City of Edinburgh Council and The Collective gallery have come forward with plans for a major re-imagining of the Observatory Complex on Calton Hill (Ref. 15/01737/LBC).
Collective’s vision is to be:
… a new kind of City Observatory for Edinburgh, encouraging engagement, bringing together ideas of research and development with science, heritage and contemporary art, connecting with the locality through the acts of looking, thinking and producing in synergy with the historic culture of the City Observatory site. … The City Observatory will be a space in which practitioners, producers and publics can meet, think, debate, reflect upon the past and most importantly, take action.
To this end, Malcolm Fraser Architects envisage restoring, reopening and extending the use of the walled Observatory compound with some additional new accommodation and improvements to the landscape.
Key points
- Repairs to the external fabric and landscaping of the City Dome (the building already in use as a gallery space, pictured top-right).
- The City Observatory (the large structure pictured immediately above) to be a flexible meeting, education, workshop and retail space. Its library to be restored. The transit telescope within to be overhauled and retained. Removal of later internal partitions.
- Full repair and restoration of the Transit House as a ‘gathering and education space’.
- Demolition of the now ruinous, unsightly, unstable and hard-to-adapt 19th-century Tweedie, Cox and Crawford Domes (see below). Working parts of the latter to be transferred to the Blackford Hill Observatory.
- Construction of a new, single-storey gallery and office space, recessed into the hillside on the Observatory’s north side. Roof terrace and observation point.
- Construction of a new stone pavilion in the site’s north-west corner, ‘containing, at a lower level, back-of-house fractions and, above, a café/restaurant/salon, looking back at the City Observatory and out towards the distant Forth Bridges, cantilevered over the chamfered corner of the enclosing wall'.
- New bronze-clad kiosk within the compound’s main east gate.
- Full accessibility throughout.
- Observatory House at the south-west corner is a separate to-let entity and does not form part of these plans.
All these elements, plus interesting geological, historical and landscape considerations, are approachably explained and illustrated in the Design Statement (attached as a pdf at the foot of this page).
Positive vision
Spurtle is excited by the proposals. They represent a forward-looking and ambitious statement about modern art and its place in an historic city.
They restore and revive Playfair’s redundant structures.
They significantly improve and extend the site’s uses, and open the whole Observatory complex to the public for the first time in its almost 200-year history.
Got a view? Tell us at spurtle@hotmail.co.uk and @theSpurtle and Facebook
Gary Kerr Don't forget the retail prospects I'm sure the Council haven't.