Icono-clots

Sculptor Alexander Stoddart’s suggestion that Scotland’s Calton Hill Parthenon should be completed as Cockerell and Playfair intended has much intellectual merit, and would reclaim a link with Greece first given expression in the 18th century surveys of James “Athenian” Stuart and Nicholas Revett, who introduced British architects to the glories of the Acropolis.

Unfortunately, the credo of the 1964 Venice Charter was that any addition to a historic structure should be “of our time”, which has given us such howlers as the ill-advised glass addition to Edinburgh’s Usher Hall. Add to this the aesthetic illiteracy of an Edinburgh political establishment which has approved, amongst other things, a copper spiral hotel next to Robert Adam’s Register House which would probably be refused consent on Las Vegas Strip, has still to make its mind up about a proposal to wreck the Royal High School with modern additions, has approved the demolition of listed buildings in St Andrew Square, and has sold off a parcel of land which was paid for by Andrew Carnegie in 1887 specifically to safeguard the light, fresh air and outlook of the city’s Central Library, and it would seem unlikely, to say the least, that our city-wrecking council would have the least interest in reconstructing our national parthenon.

It isn’t so much that it shouldn’t, or couldn’t, be done. After all, even in New York there’s growing support for the proposal to reconstruct Penn Station, demolished in the 1960s, as it was first built in 1910. Edinburgh councillors, sadly, still seem to think and behave like their iconoclastic 1960s predecessors.

DAVID J BLACK St Giles Street, Edinburgh