Can Glasgow’s new “bigger and better” Riverside Museum really be built on a budget of £50million?

11 Feb 2005

It all seems so familiar – a major public building, a ‘signature’ architect chosen in ‘competition’, a design and construction period of under two years, and a budget of £50million. Plus, of course, mandatory reference to the project’s ‘Bilbao’ potential to exponentially increase tourism numbers. The project this time is Glasgow’s proposed Riverside Museum, an entirely new facility intended to replace the city’s ageing, but much-loved Transport Museum with – in the words of council leader Charles Gordon – “something bigger and better”. It may well turn out to be both, but the one thing we can be sure of is that more money than the currently projected budget will be expended in the delivery.

The cost of the nearby Science Centre, after all, included a hefty injection of Millennium Funding in its £70million total, and even the Museum of Scotland in Edinburgh is now seen as spectacularly cheap at £62million. So what should we expect for only £50million? With a previously undisclosed aptitude for quantity surveying and not a little hubris, Kirsty Wark famously declared to Lord Fraser’s Holyrood Inquiry that the Scottish people “would only have got a shed for £40million”, so an extra £10million may well not be enough in this instance to effect a Venturi-like transition from shed to fully-fledged duck. Irrespective of the quality of the eventual design solution, from an architect whose contribution to the Millennium Dome’s interior fit-out is reputed to have gone from £7million to £27million, there are other serious questions for architects in Scotland to ponder, even if the nation’s politicians and press seem reluctant.

First, the continuing manipulation of EU procurement rules for public projects. In the case of the Riverside Museum, Charles Gordon made clear at the initial project launch that an ‘international name’ architect was being sought. While hardly encouraging to local talent, the pretence that a genuine and open competition was being held was entirely belied by the back-of-envelope diagram adjudged the winner. Of course, there are precedents for incomplete design schemes succeeding in competition (Sydney Opera House is invariably wheeled out at this point), but is there any credibility for either jury members or profession when ‘iconic’ solutions which pay scant regard to either brief or context are chosen?

Second, what is the point of setting a budget if it is not to be a factor in deciding the most appropriate solution to the requirements of the brief? This usually only occurs in publicly-funded projects, since it appears more money will always be found once the project is rolling, but it does make like-for-like comparisons of design solutions impossible and completely wastes the time and resources of the other competitors.

Third, what encouragement is there to architectural talent to stay in Scotland when there is growing evidence that major public projects will inevitably go to a ‘signature’ architect based elsewhere? The Riverside Museum is not an isolated example after all – Lord Foster has apparently already been approached to produce an ‘iconic’ design for the new ‘FBI-style’ national police headquarters, at Gartcosh in Lanarkshire.

It is a vicious circle – the best of Scotland’s architectural talent cannot develop experience of designing and building major public projects if the starting line is continually removed from sight. There is little point in having an Architecture Policy Unit in the Scottish Executive or indeed of creating Architecture and Design Scotland if neither is prepared to challenge such a fundamental issue head on. Who expected that politicians, civil servants and senior members of the profession would still be tugging their architectural forelocks to distant masters six years after the devolution of government to Scotland?

Peter Wilson