Although Meier for once does not have to battle with Gehry, his usual nemesis, in this competition - and Gehry is sorely missed, if only for entertainment value - he does have to contend with a compatriot in the form of New York based Rafael Vinoly, here teamed up with Edinburgh-based Reiach and Hall (of St. Enoch's Centre, Glasgow, fame). Vinoly was little-known outside the States until last year, when he completed the mighty Tokyo Forum - a series of concert and conference halls plugged into the vast elliptical glazed hull of the Forum itself, a covered public meeting-place of stupendous scale. Vinoly has a weakness for grand gestures and simplified forms: for Edinburgh, typically, he has designed an "object building", a big rotunda trailing the rest of the Parliament buildings behind it like a stubby comet. Set against this big, naïve shape, the Palace of Holyrood seems delicacy itself.
Despite paying lip service in his entry to the urban character of the Royal Mile from Castle to Palace, Vinoly has effectively just plonked down a great big cake tin, which might as well be the "anchor store" in a shopping mall. A cylindrical building is a time-honoured way of resolving awkward corners and conflicting grids, but Vinoly's clumsy adoption of the form here succeeds in making Meier's antiseptic, sexless architecture seem almost subtle.
In my view, both Vinoly and Meier are shown up by Michael Wilford's entry. Like both of the American schemes, Wilford's is made to absorb the shift in the urban grid between the eastern end of the Old Town and the formality of the palace. His glazed rotunda is smaller than Vinoly's, and rises from a rectangular surrounding building. To this he adds a flanking tower, to add to the sundry vertical features you encounter at intervals down the Royal Mile. His big idea, though, is to conceive the whole building as a piazza crossed with a viewing deck. Like Miralles, he has considered the views out to the surrounding crags, from various points, very carefully. But I have no idea, from the material presented, what Wilford's building would look like viewed from the Holyrood direction. There's a long rectangular podium-like slab indicated there, but no detail is vouchsafed.
Denton Corker Marshall from Melbourne, with Glass Murray Architects of Glasgow, have produced what is so far the sketchiest of all the contenders. Its jumble of leaning and interleaving forms culminates in a debating chamber that eschews the rotunda shape, instead swinging out of one corner (at the same point chosen by Meier) in an undoubtedly dramatic ellipse. The pencil sketches are exciting: their one too-perfect computer-generated image looks disappointingly more like an international hotel or corporate HQ. Still, as the days have passed I've warmed to the Australians a little, as I've cooled to the Americans. They have a reasonably original idea that could be made to work.
But on my personal wish list it would still be Miralles first, Wilford second, Denton Corker Marshall third, Meier fourth, and Vinoly fifth. For me, Miralles is first by quite some distance. The fact that he relates primarily to the surrounding land rather than the adjacent city has a symbolic importance: this is the Scottish Parliament, not some Edinburgh city hall. I think he has taken the risk of modifying the brief a bit, too - wasn't a circular debating chamber specified, or at least recommended? This too is in his favour: those who intelligently question competition briefs reveal that they have thought deeply about the design challenge, to the extent of being prepared to take risks.
