Caltongate architecture not suited to Old Town

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Archiseek / UK / Scotland / News / 2006 / May 10

Does Edinburgh really need more city centre office accommodation? Yet another 'signature office'? Within a few hundred metres of my home in the New Town one office has been demolished and rebuilt as flats, another is in the planning process for the same, and Standard Life's Tanfield complex is unused. The architectural style of Caltongate is mediocre. It would pass muster along with the other developments in the Waterfront and elsewhere around Edinburgh. But this is the Old Town. The Caltongate plans have no distinctive feature that marks, or reflects, the time and the place. It could be Ayr or Basingstoke or Chelmsford. It isn't 'Edinburgh'. For example, I don't think the Holyrood Parliament building is right for where it is, but it does work after a fashion, because it is a serious architectural statement.

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