Graphic Design
If you are looking for a simple business card design or for a complete corporate identity, Archileb’s team will be with you from the brainstorming phase, into the creation, to the completion of all corporate identity items (logos, letterheads, invoices, receipts, brochures, etc…).
For further assistance, you can email us at services@archileb.com.
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Scottish Parliamant, Holyrood, Dewar, Miralles, Frazer Enquiry and Royal Mile constituted a vocabulary that haunted the Scottish and English media for the last five years. Lately, a new word was added: Stirling Prize. Scotland’s Parliamentary tradition (which could be traced back to the twelfth century) saw upheaval, disruption and dissolution even before the Act of Union of 1707 with England, which formed the Parliament of Great Britain. A strong sense of national identity survived although Scotland contributed greatly to British parliamentary life at Westminster, until it was able to regain a parliament as a devolved legislature (having limited powers to pass laws in education, health, agriculture, justice, and limited tax varying capability) through the Scotland Act of 1998. This degree of domestic authority, although foreign policy remains with the UK parliament in Westminster, satisfied to a certain extent the long-felt desire of Scots for a measure of self governance. In an eagerness to express formally what has been gained politically, Donald Dewar, Scotland’s first First Minister launched an international competition to find an architect to work with on the building that would present nothing less than “an image of Scotland’s new position within the United Kingdom as we move in to the 21st century”. The project, funded by the Scottish Consolidated Fund, was awarded to Catalan architect Enric Miralles (The Catalans are role models for ambitious minorities attempting to assert their identities) following his submission showing a collection of leaves laid over the landscape, and a photograph he had taken on a student trip of two upturned turf-covered rowing boats he found on a beach that may or may not have been in Scotland. 
(Scottish Painting used by the Architects as inspiration for the winning proposal)
So what happens when you embark on a journey in a politicized environment, in search of a spatial representation of a temporal event in a particular context involving national feelings as abstract as history, identity and pride? Keeping in mind that you’re blind sighted by your upturned boat, chose the only site without a feasibility study, didn’t define a clear project brief, awarded the project to a foreign architect, have been over optimistic about building costs in order to get the project off the ground, and finally made the wrong choice about the construction management procurement scheme (Issue raised by the private inquiry of Lord Frasier as the main reason behind the outrun of estimated costs). In that case, you deliver a project three years late and ten times over budget (₤410 millions) within a cycle of variations, media and public outrage. But you may also win one of the most prestigious architectural awards, the Sterling Prize; awarded by the RIBA (Royal Institute of British Architects). To whom the prize should’ve been actually awarded is not clear. Is it to the team under the upturned boat: composed of the people, civil servants and MP’s, and Architects? To the boat-project itself? Or to the bird on the boat, probably a Scottish one and who had to pay ₤80 like every other fellow citizen to get his parliament? The judges stressed that they selected buildings on their architectural merit not on their procurement. In their citation they described the Scottish Parliament as a "statement of sparkling excellence" and praised its late architect Enric Miralles for his "extraordinary architectural ambition and design vision." However the issue is not in the won prizes, since a whole pragmatic debate touches their awarding criteria, meaning and impact on selected projects. The issue is about the role assigned to or expected from architecture in ideas concealing projects like the Scottish parliament. Is it a passive role of a reflection and representation of a landscape, selective images and local materials and craftsmanship? In the words of the architect: “a building growing from the land it represents”, a geographical approach rendering a building familiar and easy to identify with, a magnet of meanings inspired by history and knowledge. Or is it an active one, of an architecture that generates messages, beyond the literal identification with the landscape or the vernacular, conveying meanings appropriate to the activity it houses, and the aspirations of its people? An abstract approach that would produce a building to deciphere through imagination and dreams. Roland Barthes recognized a double movement in architecture studying the Eiffel Tower: “This double movement is a profound one: architecture is always dream and function, expression of a utopia and instrument of a convenience” This couldn’t be more relevant to the Scottish parliament, a building that shelters democracy as a function, in favor of a dream, independence; an instrument of convenience drawn from a mixture of steel, oak, and granite, embedded in the Edinburgh's medieval fabric at the foot of the famous Royal Mile in front of the spectacular Holyrood Park and Salisbury Crags, escaping to the borders of the irrational through its infinite decoration and vast array of symbolism, organically transitioning through its poetic forms from the city to the Scottish countryside. Only a naïve political perception would undermine the pragmatic ideological and transitional stage that Scotland is currently experiencing, and only a poetic architectural approach would be suitable to satisfy nationalism. After all what is nationalism but nostalgia in an era that’s racing towards globalism? Winston Churchill once remarked that: “first we shape our buildings, and afterwards our buildings shape us”. It is by a Christian tradition that the spiritual excludes the familiar. It is in this line that Miralles’s invented volumes, timber gothic vaults, monastic cells, and sshapes of light, gathered into a temple of democracy where hopefully worship rituals will shape politics to the will of its people. |
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