INFRASTRUCTURE PROJECTS.

Four of the major Millennium schemes are impossible to illustrate in the normal way: the national cycle network, the University of the Highlands and Islands, the Renaissance of Portsmouth Harbour and the Millennium Link - the re-opening of the canal between Edinburgh and Glasgow. Like the cycle network, the other three projects are largely concerned with improvement of existing things and linking them to become part of the infrastructure: they will perhaps have more impact on community than many of the individual set-piece buildings shown elsewhere in this issue.

The University of the Highlands and Islands draws together scattered teaching institutions throughout the romantically deserted Celtic north-western fifth of Britain by making a coherent infrastructure, improving 17 buildings and generally making sure that all is linked up electronically from the North Atlantic Fisheries College in Shetland to the Highland Theological Institute near Inverness, from the Lewes Castle College in the Outer Hebrides to the Dunstaffnage Marine Laboratory in Argyll. It intends to be a world-class tertiary education organization by 2001.

Portsmouth's great natural harbour has been important since Roman times and, at the height of Empire, it was the Royal Navy's greatest base. Since then, the Forces and the city have run down, particularly since the collapse of the Soviet Union. Large amounts of land have become available for development, and many of the wonderful austere and elegant eighteenth and nineteenth century naval buildings, the barracks, docks and storehouses, need new uses.

The Navy continues to have a smaller up-to-date base in the harbour area, but suddenly large areas of previously inaccessible city have become open. The Renaissance of Portsmouth Harbour Millennium project is intended to connect all the different parts of ex-Navy land and integrate them into a new kind of city based on aspects of the new economy, particularly tourism, leisure, heritage and shopping. Portsmouth certainly has world class monuments: as well as the buildings, two of them float-HMS Victory, Nelson's flagship at Trafalgar and HMS Warrior, the world's first armoured iron battleship.

And it has always been a city divided in half by the harbour itself, with Portsmouth on the east side and Gosport on the west. Links between all the disparate bits are to be provided on land by hard landscaped promenades and over the harbour by a waterbus network. For locals, a submarine light rapid transit system between Portsmouth and Gosport will probably be more useful (it is not part of the Millennium scheme). The most obvious Millennium contribution will be the new Calatrava-esque observation tower by HGP Greentree Allchurch Evans, erected at a key point in the urban texture to give a symbol for the revived city, and views of the whole harbour.

Re-opening the canal system between the Forth and the Clyde is an ingenious, picturesque, nostalgic notion. Now to be used almost entirely for pleasure craft (though not exclusively), in the eighteenth century it was the industrial artery of Scotland. It was much destroyed in the horrendous 1960s, when motorway schemes and simple stupidity broke it into dead stretches of water. They are being linked again with great ingenuity, the most dramatic example of which is the quite extraordinary rotating boat lift at Falkirk which is to hoist barges up over a difference in level which was formerly dealt with by a flight of nineteenth-century locks that were closed in the 1930s. It is to be a remarkable and extraordinary engine - and clearly the huge techno-sculpt (designed by RMJM and Ove Arup & Partners) is the proper structure with which to end this special issue of the AR.