The building of the Scottish Parliament, which opens today, has been a saga, reports Frank McDonald, Environment Editor.
At the latest reported figure of £431 million (€625 million), the new Scottish Parliament is costing tight-fisted Scots almost as much as we're paying for the Luas or the Dublin Port Tunnel. And most of them still see it as a spectacular waste of public money, on a par with London's Millennium Dome.
How could the building have cost so much? The original estimate in 1998, when Catalan architect Enric Miralles was chosen to design it, was put at £50 million. Though it was never likely that his complex concept could be realised for that price, nobody expected costs to get completely out of control.
What complicated the situation, and jinxed the project, was that it its begetters and prime advocates died within months of each other in 2000 - Miralles from a brain tumour in July and Donald Dewar, then Scotland's first minister, from a brain haemorrhage in October after a fall at his Edinburgh home.
The whole saga has been detailed by Lord Fraser of Carmyllie in the 267-page report of an inquiry into what went wrong. In characteristically direct Scottish style, he points the finger at senior civil servants for misleading ministers and MSPs by simply not telling them about alarming new estimates.
"With the honorable exception of Sir David Steel [the first presiding officer] on behalf of the Scottish Parliament Corporate Body accepting some responsibility for increased costs, the ancient walls of the Canongate have echoed only to the cry of 'It was nae me'," as Fraser puts it in his report.
He found that there was "no single villain of the piece", but rather "a series of systemic failures and an unwillingness of those involved in the project to call a halt and demand a re-appraisal. The few that did were quickly shown the door". These included two project managers who gave up in despair.
Dewar wanted to be "the most important patron of the architecture of government for 300 years". As a passionate believer in devolution, he favoured a new parliament building to symbolise Scotland's restored political power instead of going ahead with plans to adapt the old Royal High School on Calton Hill.
Joan O'Connor, a former president of the Royal Institute of the Architects of Ireland (RIAI), who served with Dewar on the jury that chose Miralles, said: "His heart was in developing a contemporary icon . . . a landmark building that would identify that particular moment in Scotland's history."
Referring to O'Connor and fellow jury member Kirsty Wark, of the BBC, Fraser said he was aware that they were women of "steely will, independence of mind and a keen appreciation of architecture" who were "unswerving" in their belief that the jury was right to award the plum commission to Miralles and his team.
There was an "element of risk", as O'Connor conceded, but it was a risk worth taking. This arose from the architect's charismatic personality and his practice of working in "creative bursts". As one quantity surveyor observed: "Nobody tells Enric to think about economy with any seriousness." The commission was actually awarded to an improbable joint venture comprising Miralles's EMBT, with its atelier way of working, and Edinburgh-based RMJM, an international firm of architects with 600 staff and offices in Europe, the Middle East and Asia. Not surprisingly, this led to serious strains.
In a foretasts of the public row between Daniel Libeskind and SOM over the World Trade Centre site in New York, relations between the two practices, separated by geography and communicating mainly by fax, were often so fraught that the "partnership" threatened to disintegrate, Fraser was told.
"The wheels began to fall off the wagon," he says, when a decision was made to procure the parliament using a relatively novel method called "construction management". As performed by Bovis, this involved dividing the project into a number of "packages" and putting each of them out to tender.
Since the design was so complex and there were so many elements, nobody could say what the final bill would be. And though all the risks were carried by the client, the implications of this were never spelled out. As Fraser says: "It beggars belief that ministers were not asked to approve the proposal."
And because the project was being fast-tracked to get the parliament building up as soon as possible - January 2002 was the target - it demanded a quick turnaround on the part of the architects to produce batches of drawings for each "package". Altogether, some 16,000 formal drawings were produced.
A proper brief took ages to finalise and, even after that, numerous design changes were made by the architects themselves or by the project team at the behest of MSPs. The floor area went up by nearly 50 per cent to 29,000 square metres and there was a determination to maintain architectural quality.
The foyer roof design, which has been likened to upturned boats, cost six times more than anticipated. There was a similar overrun on the stone cladding, while the conversion of Queensberry House, a listed building dating from 1695, to parliamentary offices was also immensely more expensive.
Security measures alone, including blast-proofing, cost nearly £30 million. Constructing the complex roof of the chamber also turned into something of a nightmare, with a hefty price-tag to pay for it.
In fact, almost no element of the entire project was delivered either on time or within budget.
More than two years late and with the final bill still to be settled, the Scots now have their new parliament. All things considered, it would have been a lot cheaper - and more Scottish - to convert the old Royal High School on Calton Hill. But then, Edinburgh would not have got its bit of Barcelona.