Two for one

Roddy Martine looks at The Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art and the Dean Gallery, two venues close enough to be counted as one and the same.

Up until 1984, Scotland's national collection of modern art was housed in the elegant Inverleith House, at the heart of Edinburgh's Royal Botanical Gardens. The setting, surrounded by old trees and rhododendrons, was glorious, but as the collection grew in keeping with the times, it became evident that the site was simply inadequate.

At the time, the former John Watson's School, a magnificent neo-classical building designed by the Scottish architect William Burn in 1825, was available, so the property was acquired and the collection moved. The spacious grounds on the north west side of Edinburgh's New Town were equally appealing and provided an ideal setting for sculptures by Tony Cragg, Barbara Hepworth, Henry Moore and Rachel Whiteread, among others.

More impressively, the lawn at the front of the building was landscaped to a design by the Dumfriesshire-based designer Charles Jencks to create Landform Ueda, a stepped, serpentine-shaped mound complemented by crescent-shaped pools of water. A combination of artwork, garden and social space, the land form was inspired by chaos theory and from shapes found in nature. It won the Gulbenkian Prize for Museum of the Year in 2004.

But that is by no means all. As public enthusiasm for modern art escalated, so did the demand for exhibition space. On the far side of BelfordRoad is the Dean Gallery, built in 1833 by the architect Thomas Hamilton as the Dean Orphan Hospital. In 1999 it was converted into a second contemporary art gall...

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• By : Roddy Martine
• In : Roddy Martine's World
• Issue : 36
• Page : 58
• Words : 873