Architect:
EMBT Architectes Associats - Barcelona.
The Parliament has a place in people's minds, a mental image that should be expressed in the site development. The building design should be like the land, built out of the land and carved into the land.
This is not a building in a park or garden but rather the form for gathering people. Instead of a building as an overwhelming monument, with rhetorical forms and classical dimensions, this building is concieved by a psychological approach.
What is the mental image of the new Parliament? How can we relate as citizens to the new Parliament? How is it going to be fundamentamentally distinctive from other European Parliaments?
The Parliament is a fragment of a large gathering situation. This natural amphitheatre that slopes, is what the land is offering us to build on. It is a diagram that could be explained in many ways... This social concept could have many "forms". A story definition is needed; Citizens sitting, resting, thinking but in a similar place and position as the parliamentarians.
We hope that from this emerges a series of identifications between the building and the land, land and citizens, citizens and the building, not just because of an "image", but physically shaping the act of sitting together.
[zie ook de eigen
website van het nieuwe Schotse Parlement]
