One of Scotland’s most respected authors has called the plans to build a hotel in the shape of a walnut whip in the centre of Edinburgh “heartbreaking” and a threat to the city’s heritage.
Candia McWilliam, who is the daughter of Colin McWilliam, the architecture expert, and the author of What to Look for in Winter, said that the proposed building threatened the city’s heritage and ruined the “relationship between the Old Town and the New Town”. The building is planned for the site of the St James Centre in the city.
“I saw my father warn of Britain’s architectural heritage being dismantled throughout my childhood and I can see that the same thing is happening in Edinburgh,” she said. “The city has become incredibly vulnerable to architectural degradation and demolition. Is our Unesco status actually protecting us?”
She said that the “ribbons” that curl round the building, approved by the city council earlier this month, looked as though they were “unravelling”.
“Buildings ought to have a conversation with their surroundings,” she said. “They can make a huge difference to the people who live and work in or around them — think of Charles Jencks’s Maggie’s cancer centres. But this building is disturbing, the fact it looks like it is unravelling is disturbing.
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“Architecture is meant to be humane. This is a hotel but it does not look like anywhere humans might want to stay. The building just looks like a logo, it’s declaratory and rhetorical, asserting rather than conversing.”
The “ribbon hotel” is the design of Jestico and Whiles, an architects’ practice based in London, which won the £850 million contract with TH Real Estate. Along with buildings designed by Allan Murray, the hotel will replace the St James Centre.
The ribbon design has drawn criticism from Edinburgh World Heritage and the Cockburn Association for being out of place in its surroundings.
McWilliam said that the site’s commitment to retail and “high-end shops” did not fit in with predictions about the changing nature of shopping.
“George Street already has as much as a city this size can take and Multrees Walk just seems implausible,” she said. “Instead, think of shops in Broughton Street which are embedded in the area. People have an emotional connection to them.”
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The proposed hotel is “gimmicky”, without “tact” and ignores Edinburgh’s “fascinating history which goes deep into the heart of the nation”, she added.
McWilliam said that the building’s design was a “civic and moral matter”. “My father was very strong on this and the need to honour architectural history. It’s a question of tact, of the relationships building to building,” she said.