 |
|
| ||||||||||||||||||||||||||
|
|
| ||||||||||||||||||||||||||
|
|
|
|
|
| ||||||||
The Scottish Parliament Building is now the home of the Scottish Parliament at Holyrood, within the UNESCO World Heritage Site in Edinburgh. The Members of the Scottish Parliament (MSPs) held their first debate in the building on Tuesday, September 7, 2004. The formal opening by the Queen is scheduled for October 9, 2004.
The Parliament Building is actually a complex of several buildings with a total floor area of around 29,000 m² (312,000 square feet), providing accommodation for the 129 MSPs and around 1,000 civil servants. The buildings include:
The Debating Chamber contains a shallow horseshoe of seating for the MSPs. Galleries above the main floor can also accommodate a total of 255 members of the public, 18 guests, and 34 members of the press. The roof, reminiscent of an upturned boat, is supported by a structure of laminated oak beams joined at a total of 112 stainless steel connectors (each slightly different), which in turn are suspended on steel rods from the walls. In entering the chamber, MEPs pass under a stome lintel that was once part of the pre-1707 parliament building, Parliament Hall.
Tower Buildings contain six committee rooms with curving white plaster vaulted ceilings, and the offices of Ministers plus parliamentary and goverment support staff.
The MSP building contains offices for each MSP and two members of staff, fitted out with custom designed furniture. The building is between four and six storeys in height, and is clad in granite mosaic. At its north end the building is six storeys high (ground floor plus five) stepping down to four storeys (ground floor plus three) at the south end.
Construced behind a retained facade, the Cannongate Buildings behind house IT, finance, procurement and infomation offices.
Originally dating from 1667, Queensbury House has been extensively refurbished to provide facilities for the Presiding Officer, Deputy Presiding Officers, the Chief Executive, and various parliamentary support staff.
A separate Media Tower has been constructed adjacent to the Debating Chamber to provide media facilities.
The facilities for the public include meeting rooms in Tower Buildings, and a restaurant, education centre, exhibition space, and a shop below the Debating Chamber.
The construction of the Parliament Building proved controversial in a number of respects: the decision to construct a new building, the choice of site, the selection of a non-Scottish architect, the selection of Bovis as construction manager after having earlier been excluded from the shortlist, and serious cost and time overruns.
The then Secretary of State for Scotland Donald Dewar was adamant that a new building should be provided for the new Parliament. Work commenced in late 1997 with the demolition of a brewery on the site chosen. An alternative site at The High School of Edinburgh was rejected on grounds of size and location.
In January 1998 an international competition was announced by the Scottish Office to find an architect to build the Parliament, and in early 1999 the Catalan Enric Miralles was chosen, with the design work being awarded to EMBT/RMJM (Scotland) Ltd, a Spanish-Scottish joint venture design company created for the project.
Miralles' design was radical and highly complex, involving a series of towers and an open plan debating chamber. The most distinctive external feature was a roof in the shape of an upturned boat. Once the Scottish Parliament came into existance, in June 1999, the size of the building was increased by some 47%. The project was also complicated by the deaths in 2000 of Miralles and Dewar, and existance of a multi-headed client (consisting of the Scottish Parliament Corporate Body, the Presiding Officer, and an architectural advisor), who took over the project from the Scottish Office and Scottish Executive while it was already under construction.
By March 2004 the architects had issued around 18,000 orders for changes in the design, and the cost had reached the sum of 430 million pounds (compared to an original budget of 55 million in July 1998 when the architects were appointed). This equates to 85 pounds for each of the five million people in Scotland .
In May 2003 First Minister Jack McConnell announced a major public inquiry into the handling of the building project, headed by Private Finance Initiative in order to speed construction, but without properly evaluation of the financial risks of doing so, and - in a decision that Fraser stated "beggers belief" - without asking Ministers to approve it. This was one of the two most flawed decisions.
Following the report Jack McConnell stated that the Fraser recommendations would be fully implemented, and that fundamental reform of the Civil Service was already underway, with trained professionals being recruited to handle such projects in future. John Elvidge, the top civil servant in Scotland admitted that they had not followed best practice and apologised for the way the project had been handled. He was not ruling out the possibility that disciplinary action might be taken against any staff.
In his report, Lord Fraser set out a number of recommendations stemming from his inquiry. The recommendations cover the:
|
||||
| View Live Article | This article is from Wikipedia. All text is available under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License | |
||
