Edinburgh, Scotland
The grand design for Edinburgh’s New Town was first put forward by James Craig in the mid-1700s and later completed by many great architects of the day, most notably William Playfair. In developing the initial design for Edinburgh Park, the relevance of Craig’s and Playfair’s visionary designs was obvious. Their concept was classic in its formal simplicity – to use a grid iron pattern of squares, gardens and parallel streets in which the relationship between the buildings and their settings were carefully predetermined. Each should take from and give to the other a feeling of space, useful purpose, and harmony to create an environment in which the people of Edinburgh could live and work. The effect was both pleasing to the eye and highly functional and has withstood the test of generations, contributing in large part to Edinburgh’s preeminence as the City to live and work in the United Kingdom. Our design for the Edinburgh Park Master Plan, through a careful alignment of the landscape, the main building areas, and the central feature of a lochen, will provide a sequence of spaces and views which will surprise and delight both user and visitor. The buildings will become neighbors less than is normally found in campus style parks, and the people who use them will form part of a working community with many shared business, leisure, and recreational facilities to bring them together. We hope and believe that the design will become a better way to organize the everyday activities of thousands of people, their cars, and their support systems. If the people who work in the Park find it as conducive and pleasant to work in as we believe they will, then Edinburgh will have successfully translated it’s heritage into the future.