Arts & Culture \ Photographic Gallery Queen Street, Edinburgh (Speculative)

Proposed Photographic Gallery, Queen Street (speculative).

The National Gallery of Scotland has a remarkable photographic collection, and Scotland also layed a major role in the birth of the medium with the partnership of David Octavius Hill and Robert Adamson in Edinburgh in 1843. And yet there is no National gallery or building dedicated to photography. A small site exists next to the Portrait Gallery which was purchased and repaved by a philanthropist some years ago, but it is rarely used. Rowand Anderson’s portrait gallery is a grade A listed building dating from 1885 and was inspired by the Doges Palace in Venice.

Our project made a glass clad tower next to the gallery connecting into the existing galleries top and bottom but otherwise being operated independent of the Portrait gallery, or not, as the NGS wished. Including the ground floor there are six floors of galleries linked by two staircases acting also as fire escapes. For a single exhibition visitors would take a lift to the top, and descend (a distant memory of the Guggenheim in New York) and at the ground floor exist through the gift shop and café in the Portrait gallery. The top floor is celebrated with a special lantern light. Each gallery has a window towards the Forth. Altogether there are 144m display which is the equivalent of three of the existing galleries in the adjacent building.