Scottish Parliament Building
The Scottish Parliament Building is the home of the Scottish Parliament at Holyrood, within the UNESCO World Heritage Site in central Edinburgh. Construction of the building commenced in June 1999 and the Members of the Parliament held their first debate in the new building on 7 September 2004. The building aimed to achieve a poetic union between the Scottish landscape, its people, its culture, and the city of Edinburgh. The Parliament Building won numerous awards including the 2005 Stirling Prize.
About Scottish Parliament Building in brief
The Scottish Parliament Building is the home of the Scottish Parliament at Holyrood, within the UNESCO World Heritage Site in central Edinburgh. Construction of the building commenced in June 1999 and the Members of the Parliament held their first debate in the new building on 7 September 2004. The building aimed to achieve a poetic union between the Scottish landscape, its people, its culture, and the city of Edinburgh. The Parliament Building won numerous awards including the 2005 Stirling Prize and has been described by landscape architect Charles Jencks as \”a tour de force of arts and crafts and quality without parallel in the last 100 years of British architecture\”. It is located 1 km east of Edinburgh city centre on the edge of the Old Town. Comprising an area of 1.6 ha, with a perimeter of 480 m, the Scottish parliament building is located in a large site previously housed the Scottish and Newcastle brewery which were demolished to make way for the building. It is bordered by the Canongate stretch of the Royal Mile on its northern side, Horse Wynd on its eastern side, where the public entrance to the building is, and Reid’s Close on its western side. The south eastern side of the complex is bounded by the Our Dynamic Earth visitor attraction which opened in July 1999, and Queen’s Drive which fringes the slopes of Salisbury Crags. To the south of the parliamentary complex are the steep slopes of Arthur’s Seat. The Holyrod and Dumbiedykes areas, to the west of the site, have been extensively redeveloped since 1998, with new retail, hotel and office developments, including Barclay House, the new offices of The Scotsman Publications Ltd.
In the immediate vicinity of theBuilding is the Palace ofHolyroodhouse, which is borders by the broad expanse of Holyroods Park. The Scottish Parliament was established on 11 September 1997 after a referendum held on the establishment of a directly elected Scottish Parliament. Before 1707, the Kingdom of Scotland was a sovereign independent state which had its own legislature—the Parliament of Scotland—which met, latterly, at Parliament House in Edinburgh. As a consequence, Scotland was directly governed from London for the next 292 years without a legislature or a Parliament building of its own. Following this referendum, the Scottish Office, led by the then Secretary of State for Scotland, Donald Dewar, decided that a new purpose-built facility would be constructed in Edinburgh, which was not the official site until the official picture was entered into the official record in the 1990s. The official picture of the new Scottish Parliament entered the picture after the official opening of the Holyrorood House on 9 October 2004. A major public inquiry into the handling of the construction, chaired by the former Lord Advocate, Lord Fraser of Carmyllie, was established in 2003. The inquiry concluded in September 2004 and criticised the management of the whole project from the realisation of cost increases down to the way in which major design changes were implemented.
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This page is based on the article Scottish Parliament Building published in Wikipedia (as of Nov. 30, 2020) and was automatically summarized using artificial intelligence.
