Parliamentary points.

SIR: Congratulations to AR on a comprehensive review of the new Scottish Parliament. The beautiful photographs encapsulate my only criticism of the building, that is the lack of light and shade. The muted filtering suggests areas of gloom or shade which do not exist. Even on the dullest days, the light produces an often alarming bright oak filled interior. While this lifts the spirit, it compounds the unrelenting nature of the geometries and detail. One longs for a more powerful exertion of Lou Kahn's influence--silence as well as light, at least on a few occasions as one progresses through the building.

Peter Davey's fine introduction took me back to his similar AR piece on the completion of Gunter Behnisch's Bonn Parliament, for it is here, with the failed Devolution Referendum of 1975, that the architecture of the Scottish Parliament begins. Bonn, the potent warning for any potentially prolonged gestation period on such projects, started life as a competition win that year at the height of the Cold War, only to be declared redundant with the destruction of the wall less than two years after its completion.

This and Hans Meyer's League of Nation's competition winner--transparency, no closed door discussion--provided the polarity of debate as we, in association with Denton Corker Marshall, embarked on the early stages of the competition in 1998, although slightly anxious given Steve Christers' (Studio Granda) experiences in Rekjavik. All of which were displayed in harsh light in Deyan Sudjic's 1999 exhibition Architecture + Democracy, and which were replenished by the release of Nathaniel Kahn's film on his father--My Architect.

The finest piece in the film, certainly the most moving, is the discussion in the Dhaka Parliament Assembly Building with Shamal Wares, the Bangladeshi architect speaking about the fragility and the value of the democratic process. This also came through in our early visits to other Parliaments such as the Dresden Chambers for Lower Saxony, for so long an eastern bloc HQ. Last year, on a tour of the new Berlin Reichstag with Peter Conradi, BAK President and Client Commissioner, there was a palpable sense of how precious were the democratic aspirations presented by such fine institutions. We seem to have lost that focus. Something that others hold as more valuable than life itself we dismiss as no more than a very expensive building.

Twenty-five years from now where will the Scottish Parliament building point of reference be? What is certain from experience and from history is that in common with all similar new democratic institutions, the complexity of events will overtake the comparative simplicity of such a building's creation. AR will be part of that archive.

Yours etc

GORDON MURRAY

Glasgow, Scotland