Och Aye! Oh No...

摘要

Building Biographies is the Scottish government's fourth biannual study of contemporary Scottish architecture. It's very, very Scottish - to the point of kitsch. The book's heavy-stock, matt-finished pages are richly illustrated with beautiful photography and present a land of honest toil, quiet glens and windswept, heather-speckled moors (with geese flying overhead). It's a land defined by low-rise handcrafted structures, built by locals, for locals, with local 'sustainable' materials, but its relevance to Scottish architecture is slight, and its narrowly defined nationalism - and pushy green agenda - has Holyrood's sticky fingers all over it. Published by Scotland's centre for architecture and design, The Lighthouse (alongside an exhibition), the book covers a sporrans-worth of 'rural' buildings completed since 2006. The exhibition's co-curator, Oliver Lowenstein, says the eight Scottish schemes featured offer 'evidence of an emerging Highlands and Islands regional architectural culture and community', although, in truth, most of the buildings were designed by metropolitan architects with little in common. The buildings signify a genuinely Scottish architecture untouched by modernity, says Lowenstein, primarily because they are built in a wilderness.