Gordon Benson commands Edinburgh
photo: Jeremy Sutton Hibbert
Daylight, much of it beaming down from roof level, reaches into every nook and cranny in the manner of the great late 18th and early 19th century architect Sir John Soane - often quoted by today's architects, but seldom so well as this. Daylight even filters into the deliberately gloomy areas of the basement, given over to ancient history, pre and post-Roman. As you move upwards through the building - and forwards chronologically - things become lighter and lighter until you get to the 20th century at the top, and then step out onto roof terraces, and finally, balanced high on top, a timber-decked roof garden. From here you get views of Edinburgh in all directions - up to the Castle, across to the sea at Leith, down to Holyrood Palace and Salisbury Crags behind. This is a belvedere to rival the Castle itself and there's a restaurant up here which will surely be swamped by the demand. At most points on your internal journey, you can see from one gallery into another, or into the great triangular entrance hall. This is not just so that you can find your way around, but so that you can always relate one period to another. Here and there, interior and exterior are fused completely - as where a set of iron gates by the architect Sir Robert Lorimer are set in a window. Look through the gates, and there is Edinburgh Castle again - which Lorimer himself added to in the 1920s. As Benson observes, "the game in the Museum is the whole theatrical one of almost schizophrenically suspending your disbelief - knowing where you are, but oscillating between a real and a projected world."
The project is conceived as a gesamtkunstwerk, a total work of art where, as in Mackintosh's Glasgow School of Art (1896-1909), the architect's hand is to be seen everywhere. The architecture and the artefacts displayed are well-nigh inseparable. Display cases, designed by the architects, are set into the thickness of the walls. The main exhibition hall is sized to contain a huge Newcomen beam engine from a Lanarkshire mine, a locomotive, a primitive rural house. Walkways are designed to reveal the upper parts of church screens first encountered on the floor below. On the outside, one big section of the facade has been pulled out like a permanently-open drawer. Inside, you discover that the room made by the "drawer" contains a specific and rather beautiful paper-making machine, itself contained within a purpose-made display case that picks up on the industrial aesthetic of the machine. Thus just one exhibit comes to influence the appearance of the entire building.
This approach is fine for the "trophy objects", but it cannot help much with the weaknesses in the collection. True, the museum is still in a state of chaos, and many of its contents are not yet properly displayed. Only when the public is finally admitted will we know for sure. But consider: this is the first time there has been a Museum of Scotland, even though one has been mooted since 1951. Since the Act of Union, amassing a national collection has not been high on the agenda. Many Scottish artefacts have been regarded simply as "British" for hundreds of years and have therefore not been concentrated particularly in Edinburgh. There have been cries of protest from Scotland's smaller existing museums about what is alleged to be the hoovering-up of what few valuable objects are going by the new kid on the block. And there is no getting away from the fact that Scotland may have a colourful history, but it is a small country, and small countries with sparse populations do not produce all that many different collectible things. The Museum is displaying only a fraction of its collection, but much of that is due to repeats - how many flint arrow-heads do you need?
The main weaknesses seem to be in the industrial area - notwithstanding the beam engine, the loco, and various models of ships - and in the 20th century, where the collection appears to be woeful. Hence the Museum's much-publicised and rather desperate gimmick of getting celebrities from Sean Connery to Tony Blair (deemed an honorary Scot) to nominate objects - any objects - to represent the century. Blair nominated a Fender Stratocaster electric guitar, Connery a copy of the Declaration of Arbroath popped into a milk bottle (he was once a milkman) and TV presenter Kirsty Wark, for some reason, a Saab convertible car. These have been put into rather sad, flimsy-looking displays which the architects, rarely, had no control over and which are quite at odds with the design of the whole space.
The problem at the bottom of the museum is different - there is too much stuff, too much clutter, down there. Some rather good artworks in slate and clay by Andy Goldsworthy, not to mention some characteristic figures by Sir Eduardo Paolozzi, are overwhelmed by glass-case culture. It's a big space, and by rights you should be able to see from one side to the other, but instead it has become a labyrinth. Again, it's not what the architects wanted. But such displays can be changed. The Museum will settle down. Everywhere else, the power of the concept is there in undiluted form.
