National treasure house - design of Museum of Scotland in Edinburgh by Benson + Forsyth

Architectural Review, The, April, 1999 by Peter Davey

Crafted with love and sensitivity for its location and for its poignant contents, the building that tells Scotland's story is a major and popular contribution to the cityscape of Edinburgh and development of museums as a type.

Until now, no decent public buildings have been made in Edinburgh since Robert Lorimer built the Scottish National War Memorial on the Castle Rock in the 1920s. With its amazing site dominated by the two extinct volcanoes: the castle crag, and Arthur's Seat (a mountain in the middle of the modern town), Edinburgh is one of the most daunting places to design in that can be imagined. Particularly so, as at the turn of the eighteenth century in an extraordinary burst of prosperity and cultural self-confidence, the Scots made their capital the finest NeoClassical city in the world - the Enlightenment was revealed in three dimensions. Craig, Adam, Playfair and their contemporaries were almost impossible to follow, and for 150 years their gigantic shadows overwhelmed architectural creativity. Relative loss of prosperity compared with Glasgow generated a pawky, Presbyterian provincial culture in Edinburgh, run by canny clerics, lawyers and bankers, vastly different from the proud, elegant Athenians of the North of earlier generations.

Now at last, the city has got a good new big building in its centre. For almost as long as anyone can remember, there was a large hole in the middle of the academic enclave, on the southern edge of the medieval Old Town, which runs down the moraine tail from the castle crag to the palace at the other end of the Royal Mile. The gap was roughly on the site of the south gate in the old city wall. Here, Chambers Street runs roughly east to west, and marks the boundary where the (largely revived) picturesque medieval and Georgian fabric changes to nineteenth-century eclecticism. At the west end of the street, four other roads meet, making the corner site one of the most important visually in the whole city.

The void has been filled by Benson Forsyth's Museum of Scotland, an urbane and imaginative contribution to the cityscape. It takes cues partly from its neighbours and partly from history and the landscape. The new building has external walls of veined buff and slightly pink sawn Moray sandstone, which resonates with (though does not copy) the traditional Edinburgh ashlar (the old local quarries are worked out). In effect, the stone walls are a shell from within which the white rendered concrete core rises to a shallow concave roof. The stone takes its height from its neighbours on both sides, Victorian medieval to the south, and to the east along Chambers Street, the Royal Scottish Museum, a confident mid-nineteenth century building, designed in international revived Florentine style by Captain Fowke (of Albert Hall fame). Fowke's raked ashlar plinth is echoed in parts of the new building's base. The main impact of the new design does not come from contextualism: a stone cylinder at the corner links the two external walls and forms a landmark at the junction of the five roads. Though not a stair, it is reminiscent of the drum stairs of Edinburgh's tenements. Its smooth stone walls are incised and penetrated by slots and openings which are carefully adjusted to frame dramatic views over the city; the most important opening through the thick walls is the main entrance from Chambers Street.

Once across the bridge and inside, you are led up to the left along stone stairs or gentle ramp of the long thin entrance route. You are drawn on and upwards by the lines of raked ashlar, which has come in through the drum with you. The space is in part quite low, and seems a bit dark when you arrive, but its directionality is confirmed by a vivid splash of light at the end. Luminance spills over the reception desk which inflects you sideways. It comes from the great glazed triangular court, which is geometrically an extension of Fowke's wonderful glass and iron great hall, as light and elegant as the outside of his museum is pompous and stolid. When alterations to the nineteenth-century building are complete, there will be a luminous axis parallel to Chambers Street running through the whole complex. A huge window at the pointed west end increases the luminosity of the space and focuses on the Greyfriars Church, a late Gothic building which figured large in seventeenth-century Edinburgh history.

The triangular Hawthornden Court is the main orientation centre in a building which is supposed to tell the story of Scotland from earliest times to the present. To do this, time has been divided up by level, with natural history and anthropology in the basement, medieval and renaissance affairs on the same level as the orientation court, and the eighteenth, nineteenth and twentieth century collections on upper floors. There is a huge number of exhibits which vary from small and delicate objects like jewellery to large machines dating from the Industrial Revolution. This kind of museum is now rather unfashionable in museological circles, but very popular with the public. It is low on dioramas, interactive devices and massive quantities of explanatory matter, and the collections consist of objects brought together by generations of curators to form a sort of cultural cock-a-leekie, a rare Scots dish made to an unrepeatable recipe.