(Copyright Hugh Pearman/The Sunday Times: unedited version of the article published November 21, 1999)
Architects, you cannot help noticing if you knock around with them a bit, often have a curious blindness when it comes to work that is stylistically different from their own. They mostly pay lip service to the notion of "never mind the style, feel the quality", but when it comes down to it - like when they are on an awards judging panel, for instance - 87 per cent of all architects cannot see past the issue of style.
This year, such fatal subjectivity came close to scuppering the £20,000 Stirling Prize for Architecture. One of the best new cultural buildings to arrive on these shores for years very nearly wasn't even considered for the Prize.
Fortunately, some last minute behind-the-scenes manoeuvring (by some of the non-architects involved) rescued the Museum of Scotland in Edinburgh from such ignominy - and by doing so saved the reputation of this most prestigious of architecture awards. This is a hugely impressive building, a labour of love, by architects Gordon Benson and Alan Forsyth. It is modern, certainly, but not modern in the fashionable steel-and-glass sense: the museum is very much in an older, full-blooded, over-the-top monumental tradition that is most certainly not flavour of the month in metropolitan architectural circles.
Benson & Forsyth: Museum of Scotland
