Hearing this, from my lair in the south, brought memories flooding back. Suddenly I was back in the 1980s, and councillor George Kerevan was trying to turn Edinburgh into a capital of contemporary design, instead of the sort of place that had hit a post-war low with the widely hated 1960s concrete bunkers of the St. James Centre on Leith Street, and which had then reacted by retreating into a historicist shell. Kerevan had instigated a flurry of competitions for vacant sites, of which the city had many. I remember meeting one of his protégées, the American architect Richard Meier, who had been invited in to masterplan the Edinburgh Park business district out near the airport. Over a long dinner, Meier told me how his park would be based on the model of the New Town, and how it would be one in the eye for the post-modernists he hated so much.

Well, up to a point, Mr. Meier. Edinburgh Park did indeed turn out to be a modernist enclave, even if few going there today would immediately recognize the New Town model. But Mr. Kerevan, if I remember rightly, also had a lot to do with getting the city its new financial district, built in what used to be that bizarre moonscape around the Sheraton Hotel. There, the buildings are done out like American football players, all helmets and shoulder-pads. Ditto Saltire Court on Castle Terrace, completed in 1991 in full post-modern fig by architects Campbell and Arnott. It finally filled the city’s notorious “hole in the ground” where many had wanted an opera house (coincidentally the St. James Centre was also built on a site previously earmarked for an opera house, by no less a luminary than that prolific postwar planner, Patrick Abercrombie). After all the waiting, Saltire Court was a distinct anticlimax. Its chief appeal for me is the unlikely existence within it of the Traverse Theatre by architect Nicholas Groves-Raines. Can it really be ten years old already?

Kerevan, these days a political commentator and SNP activist, was later reported as saying, in a Royal Fine Art Commission debate in 2000, that for all his efforts back then, there had been virtually no “trickle-down” from celebrity architecture projects to improve the general standard of new building. He also felt that he had failed to get the city any truly great architecture. Well, that’s honest. At least he kicked the city out of what had become an architectural torpor. Point is: have things now gone too far in the other direction?