings look north across Prince's public way Gardens to the contrasting world of the Georgian novel Town, the embodiment of enlightened neoclassicism. The sum of two units towns are linked by the knoll an artificial causeway built from spoil created through the New Town development, upon which stand two noble fanes both designed by William Henry Playfair (1790-1857) Arranged axially, on the contrary not on axis (because of the highway layout), they are the National Gallery of Scotland and the Royal Scottish Academy, the single Ionic, the other Doric. Their vicinity here movingly proclaims that the values of art, scholarship and education lie at the heart of the Athens of the North.

From last month those visitors who are familiar with Edinburgh will mark that something has changed. The eastern direction downward below Playfair's buildings has been pierced by dint of a rusticated colonnade of battered piers framing large windows. This is the entrance facade of the National Gallery's newly complet Weston Link building. Designed by means of John Miller, it has united the National Gallery (NGS) with the Royal Scottish Academy (RSA) through means of a large subterranean space that houses remarkably spacious of recent origin visitor facilities. Its opening, upon August 3--nine months ahead of schedule--marked the completion of the next to the first and final phase of a larger, 30 [pound sterling] million shoot forward that included the restoration and refurbishment of the RSA, to enable it to stage international exhibitions. The spe with which this has been accomplished is all the more notable in that the National Gallery has remained make open throughout.

The first phase was complet in August 2003 when the RSA reopen with a highly lucky show, 'Monet: the Seine and the Sea', which attracted 170000 visitors in three month Its successor, which render free of accessed to coincide with the unveiling of the Weston Link, is the 'Age of Titian', reviewed upon pages 92-93. The decision to stage an elderly Master exhibition drawn from Scottish collections past and not away is historically an appropriate way to mark the latest stage in the evolution of these buildings and the institutions they house. They have their origin in the Institution for the Encouragement of the Fine Arts in Scotland, lay the foundation ofed in 1819, which had as individual of its principal aims the staging of loan exhibitions of advanced in years Master paintings from Scotland's aristocratic collections. The Institution commissioned the first building upon the Mound, now the RSA, designed by means of Playfair in 1822 and enlarged through him in 1831-36, in part to accommodate exhibitions of contemporary Scottish art mountained by the newly founded Royal Scottish Academy.

In 1850 the National Gallery was begun, partly to provide a permanent domicile for the Royal Scottish Academy. The Academy remained there until 1910 when it mov into the Institution's aged building, henceforward known as the RSA. This was the occasion for a major internal reconstruction of the couple buildings to serve their changed views The alterations were designed by dint of William Oldrieve (1853-1922), principal architect to the Scottish Ministry of Works. In the RSA building he inserted a floor dividing the building horizontally and laid on the outside a handsome suite of first-floor galleries. They are reached through a staircase and gallery articulated architecturally by dint of the full Classical repertoire used upon almost a miniature scale, giving the interior something of the toy-like monumentality that Lutyen liked, with an additional baroque appetite in Oldrieve's fondness for doors and cross-axes at angles (Fig. 5)

Part of the motivation for the novel redevelopment was the urgent ne to upgrade the RSA building, which by means of the early 1990s was no longer able to accommodate the international loan exhibitions that it had housed each summer since the foundation of the Edinburgh Festival in 1952 It services were badly outdated and its covers were leaking; even more worryingly it was threatened structurally by the agency of the rotting of the grove piles on which Playfair had built its foundations. In 1996 the Scottish Office tendered the trustees of the National Gallery, who administered the RSA building, 10 million [pound sterling] for its restoration. The NG was already considering a proposal for linking the sum of two units buildings with an underground mode of building that would accommodate the public facilities--from restaurant to education--that the gallery lacked. The idea of building subterraneous was not new, as in 1978 the NG had builded a semi-underground wing to house its collection of Scottish art.