Building Design

It is easy to be underwhelmed by the Weston Link which forms the new subterranean connection between the Royal Scottish Academy and the National Gallery of Scotland on Edinburgh's Mound. Easy, but wrong — this is a work of considerable sophistication and not a little subtlety. It draws heavily on John and Su Miller's many years of adapting and extending existing museum and gallery spaces. It is not the type of all-singing, all-dancing architectural response we have come to expect from new public buildings in recent years and, in the absence of any overt formal or structural gymnastics, the success of the design solution needs to be assessed upon old-fashioned criteria such as good planning, sectional ingenuity and constructional discipline.