Exploring Scotland's Holyrood

New Parliament building is infused with symbolism

EDINBURGH -- The question sounded innocent. On the most historically prim stretch of this storybook-lovely city, the white-haired gentleman from Dundee was touring the controversially avant-garde Scottish Parliament building at Holyrood and wondering about the strange leaning shapes on the facade.

Like everything at Holyrood, the leaning shapes represented something. John Fairweather wanted to know why they looked like hair dryers.

"What are they supposed to mean?" Fairweather asked the bespectacled Holyrood guide.

The guide smiled tightly. In Scotland's majestically historic capital, that was a loaded question.

This mystic land of lochs, isles and highlands takes its national identity very seriously, infusing pride into even its most questionable symbols, such as the consumption of Mars bars dipped in fish batter and deep-fried to ensure maximum risk of heart attack. Scottish pride is especially intense in Edinburgh, the dramatic city of 453,000 people who are still very much in love with its past.

Chilly even in summer, hoarse winds shearing its fortified crags, a faint scent of rain always in the air, Edinburgh lives in a narrative of history-drenched intrigue. Its striking skyline includes neoclassical columns, the extinct volcano plug known as Arthur's Seat and Edinburgh Castle -- a site occupied since the Bronze Age and holding Europe's oldest surviving regalia (the Scottish crown, scepter and sword of state).

From the windows of Gladstone's Land, a six-story 17th-century tenement built over the medieval old town, renters saw the arrival of Bonnie Prince Charlie and his Jacobite troops in 1745. Queen Elizabeth also has her official Scottish residence at Holyroodhouse on the Royal Mile, the spine of the medieval old town. From her palace, she can see the Scottish Parliament at Holyrood.

A rising ellipse of Caithness stone, stainless steel, oak and sycamore, Holyrood curves and juts in the shadow of Arthur's Seat and the faux Romantic ruins of Carlton Hill. Created by a young Catalan architect who died of a brain tumor four years before its doors opened, it ran 10 times over budget and cost taxpayers 431 million pounds (or $765 million). The building is so simultaneously loved and hated that last summer it was nominated for a top architectural prize at the same time it was voted one of the ugliest buildings in Great Britain.

John Fairweather and his wife, Nancy, were Holyrood skeptics when they traveled 37 miles south from their home in Dundee to Edinburgh with their friends Jim and Jean Cargill. Why did Holyrood look like an overdressed space alien in a neighborhood of gabled nobles? Why did it cost so much? Would this symbol to the soaring democracy of home rule for the Scottish state ever be part of the family?

"Will it be our future?" Nancy Fairweather wondered.

The couples from Dundee arrived in August, Edinburgh's busiest month. Thousands of international visitors were in town for the annual Edinburgh Festival, the world's largest cultural event, which features music, theater, art, comedy, book fairs, street performers and a new festival of politics at Holyrood.

Last year, there were painted Korean dancers interpreting Shakespeare, Los Angeles actors speeding through a 30-minute version of the Star Wars trilogy and an Australian singer with rib-length Botticelli curls, crooning while simultaneously playing guitar and didgeridoo.

But even so, Scottish tradition held court. The gut-hum of bagpipes at the Military Tattoo echoed from a lighted Edinburgh Castle. Long-haired men in kilts, their faces painted warrior blue, walked the streets as the 13th-century revolutionary William Wallace. You could feel the history.