The Best in Leisure and Public Architecture [antikvár]

THE BEST IN LEISURE AND PUBLIC ARCHITECTURE Introduction "All architecture proposes an effect on ttie human mind, not merely a service to the human frame. " John Ruskin Architecture is a public art. Whether individual buildings in the landscape, small collections of dwellings arranged as a township or the massive concentrations of structures that establish a city, architecture comprises the built environment. As such, it is possibly the only art that has to be looked at. It is because architecture is considered to be public property that local government agencies in some parts of the world take it upon themselves to limit the degree by which architecture can offend, by establishing planning laws to ensure that the aesthetics of architecture are publicly scrutinized before the act of construction. The New Museum of Scotland in Edinburgh illustrates the problems and challenges of making a public building. Alan Phillips Associates addressed the problem by going underground. The competition brief called for a very large building within a city context that is historically fragile. If the buiiding were to be erected above ground it would have dwarfed its neighbours, and would have been of a scale and character that might have injured existing buildings of architectural and historic interest. Consequently, the architects lowered all but three storeys of the building into a huge quarry, leaving that which stood above ground as simple and ordinary, not wishing it to be in contention with the existing urban fabric. That which was below ground declared its visibility by its invisibility, looking outwards to the existing geomorphology of the site and inwards to a series of interlocking voids that created dramatic elevations, private to themselves and visitors, and eccentric without interfering with the above grade visual context. The New Museum of Scotland by Alan Phillips Associates