Tower blocks: David Mach’s vision for Edinburgh arts venue revealed
David Mach, the celebrated Scottish sculptor behind the “Big Heids” beside the M8 motorway, has unveiled a design for his first-ever building – a new arts, events and conference venue made out of more than 30 shipping containers for a £500 million development on the outskirts of Edinburgh.
The Fife-born artist, famed for making work out of matches, tyres, magazines and coat hangers, has revealed he used dozens of boxes of Bacofoil to create the design of “Mach 1”, which will be around 50ft tall at its highest point.
Mach has compared the building, which will boast its own cafe-bar, to the “piles of rocks” he recalls from the Fife coastline he was brought up beside, as well as Inca ruins.
The building, which will have 3,500 sq ft of floor space, could open by the spring of 2020 if planning is secured for a vacant site next to the Edinburgh Park Central tram stop.
It is hoped music, comedy and poetry nights will be regularly held at the building, which will have a capacity of more than 140 people and will be act as a marketing suite for a new “city quarter” expected to create 1,800 homes and more than 7,000 jobs on a 43-acre site.
The Turner Prize nominee got involved in the development after starting to work with the London-based gallery Pangolin, which is part of Kings Place, a seven-storey development created by Parabola that combines office space with music and visual arts venues.
Mach said: “I was already working with Pangolin on a few ideas with shipping containers when this came up.
“I seem to have become an accidental architect, which I’m sure architects will have something to say about. But it’s not a pretend thing, it’s a real piece of architecture.
“Shipping containers are really interesting to me architecturally. They are also really familiar to people and go all over the world.
“But this will be different to anything else that has been built out of them before, which is what you really want as an artist. We’re still working out whether every bit of it will be from real containers, but it will have to look as if they are all real and it will be very strong. You should be able to drive a tank over it.
“When I knew what Parabola was after, I made a basic model out of Bacofoil boxes. I just started fooling around imagining the kind of spaces you could create inside the building. I never work with computers. I always think they limit your imagination.”